From absolute majority to Chega's heel in 487 days

Almost 1 million: 907,386 votes. This is the extent of Pedro Nuno Santos' destruction in less than a year and a half at the head of the PS.

With an absolute majority, the young Turk who threatened to leave the debt unpaid and the Germans with their legs shaking, the former minister who, even in defeat, did not tire of accusing of incompetence those who were unable to resolve in 11 months the damage caused by nine years of his socialist governments, including a contraption with the extreme left that he had set up, achieved the second worst result in the history of the PS (yes, second; we'll get to that).

Even with a makeover and lessons on behaviour, the audacity of asking for the vote biased towards those he had previously convinced to support the PS in the negative coalition that governed the country (it's no use voting for Livre and BE, those votes are useful to us, he repeated and repeated and repeated) and the insistence on not abandoning the pool of mud that he wanted to splash on everyone around him only earned him the humiliation of leaving the party as he had left the government before: pushed overboard, waving the same flimsy arguments that only make sense to his ears and those of his clique (or claque?).

Rejected by the Portuguese, Pedro Nuno Santos transformed António Costa's absolute majority into a third place for the PS (the tie at 58 deputies is broken as soon as the votes of emigrants are included) which will go down in history. Behind a party that has not even been around for a decade.

The man who saw his own victory reflected in the bubble, which for months promoted him as the only possible choice, managed the feat of losing an average of two deputies per month since the last legislative elections, now having 58 seats in Parliament. Worse, only Almeida Santos had done so when Cavaco Silva came in, in 1985 (57 elected deputies), because even Vítor Constâncio reached 60 seats when the PSD won its first absolute majority (in 1987). In those 1980s, Santos and Constâncio convinced more than a fifth of the 5.7 million voters; yesterday, Pedro Nuno gathered 23.38% of the 6 million people who went to the polls, a turnout only equaled 30 years ago (abstention in the country was 35.62%).

Just six months after its inception, with 66 thousand votes, Chega managed to make its debut in the Assembly and André Ventura commented on his achievement with the following phrase: "I guarantee you that in eight years we will be the biggest party in Portugal" — delusions of grandeur, they dismissed.

That was in 2019. Three years later, Ventura reached a dozen elected representatives and in 2024 he quadrupled the result, with the 50 deputies being looked at with as much shock as certainty that the inflated balloon was ready to burst.

Six years after that phrase, hopping over sharp knives and tripping over stones and walls due to ineptitude or voluntary irascibility, it reveals a resilience of elastic fibre, capable of overcoming the socialist parliamentary group. Counting the votes of the emigrants, the "50 fascists" that Fernando Rosas wanted to obliterate from Parliament will be joined by another ten (perhaps more) in 2025, many of them legitimised in the historical strongholds of the extreme left, whose problems and concerns were ignored for decades. Discarded as part of a reality that no one wants to see, Beja, Setúbal and Portalegre surrendered to Chega, which established itself in practically the entire territory — even Grândola, a dark town, was 37 votes away from turning over.

Strange? Only for those who are blinded by the politically certified speeches that dominate the stages today but have very little to do with the prevailing sentiment and what is being experienced in the country. If there were any doubts, just look at the island called Mariana Mortágua, after the Portuguese transformed the Bloco into a solitary little Lego piece that doesn't fit anywhere.

Continuing to insult the Portuguese people like the lawyer presented as a weapon against Ventura — "the vote for Chega is proof of the stupidity of too many Portuguese people" , she wrote in X — is, in fact, proof of little intelligence and less empathy. Even more so when the left is reduced to scraps: all together, including the PS and counting even the newly arrived JPP and PAN (which has no ideological option but rejects any possibility that comes from the right), has 19 fewer deputies than the AD alone (70 against 89).

After doing the math and still being able to add one or two more deputies from the emigration circles, the AD, the government and in particular Luís Montenegro were chosen to govern. Without a shadow of a doubt or possibility of interpretation. Around 2 million Portuguese, a third of all those who voted, legitimized the prime minister and endorsed as absurd the "unanswered questions", the "not illegal but unethical case" and all the character offenses with which they tried to overthrow him, precipitating the second legislative elections in two years.

The anachronistic left disintegrated, the liberals rose again, even though they suffered the effects of a government more open to confronting what afflicts those who do not see "cultural diversity" through hygienic film and glitter; even though they were penalized by economic proposals closer to those of an AD that only understands as "radical and dangerous" those who believed they had the design and moral superiority to choose for the people what is best for them.

And now, do we understand where we are or are we going to continue to despise the increasingly discontented Portuguese and discard democracy whenever it results in a choice different from the one propagated by the megaphone?

Editorial Director