Montenegro renews his mandate as Prime Minister of Portugal

Luis Montenegro, leader of the center-right Democratic Alliance (AD) grand coalition, won reelection as Portuguese prime minister after Sunday's elections, with votes ranging from 29% to 35% . Despite this, he will need governing partners to secure a majority in the Assembly of the Republic.

Political instability has reigned in Portugal in recent years. Since 2020, only Bulgaria has voted more times than Portugal. These latest elections are also the third held in the last three years.

Early elections were held in March 2024 following the resignation of Socialist Prime Minister António Costa in November 2023, following an alleged corruption case within his government—which ultimately came to nothing. These latest elections were the result of a scandal related to the family business in Montenegro . Last February, when the AD leader had only been in office for a year, he lost a vote of no confidence promoted by the opposition due to a controversy related to his family business, Spinumviva , which was accused of receiving payments from companies with interests in government decisions.

At the moment Montenegro lost the confidence of the Portuguese parliament, the President of the Republic of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, dissolved the Assembly and called elections to resolve the political crisis. Despite the scandal, voting intentions in Portugal have remained steady, and the leader of the Democratic Alliance was reelected yesterday.

The election results have made it clear that the rise of the far right continues to intensify in Europe following Chega's overtaking of the Socialist Party.

Although polls showed Nuno Santos as the second-largest political force and positioned him as Montenegro's ally to prevent Chega from entering government, the rise of the far-right Chega party is creating a new political landscape in Portugal and, possibly, putting Nuno Santos on the exit ramp.

This is a situation that analysts had already predicted, pointing out that it would generate greater "instability" in the Portuguese political landscape.

Furthermore, the elections recorded a similar abstention rate to that of 2024. The percentage of Portuguese who decided not to vote yesterday was between 36% and 42%, while the previous year's figure was 40.6%, corresponding to 4.3 million eligible voters.

Controversy abounded during the elections, as Nuno Santos denounced after his participation in the elections that the local representative of his party in Lisbon, Miguel Coelho, had been attacked and called for "respect for all." It was Coelho himself who revealed that an "individual" called him a friend of the Monhés, which is a derogatory term in Portuguese for people from South Asian countries, such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, "and threw me to the ground with a hard blow to the face. He shouted "Vota a Chega," the politician noted.