2002 Portuguese legislative election

Background

After the disappointing results of the Socialist Party (PS) in the 1999 elections, the PS government entered in a series of crisis. Resignations of ministers from government and incapacity of passing legislation in Parliament led to controversial, and weird, alliances, like the 2000 and 2001 budgets which were approved by a sole CDS – People's Party (CDS–PP) Member of Parliament, Daniel Campelo, in exchange for the government approving a cheese factory in Campelo's hometown, Ponte de Lima, in Viana do Castelo district.

Government fall

The Socialist Party suffered a big, and unexpected, defeat in the December 2001 local elections. The party lost major municipalities across the country, mainly Lisbon, Porto, Sintra and Coimbra to the Social Democratic Party. Due to this surprising defeat, Prime Minister António Guterres announced he was to tender his resignation as Prime Minister in order to avoid the country falling "into a political swamp". Shortly after, President Jorge Sampaio accepted Guterres resignation and called snap elections for March 2002.

Leadership changes and challenges

PSD 2000 leadership election

After the 1999 election defeat, Durão Barroso's leadership started to be challenged and criticized. In January 2000, Durão Barroso called a snap party congress to resolve the leadership dispute. Alongside Barroso, Pedro Santana Lopes and Luís Marques Mendes also ran. Durão Barroso was reelected as PSD leader and the results were the following: |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" ! align="center" colspan=2 style="width: 60px"|Candidate ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|Votes ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|%

PS 2002 leadership election

Following the resignation of António Guterres as Prime Minister and PS leader, the party started the process to elect a new leader. The popular minister in Guterres cabinet, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, and PS member Paulo Penedos, were the two candidates on the ballot, while the minister of Foreign Affairs Jaime Gama, who had announced his candidacy, dropped out. Around 121,000 PS members were registered to vote. In the end, Ferro Rodrigues got almost unanimous support by being elected with almost 97 percent of the votes. The results were the following: |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" ! align="center" colspan=2 style="width: 60px"|Candidate ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|Votes ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|%

Electoral system

The Assembly of the Republic has 230 members elected to four-year terms. Governments do not require absolute majority support of the Assembly to hold office, as even if the number of opposers of government is larger than that of the supporters, the number of opposers still needs to be equal or greater than 116 (absolute majority) for both the Government's Programme to be rejected or for a motion of no confidence to be approved.

The number of seats assigned to each district depends on the district magnitude. The use of the d'Hondt method makes for a higher effective threshold than certain other allocation methods such as the Hare quota or Sainte-Laguë method, which are more generous to small parties.

For these elections, and compared with the 1999 elections, the MPs distributed by districts were the following:

Parties

The table below lists the parties represented in the Assembly of the Republic during the 8th legislature (1999–2002) and that also partook in the election:

Seat changes

• On 7 November 2000, MP Daniel Campelo, elected in the CDS – People's Party list for Viana do Castelo, left the party and became an Independent, following a split with CDS–PP regarding his votes in favour of António Guterres government's State budgets.

Campaign period

Party slogans

Candidates' debates

Opinion polling

The following table shows the opinion polls of voting intention of the Portuguese voters before the election. Included is also the result of the Portuguese general elections in 1999 and 2002 for reference.

Voter turnout

The table below shows voter turnout throughout election day including voters from Overseas. Due to lack of data from the 1999 election, it's not possible to compare the turnout throughout election day between the two elections.

Results

National summary

Distribution by constituency

|- class="unsortable" !rowspan=2|Constituency!!%!!S!!%!!S!!%!!S!!%!!S!!%!!S !rowspan=2|Total S |- class="unsortable" style="text-align:center;" !colspan=2 | PSD !colspan=2 | PS !colspan=2 | CDS–PP !colspan=2 | CDU !colspan=2 | BE |- | 3 | 41.0 | 2

Maps

File:2002 Portuguese legislative election district results.svg|Winner and seats by constituency. Legislativas portuguesas de 2002 (Mapa).png|Most voted political force by municipality.

Aftermath

After the elections, PSD and CDS–PP formed a coalition government, the first since the Democratic Alliance (AD) in the early 1980's. This government was marked by the fragile fiscal and economic situation of the country and the 2003 Casa Pia child sexual abuse scandal. During this government, Portugal became a major ally in the War in Iraq, even hosting a summit at Lajes Field, in the Azores, between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain, which divided public opinion. In the 2004 European Parliament election in Portugal, the PSD/CDS–PP coalition Força Portugal suffered a big defeat by gathering just 33 percent of the votes, against the 44 percent of the Socialist Party. A few days later, José Manuel Durão Barroso announced he was resigning from the post of Prime Minister in order to become President of the European Commission. Despite pleas for a snap legislative election from Opposition parties, President Jorge Sampaio decided to nominate the new PSD leader, Pedro Santana Lopes as prime minister.

Fall of the government

Santana Lopes government was marked with deep disagreements and disputes within his own party, the Social Democratic Party, which began to damage the government's actions. One of these disputes was the resignation of Youth and Sports Minister, Henrique Chaves, which was a close ally of Santana. This resignation precipitated the fall of the government, with Chaves accusing Santana of not being "loyal and truthful". Just five months after swearing in Santana Lopes as prime minister, President Jorge Sampaio gave a speech in which he accused the government of "contradictions and lack of coordination that contributed to its discredit", and used his power of dissolution of Parliament and called a snap election, so far the only time till date such power was used in Portuguese democracy by a president. Santana Lopes disagreed with the President's decision but respected it and announced his resignation. A new election was called, by the President, for 20 February 2005.

Notes

| Results presented here exclude abstention (19.7%). With their inclusion results are: PS: 32.8%; PSD: 26.1%; CDS-PP: 6.5%; CDU: 5.4%; BE: 2.4%; Others/Invalid: 7.1%.

| Portuguese Communist Party (10 MPs) and "The Greens" (2 MPs) ran in coalition.

| Left Bloc / People's Democratic Union joint electoral list only in Madeira.

| The National Solidarity Party (PSN) ran a list in Vila Real district, but dropped out before election day and got just 7 votes. In the certified results, the votes are counted as invalid.

| The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Ecologist Party "The Greens" (PEV) contested the 1999 election in a coalition called Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU) and won a combined 9% of the vote and elected 17 MPs to parliament.

References

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