It may have been the politician’s practiced habit of emotional concealment, but in his concession speech last night, the smiling outgoing Portuguese Prime Minister Jos Socrates hardly looked like a man distraught with defeat. Nor, for that matter, did his opponent, Paulo Passos Coelho, seem gleeful with triumph. In fact, all of Lisbon seemed subdued, greeting news of the victory of Passos Coelho’s center-right Social Democrat party with little more than a bit of flag-waving and a few dozen honking cars cruising the Avenida de Liberdade. The muted response was a clear reminder, if anyone needed it, that leading the Portuguese government isn’t such a great job these days.
The PSD won 38.63% of the vote in Sunday’s election, versus the Socialists’ 28.05%. The margin of victory was wider than many polls had predicted, but was still not enough to give Passos Coelho’s party a majority in parliament. He is expected to form a coalition with the right-wing Social Democratic Center party. See more international news in Global Spin
And that is precisely what some analysts are hoping for. “The best chance for a solution to our economic woes lies with a right-wing coalition government,” says Andr Freire, a sociologist who specializes in electoral politics at the University Institute of Lisbon. “Not so much because of the policies themselves, but because they can work together in a way that the Socialists haven’t been able to. It’s our best shot for a stable government.”
Much hangs in the balance. When Scrates failed in April to persuade the country’s three other leading parties to support an additional round of austerity measures, his government collapsed, forcing snap elections. In the meantime, he stayed on as the head of a caretaker government while Portugal negotiated a 78-billion bailout package from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
