Close Race Expected in Portugal’s Presidential Election

Portugal elects a new president Sunday in a confrontation between a veteran Socialist and a young conservative. The outcome is expected to be close.

The conservative, Diego Freitas do Amaral, a 44-year-old Christian Democratic law professor, fell just short of a majority in the first round of the elections three weeks ago with 46% of the vote. Although his enthusiastic supporters scream and jump at rallies as if victory is already in his grasp, Freitas may find it difficult to get the extra five percentage points needed to win.

His opponent, Socialist Mario Soares, 61, a former prime minister who is the best known Portuguese politician outside Portugal, has managed to win the endorsement, at least in principle, of all the leftist candidates who took part in the first round and of almost all the leftist parties. Soares finished second in that round with 25% of the vote, far behind Freitas. But the leftist candidates together polled a majority of the votes.

There is a a question about the commitment of the Communist Party to Soares in the second round. Soares is regarded as a long-time enemy of the Communists, and Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal told his followers, in effect, to hold their nose and vote for Soares to prevent a rightist victory.

“You don’t have to read the name of Mario Soares,” Cunhal told a special party congress two weeks ago. “You don’t have to look at his picture. Just mark a cross in the little box that follows his name and picture on the ballot.”

Communists Got 15%

The Communist Party, which took 15% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections, is regarded as highly disciplined with militants usually ready to heed Cunhal without question. But his far from ringing endorsement of Soares might tempt some Communists to abstain on Sunday.

During the latest phase of the campaign, Soares, a personable politician, put Freitas on the defensive by trying to tar him with the old dictatorship of the late Antonio Oliveira Salazar and his successor, Marcello Caetano. Soares accused Freitas of receiving money from a Salazar fund set up to pay informers for information about the activities of university students. Freitas denied the accusation, insisting that he never took part in politics until the 1974 revolution that overthrew the dictatorship.

Freitas, who is rather stiff and awkward on the platform, campaigned on the promise of a forward look for impoverished Portugal. His slogan, “Go Forward, Portugal,” is plastered throughout the country. Freitas promised that he could guarantee stability by working closely with Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who endorsed Freitas and campaigned alongside him. Cavaco Silva’s Social Democrats, a centrist party, organized most of the Freitas rallies.

Whatever the outcome, Freitas, by winning 46% of the vote in the first round, has already amassed more support than any other conservative candidate or party since the revolution. In the first years after the fall of the dictatorship, the mood of Portugal was so leftist that Freitas, when he founded his Christian Democratic party, called it “the Social Democratic Center.” That was about as far right as a party could sound in those days.

In practice, the prime minister, not the president, has been the most powerful executive in the Portuguese parliamentary system. But the president, in addition to emergency powers, does have significant powers to appoint and remove the prime minister. Since the Assembly of the Republic often lacked a clear majority in the last 11 years, President Antonio Ramalho Eanes used these removal and appointment powers relatively often, leading to an acrimonious feud with Soares during the latter’s three administrations as prime minister.

No endorsement

In the first round of voting, Eanes, who cannot run for a third term, endorsed Francisco Salgado Zenha, an anti-Soares Socialist, for president. After losing, Zenha asked his supporters to vote for Soares in the second round. But Eanes, although he regards himself as a leftist and has allowed a new political party with a vague leftist ideology to form around him, refused to follow Zenha, endorsing no one for the second round.

The new president will be the first civilian president of Portugal since the 1926 coup that led to the Salazar dictatorship. All presidents were military officers during the Salazar years. After the 1974 revolution, two generals led provisional governments. Eanes, the only elected president since then, was an army general credited with preventing the Communists and their allies in the army from seizing power in the first year after the revolution.