José Goulão
The first round of Portugal's presidential election has laid bare the advanced state of political decay in that old country
The first round of Portugal's presidential election has laid bare the advanced state of political decay in that old country, a democracy hollowed out by anti-democratic impulses and shackled to the stateless, technocratic dogmas of European federalism and the aggressive militarism of NATO.
The first-place result secured on 18 January by António José Seguro, the candidate backed by the Socialist Party - long since converted into a vehicle for economic neoliberalism - was greeted with cautious relief by much of the democratic electorate. Seguro emerged as a lesser evil after opinion polls, cynically instrumentalised to mould public perception, fabricated a scenario of a "technical tie" among five candidates drawn from the self-styled "political class": an insulated elite that treats the right to govern as its hereditary property.
This obsessive promotion of a fictitious technical tie distorted the electoral process itself. It pushed large numbers of voters into recalibrating their choices in response to an urgency that did not exist, forcing first-round decisions that would normally be reserved for a second ballot. The principal casualty of this manufactured panic over the "useful vote" was António Filipe, supported by the Portuguese Communist Party and its allies in the Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU). A substantial share of votes intended for him was immediately siphoned off to Seguro. That Filipe ran what was widely regarded as the most serious, coherent and competent campaign counted for nothing. This is a structural flaw of Portugal's misshapen "liberal democracy": integrity, seriousness and competence are marginal values in electoral contests and in the media coverage that frames them - coverage that is largely propagandistic, shallow and manipulative.
The roughly 20 per cent that polls initially assigned to Seguro differed little from the projections for the reactionary, militarist admiral Gouveia e Melo; for Marques Mendes, the candidate of the incumbent government; for Cotrim de Figueiredo, the standard-bearer of a hardline neoliberalism inspired by the Chicago Boys - themselves intellectual godfathers of the Chilean butcher Pinochet; or for André Ventura, the openly fascist, Salazarist leader of the Chega party.
António José Seguro, 64, a lifelong Socialist Party apparatchik who climbed from the leadership of the party's youth wing to secretary-general before being undone by the internal intrigues and transnational ambitions of António Costa, ultimately achieved an unexpected 31 per cent.
He is a politically inconsistent figure, "moderate" and "centrist" by temperament - terms that in practice translate into permanent availability to legitimise right-wing policies and the dominance of the so-called Centrão. This tacit governing pact within the "arc of governance", uniting the three neoliberal pillars of Portuguese politics - PS, PSD and CDS - has ruled the country since the reactionary countercoup of 25 November 1975. Subordinate to European federalism and NATO militarism, it has systematically stripped Portugal of sovereignty, social cohesion and democratic substance.
Seguro's sudden reinvention as an "independent, non-partisan" candidate allowed him to harvest votes prematurely in the first round through the mechanics of the useful vote. That very fact casts doubt on his capacity to expand his base to the required 50.01 per cent. The Left Bloc, a "radical" but essentially social-democratic force and a tactical ally of the PS, may add two percentage points; the federalist left party Livre perhaps two or three more. Ultimately, Seguro's path to victory depends on the republican discipline of communist voters and their allies - the same voters who, forty years ago, ensured Mário Soares's election by "swallowing a frog", as Álvaro Cunhal memorably put it - as well as on hypothetical defections from the traditional right away from Ventura.
The useful-vote operation has failed, however, to prevent Portugal's political outlook from becoming starkly alarming as the country approaches the decisive presidential run-off on 8 February.
Ventura, the Salazarist candidate, has advanced to the second round with 23.5 per cent, and the prospect of his election cannot be dismissed. In third place came the polished, rhetorically agile fascist Cotrim de Figueiredo with 16 per cent. These are two expressions of the same ideological lineage: Salazar's political great-grandchildren, divided between the truncheon-wielding tradition of the Portuguese Legion and the PIDE on one hand, and an "aristocratic" neoliberalism rooted in the Austrian School on the other - both historically aligned with regimes such as those of Pinochet or, more recently, Milei. Together, they enter the second-round commanding around 40 per cent of the vote.
The right-wing government led by Luís Montenegro has issued no voting recommendation, refrains from confronting Ventura directly, and reserves its sharpest criticism for Seguro. In these conditions, it is likely that a significant portion of the electorate that supported Marques Mendes and Admiral Gouveia e Melo - nearly 24 per cent combined - will drift towards Ventura's populist, racist and aggressively anti-immigration discourse.
There is little doubt that, despite a career largely detached from popular interests, António José Seguro remains on "this side" of the 25 April revolution and of democracy, however hollowed out and distorted it may be under the liberal label. Ventura, by contrast, despite his performative disavowals of affinity with Cotrim's "uncles" and "posh boys" - the fascist jet set of Lisbon and Porto's affluent peripheries - objectively converges with them in preparing the ground for a regression to Portugal's authoritarian past.
In short, it remains uncertain whether Seguro's provisional lead will suffice to block the ascent of Salazar's great-grandchildren to the highest offices of power in Lisbon.