It was supposed to be a long night, especially in Lisbon and Porto, elections close to the end. But perhaps no one anticipated it being so confusing and surprising.
It started with two historical bastions of the PSD — Viseu (Viseu, damn it) and Bragança, even more so by the hand of a woman, a young and well-explained woman — falling, unexpectedly, to the PS, and another of the social-democratic northern bastions, Braga, holding on, it seems, only by less than 300 votes (still considering differences of hundreds of votes, Aveiro remained in the hands of the PSD for around 200).
It was also a night in which Guimarães and Beja went from the PS to the PSD/CDS coalition and Faro and Coimbra took the opposite route; the night on which the PCP lost seven of the 19 chambers it held, including the symbolic Grândola, and the only two district capitals it had left, Évora and Setúbal. The first fell to the PS and the second to the Setúbal de Volta coalition, headed by the former communist and former mayor of the city Maria de Lurdes Meira, now an independent supported by the PSD (and who won the chamber from the PS by a thousand votes). There were two heavy defeats for the communists: in Setúbal, they went from first to fourth force; in Évora for third.
Another big loser of the night was Chega: although tripling, compared to the previous municipal ones, the national vote — from less than 200 thousand votes to 600 thousand — saw more than half of the 1.3 million votes it had in the legislative elections disappear, reaching, after almost all of its list of deputies (44 out of 50) candidates, just three chambers.
In the Algarve, where it had “won” the legislative elections, Ventura’s party only won one chamber, Albufeira (which it joined with Entroncamento and São Vicente, in Madeira); in Alentejo, where there seemed to be a lot of strength, not even one.
This result of the far-right party is not only due, as is often said, to the fact that it continues to be a unipersonal project (so unipersonal that the leader thinks he has to put his face on all the posters), but perhaps above all because at a local level, the vote of protest, the vote that wants to see everything burn, will make little sense: when it comes to their lands, their cities and parishes, people do not want to express anger or watch antics on Tiktok or attacks in assembliesbut get solutions, work, seriousness (at least attempted), someone they can trust. And apparently Chega’s candidates don’t seem trustworthy.
As for the big winner, it is clear: winning, after a hard-fought struggle, the two main cities (Lisbon and Porto), counting, alone and in combination, a greater number of chambers and a greater number of votes, the PSD can undoubtedly claim victory — and Luís Montenegro can boast, as he did, of having managed, in five months, to win two elections in a row and consolidate his dominance over the country, a dominance that is all the more notable when he coexists with the growth of a party to his right and a series of poorly explained issues.
Carlos Moedas is another great winner: despite the end of his term of office shaken by the tragedy of the Glória elevator (in which he distinguished himself by trying to allocate any problematic decisions to the previous executive and by victimizing himself in the face of any question about the accident), and a very pronounced deficit in “work” (much of what he presents as his work is a legacy of the previous government), he was much further away from the left coalition (20 thousand votes) than he had stayed with the PS-Livre coalition four years ago (around two thousand), he obtained another councilor. His name on the ballot paper, alongside that of the coalition he is part of, would have been right: the people of Lisbon, apparently, as he likes to say, ‘know him’, and perhaps have even gained him esteem. Maybe they believed it was him or “radicalism”.
Equally noteworthy is the return, with benefit, of two of the so-called local “dinosaurs”: the aforementioned Maria de Lurdes Meira in Setúbal and Luís Filipe Menezes, who took Vila Nova de Gaia from the PS. These triumphant returns of former mayors, after more or less long crossings of greater or lesser deserts and more or less complex events, are common in local politics — the most interesting thing is, however, that they tend to be successful, which will derive from the special and somewhat mysterious relationship that they manage to establish with prospective voters.
But there is another winner of the night. Yes, that’s right: the PS. He demonstrated much more than a proof of life: alone — he participated in much fewer coalitions than the PSD — he had 1.5 million votes, around 170 thousand less than in the 2021 local elections but 100 thousand more than in the May legislative elections. He lost control over the number of councils (it is not yet certain, at the time of writing, how many there are in total) and therefore the presidency of the National Association of Municipalities, and he was unable to conquer Lisbon or Porto, yes; but none of his defeats were dishonorable. The PSD fought head to head for a series of chambers and won several.
More than “returning” — the expression used by José Luís Carneiro, which presupposes that he would have left, or gone —, the PS held on. It’s not like he was reduced to ashes or lost his way; he was just a little neurasthenic. And it showed that not only is it the great party of the left but, with the disappearance of BE, the evident decline of the PCP and a still not very expressive Livre, it is almost the entire left — which necessarily lends it (or should lend it) a spirit of urgency and mission.
Finally, if anything can be concluded from these elections, it is that the country still has, and above all, two large parties, with no other having emerged capable of competing with them for local power.
It could be, of course, that this will happen. But for now the news of the death of bipartisanship seems to have been greatly exaggerated.