Portugal’s centre-right president re-elected but far right gains ground

Portugal’s centre-right president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has won re-election after a poll held at the height of the country’s coronavirus crisis that also saw the far-right candidate gain a lot of new support in third place.

Rebelo de Sousa, who had been widely expected to win another term, took 60.7% of the vote, with almost all the results declared amid very low turnout of around 40%.

The Socialist challenger Ana Gomes came in second with 12.9% of the vote, but she was only just ahead of the far-right candidate André Ventura in third.

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The 38-year-old founder of the rightwing populist party Chega – which means “Enough” in Portuguese – had said he was in the running to “crush the left”, which fielded three out of the seven candidates.

Portugal has not so far seen the same anti-establishment surge from the right that have reshaped the political landscape in some larger EU nations in recent years, although it has seen a rise anti-immigrant violence.

Ventura – an ally of Marine Le Pen of France and Italy’s Matteo Salvini – secured his party’s first and only parliamentary seat in the 2019 legislative elections, winning the backing of 70,000 voters or 1.3%.

But Sunday’s presidential election saw him bring in 11.9%, or almost 500,000 votes.

“For the first time an openly anti-system party has disrupted the traditional right, with nearly half a million votes,” he said on Sunday.

In his victory speech Rebelo de Sousa pledged to make the fight against coronavirus his “first priority”.

Portugal recorded its worst daily coronavirus death toll on Sunday, with more than 85,000 infections and almost 1,500 deaths reported in the past week.

That is the highest rate worldwide in proportion to its population of more than 10 million, according to an AFP tally based on government figures.

Opinion polls had pointed to a first-round victory for Rebelo de Sousa, a former political commentator known for candid moments like sharing a meal with homeless people and plunging into the sea to help girls whose canoe had capsized.

Turnout reached 39.49% with 99.91% of votes counted, soothing fears that abstentions might top 70%.

In the capital, Lisbon, voters queued outside polling stations and were let in one by one under coronavirus social distancing rules.

One voter, architect Jose Barra, 54, told AFP: “Nothing would have stopped me from voting, but I think elderly people, for example, will be discouraged both by the virus and by the queues.”

As mail-in ballots are not well-established in Portugal, early voting was available the previous Sunday, drawing nearly 200,000 voters.

Portugal has been under a second national lockdown for the past 10 days aimed at stemming a surge in coronavirus cases.