Portuguese Conservative Wins 1st Round : But Falls Short of Majority Vote and Will Face Soares in Runoff

Diogo Freitas do Amaral, 44, a conservative law professor, took a commanding lead in the Portuguese presidential elections Sunday but fell short of the majority needed to win in the first round.

Socialist Mario Soares, Portugal’s prime minister three times and its best-known politician outside the country, held off a challenge from two other leftist candidates to finish second and earn the right to oppose Freitas do Amaral in a runoff election scheduled Feb. 16.

In a televised speech after the results were clear, Soares sounded conciliatory toward his fellow leftist opponents. Saying that the vote showed the left is still a majority in Portugal, he declared, “From tomorrow on, the real battle begins.”

Long Out of Mainstream

Freitas do Amaral had seemed to be on the fringes of Portuguese politics as leader of the conservative Social Democratic Center Party in the leftist era after the 1974 revolution. But even while falling short of a first-round majority, he put together the strongest right-wing showing in any of the three presidential and six parliamentary elections since the fall of the dictatorship.

With almost all precincts reporting, official returns showed that the four candidates had won these percentages of the total vote:

Freitas do Amaral, 46.47%

Soares, 25.52%

Francisco Salgado Zenha (backed by outgoing President Antonio Ramalho Eanes and by the Communist Party), 20.73%

Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo (an independent leftist), 7.27%

In the second round, Freitas do Amaral will be favored because Soares, in the view of most analysts, will have a difficult time uniting the left behind him--especially in gaining votes from his longtime enemies in the Communist Party. Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal has said that Soares, when compared to Freitas do Amaral, “is not the lesser of two evils but the same evil.”

The conservative standard-bearer, a heavy-set man who looks awkward in campaign appearances, founded his party as a Christian Democratic grouping soon after the 1974 revolution. However, in a reflection of the leftist mood of those times, it was never called by that name. Instead, the name Union of the Social Democratic Center was chosen--that being about as conservative as any party dared to sound then.

Nonetheless, the Portuguese have always looked on it as a conservative organization.

The party has not been a major force in Portuguese politics in its own right, but has joined both the Socialist Party and the centrist Social Democrats in coalition governments. On their own, the Christian Democrats could not have powered Freitas do Amaral to his commanding lead. But he had the active and influential support of Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva’s Social Democrats.

Freitas do Amaral has served as deputy prime minister, foreign minister and minister of defense in several Cabinets. He left Parliament in 1983 to study for a post-doctoral degree in law and to prepare himself for the campaign for the presidency.

The failure of Zenha, a former Socialist, to gain the second spot was a serious setback for President Eanes, a popular army general, who dropped the pose of a head of state above politics and spoke on Zenha’s behalf on national television. On top of this, Manuela Eanes, the president’s wife, and the Democratic Renewal Party, a party formed around Eanes, campaigned throughout the country for Zenha.

But, although Eanes is popular, he was unable to transfer that popularity to the lackluster Zenha, who broke with Soares six years ago.

The support of the Communist Party also failed to push Zenha past Soares. Some Communists may have deserted Zenha to vote for Pintasilgo, a former prime minister with strong leftist appeal.

Marked Comeback

For Soares, his second-place finish was a kind of victory. After his Socialist Party was badly defeated in parliamentary elections in October, Soares’ popularity dropped considerably, and the polls showed him in last place among the four candidates.

The 61-year-old Soares, who battled from exile for many years against the far-rightist regime of the late dictator Antonio Oliveira Salazar, is generally credited with putting together a Socialist electoral machine that helped prevent the Communist Party and its allies in the armed forces from taking over the country after the revolution. He has long made it clear that he wanted to end his political career as president.

Although most day-to-day political power in Portugal lies with the prime minister and Parliament, the president holds key powers to appoint and dismiss prime ministers. Eanes, in fact, used these powers in bitter conflicts with Soares to turn him out of office.

The Portuguese presidency is based on the French model, created by Gen. Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic. Presidents serve for five years and both head the military and serve as chairman of the Council of State.