Since Uganda, where Yoweri Museveni duly won the expected large but dubious victory (see last week’s preview here), shouldn’t count as a democratic election, the honor of the first real contest for the year goes to Portugal, which yesterday held the first round of its presidential election. It looks like a good omen for the forces of democracy.
The president, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, serves for a maximum of two five-year terms, so centre-right incumbent Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, first elected in 2016, is retiring. Eleven candidates competed to replace him, with the top two to go to a runoff in three weeks time (although Rebelo de Sousa won a first round majority both times).
Five of the candidates were given a serious chance of making the runoff. From (roughly) left to right, they were António José Seguro (centre-left), Cotrim Figueiredo (liberal), Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo (independent), Luís Marques Mendes (centre-right) and André Ventura (far right). Gouveia e Melo, who came to prominence as the head of Portugal’s Covid vaccination program, took an early lead last year in the opinion polls, but by New Year there was little to separate the top five.
The final polls suggested that Seguro and Ventura were the most likely top two, just about neck and neck, with Figueiredo a very close third. And that’s indeed how the order came out, but the margins were quite different. With figures basically complete (99.82% counted) Seguro, instead of being level with the far right, beat them by seven and a half points, 31.1% to 23.5% – a margin of about 428,000 votes. Figueiredo was some way back on 16.0%, followed by Gouveia e Melo on 12.3% and Marques Mendes 11.3%. The other six collected 5.7% between them.
The centre-right is currently in government, so it’s something of an embarrassment that its candidate could only manage fifth place. But Portuguese voters have a history of balancing president against government: Rebelo de Sousa won his two decisive victories when the centre-left was in office. The interesting question is what will happen to those centre-right votes in the second round.
Although the polls were unable to agree on who the second round contenders would be, they were unanimous on one thing: that if Ventura was one of them, he would lose. Every hypothetical match-up of Ventura with Seguro, or with any of the other three, showed the far right going down to defeat, mostly by margins of two to one or better. Add to that the fact that Seguro outperformed his polls in the first round and it would take some catastrophic change for him to even come close to defeat.
Prime minister Luís Montenegro has come out ahead in the last two elections, in 2024 and 2025, but was unable to win a majority either time. His government’s survival depends on the fact that centre-left and far right are unwilling to combine against him. Unlike a number of other centre-right leaders in that position, however, he has refused to deal the far-right party, Chega, into a share of power, although he has on occasion relied on its support to pass legislation.
So if Seguro wins big in three weeks time, that will be a sign that a significant number of centre-right voters want to maintain a cordon sanitaire against the far right, and are willing to accept a centre-left president as the price of that. Conversely, if the runoff is closer than expected, it will be because most of the centre-right’s voters are willing to support far right in preference to centre-left.
And there may be a moral there for Australia, where the headlines have been dominated by a surge in the polls for our own far-right party, One Nation. It’s now polling at something not far off the 23.5% that Ventura polled yesterday: enough to wreak havoc in the centre-right, but nowhere near enough to win elections unless it can count on substantial centre-right support.
If One Nation can hold onto those sort of numbers, Australia’s centre-right leaders will face the same choices that their counterparts in Portugal and many other countries have faced: collaborate with the new force to their right, or make common cause with other mainstream parties in defence of democracy. No-one who had observed their recent history would have any confidence that they will choose wisely.
The World is Not Enough 