Row as Portuguese president tries to block leftist coalition

An upcoming parliamentary vote is expected to reject the government programme of prime minister-elect Pedro Passos Coelho, extending a political crisis sparked by Portugal's inconclusive elections three weeks ago.

Last week, president Aníbal Cavaco Silva asked Passos Coelho, a conservative who has governed since 2011, to form a new government after his Social Democratic Party (PSD) won the October 4th elections in a coalition with the People's Party (CDS).

With the coalition, which won 39 per cent of votes, having lost its parliamentary majority, it needed a new governing partner and there had been speculation it might team up with the Socialist Party (PS), which came second in the election.

But instead, the socialists have been looking to their left, negotiating with the Leftist Bloc (BE) and the communists, with a view to forming a triparty front that could unseat Passos Coelho. With those three parties taking just over 50 per cent of the vote, they insist that together they have a clear mandate and therefore should have been given the chance to form a governing coalition immediately after the election.

Breakdown of confidence

However, the president disagrees. In announcing his decision to offer Passos Coelho the chance to form a government on Thursday, Cavaco Silva described a Socialist-Communist-BE coalition as “a clearly inconsistent alternative” which threatened to undermine the economy. “I have to say in all honesty to the Portuguese people that I greatly fear the breakdown of confidence of international institutions, of our creditors, of investors and of the international financial markets,” he said, in reference to the possible repercussions of a leftist administration.

Portugal

recently exited a €78 billion EU bailout deal, signed in 2011, and Cavaco Silva’s comments appear to have been mainly aimed at the communists and BE, which have between them attacked Portugal’s membership of the euro and

Nato

.

With socialist leader Anónio Costa taking a more moderate stance, exit from neither the euro nor Nato is expected to be part of a future leftist coalition’s manifesto. However, both the BE and the communists have staunchly opposed the troika-sponsored austerity of the last four years, suggesting that, if in government, they would seek a less hawkish economic policy.

The arrival of Nato troops in Portugal for military exercises this month further inflamed the debate, with BE describing them as “war games”.

Passos Coelho is the first leader of a bailed-out EU country to win a general election since the euro-zone crisis and his campaign relied heavily on the country’s ongoing recovery from the economic meltdown of 2010/11.

"People often say that Passos Coelho has been a good student of [German finance minister] Wolfgang Schäuble," said José Adelino Maltez, a political scientist at Lisbon University. "But it's looking increasingly likely that we are going to get a new, leftist government which won't be such a good student of his." The apparent aversion of the conservative Cavaco Silva to a possible leftist coalition has provoked accusations he has overstepped the boundaries laid out in the constitution for the president, whose position is in great part ceremonial.

“It’s not up to the president of the republic to interfere in other, sovereign state institutions, in this case parliament,” said Sampaio da Nóvoa, a candidate in the upcoming presidential election in January. “Nor is it up to him to decide which votes are good and which votes bad, which parties good and which parties bad. We should have an immense respect for the decision of the Portuguese people and also for parliament, the home of our democracy.”

An association of retired military officers involved in the peaceful uprising which brought an end to four decades of dictatorship in 1974 also reprimanded the president, claiming he had “drastically violated the separation of powers between institutions”.

Symbolic step

Now in control of parliament, the socialists, communists and BE have already made one symbolic step towards a possible governing coalition, agreeing on the nomination of socialist

Eduardo Ferro

as president of the chamber.

If, as is widely expected, the left votes against Passos Coelho’s policy programme in the coming days, the president could call new elections in six months’ time. However, he might be forced to swallow his misgivings and hand the left the opportunity to govern.