Portuguese voters queued at polling stations on Sunday to elect a new president, with opinion surveys showing three candidates, including the leader of the far-right Chega party, close to a spot in a probable top-two runoff.
In the five decades since Portugal threw off its fascist dictatorship, a presidential election has only once before – in 1986 – required a runoff, highlighting how fragmented the political landscape has become with the rise of the far right and voters’ disenchantment with mainstream parties.
The presidency is a largely ceremonial role in Portugal but wields some key powers, including, in some circumstances, to dissolve parliament, call a snap parliamentary election and veto legislation.
Approximately 11 million voters are eligible to cast ballots. Polling stations will close at 7pm, with exit polls expected at 8pm and results released during the night.
The last pre-election opinion survey released on Friday by Pitagórica pollsters put the Socialist party candidate, António José Seguro, on 25.1%, followed by Chega’s leader, André Ventura, on 23%, and João Cotrim de Figueiredo, a member of the European parliament from the rightwing, pro-business Liberal Initiative party, on 22.3%.
Last May, the anti-establishment, anti-immigration Chega, founded about seven years ago, became the main opposition party in a parliamentary election, winning 22.8% of the vote.
Some polls over the past week showed Ventura slightly ahead, but always within the margin of error, and all runoff projections point to him losing owing to his high rejection rate of more than 60% of voters.
The Economist Intelligence Unit said in a recent note that a Seguro-Ventura runoff “would be more straightforward given his [Ventura’s] limited appeal beyond his core base” while a clash involving Cotrim de Figueiredo would be more finely balanced and harder to predict.
“While the presidency is largely symbolic, Ventura is the only candidate signalling a more interventionist approach, though EIU sees this as unlikely to translate into victory,” it said.
There are another eight contenders, including Luís Marques Mendes backed by the ruling centre-right Social Democrats, and the retired admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo, who led the country’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign, each with more than 11%.