LISBON — The Portuguese prime minister has had a bad week.
Socialist leader António Costa’s poll lead ahead of Sunday’s election has been shrinking fast amid a bizarre scandal involving an arms heist and claims of collusion between government officials, military police and a criminal gang to recover stolen weapons.
Latest polls still have Costa’s Socialist Party (PS) ahead on around 37 percent, compared with 30 percent for the center-right Social Democratic Party (PSD). Just a couple of weeks ago, however, the PS was ahead by 15 points and hopeful of securing an absolute majority in the Assembleia da República.
At a rally Tuesday, Costa appealed to supporters to get out and vote. He warned complacency would mean “they risk waking up the next morning with an unpleasant surprise.”
Despite the shrinking lead, Costa’s situation must be the envy of most European Socialists.
Striking a new deal with the far-left will test Costa’s renowned negotiating skills.
In France, Germany and Italy, once powerful center-left parties are struggling to stay relevant in radically changed political landscapes. Britain’s Labour Party is riven by division between followers and foes of hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn. Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is facing his fourth election in less than four years.
“Socialists in Portugal were able to combine wage and income increases, and to strengthen social rights previously destroyed by the right-wing government in the ‘troika’ years,” said Iratxe García, the Spanish MEP who chairs the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament.
“Portuguese Socialists proved that TINA [There Is No Alternative (to austerity)] is a myth,” she said.
While Sánchez has just failed, after six months of acrimonious negotiations, to find coalition partners on the right or left, Costa was able to build an unprecedented pact with two hard-left parties that took him to power in 2015 and enabled the PS to maintain a stable government for the past four years.
Prime Minister and secretary-general of the Socialist Party, António Costa (C) attends a political campaign in Coimbra, Portugal, October 2, 2019 | Rio Cruz/EFE via EPA
“You think that was easy?” said Ana Catarina Mendes, the PS deputy leader. “We had to demolish walls that had existed for 40 years.”
It came together after the PS finished second in the 2015 election. Most people expected Costa to back the victorious center-right in a German-style “grand coalition.” Instead, he broke taboos by appealing to the far left to back a Socialist administration.
“We had to convince them we could have a majority of the left in parliament with one point in common: to turn the page on austerity,” said Mendes. “We managed this first of all due to the leadership capacities and vision of António Costa.”
Costa is convinced coalitions between centrist parties play into the hands of extremists and has again rejected talk of a deal with the PSD if, as looks likely from the polls, the PS falls short of an overall majority on Sunday.
That leaves open the prospect of a new geringonça — a word meaning a rickety contraption which was applied to the Socialist and far-left arrangement by a conservative politician. The name has stuck even as the partnership proved robust.
Same deal, different challenges
Striking a new deal with the far-left will test Costa’s renowned negotiating skills.
He’s still on warm terms with the leader of the old-school Portuguese Communist Party, which is polling around 7 percent, but relations have soured with the Left Bloc, which is expected to win around 10 percent of the vote on Sunday.
Costa has warned of a “Spanish-style scenario” of instability and “ungovernability” if the elections give the Left Bloc a kingmaker role similar to that of the leftist Podemos in Spain.
Still, if polls prove correct, it could be hard for the PS to form a majority without some sort of deal with the Bloc, even if Costa managed to reach out to the animal rights party PAN, which could win a couple of seats.
Costa is, however, a master of backroom dealmaking.
“Costa is an extremely pragmatic politician,” said Eunice Goes, politics professor at the U.K.’s Richmond University. “He is an extremely efficient operator and a great practitioner of discrete diplomacy.”
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Success on Sunday will mean Costa will likely lead Portugal’s stint at the helm of the Council of the European Union in 2021, where, Mendes said, priorities will include forging support for a stronger European role in the fight against climate change and securing a more integrated approach to migration.
Costa’s domestic balancing act — assuaging leftist demands for social reforms and public spending, wage and pension hikes, while pleasing eurozone budget hawks with the lowest deficits in Portugal’s democratic history — has earned him influence in Brussels and beyond.
He was successful in getting Finance Minister Mário Centeno appointed president of the Eurogroup and played an important role lobbying for the U.N. to appoint António Guterres as its secretary-general.
Costa also got what he wanted when his chosen candidate for the European Commission, Bank of Portugal Deputy Governor Elisa Ferreira, was nominated for the regional policy post that oversees some of the EU’s biggest spending programs.
Ferreira will have control of a new budgetary instrument for convergence and competitiveness, a mechanism Costa has long pushed for to support structural reforms and public investment.
“António Costa is undoubtedly one of the most respected leaders in Europe and not only within the European socialists” — Iratxe García, S&D leader in the European Parliament
“In essence, the portfolio was tailor-made for the prime minister. His long-term goal — the [regional] funds portfolio — was achieved and the bonus was the inclusion of the convergence instrument,” a government official said.
Portuguese officials talk of supporting a “progressive alliance” in Europe with an embrace that reaches from Greece’s far-left Syriza to France’s President Emmanuel Macron. Costa himself was tapped as a possible president of the European Council when the EU’s top jobs were divvied out this year.
“António Costa is undoubtedly one of the most respected leaders in Europe and not only within the European socialists,” said S&D leader García. “The fact that his name was amongst the shortlist discussed to be the next president of the European Council is a clear proof.”
In the end, Costa preferred to stay in Lisbon to fight for a second term.
Weapons theft
That his reelection isn’t the cakewalk many expected is due to the theft of dozens of anti-tank grenades, plastic explosives, high-caliber ammunition and other weapons from an army base at Tancos, northeast of Lisbon, in 2017.
The hardware was found a few months later but allegations emerged that military police had done a deal with the thieves to recover the loot. Last week, four days into the election campaign, prosecutors announced Costa’s former defense minister, José Azeredo Lopes, was among 23 facing charges in the case.
Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa at a European Union summit in Brussels, May 28, 2019 | Francisco Seco/AFP via Getty Images
Since then, the Tancos affair has dominated the campaign, injecting rancor into hitherto polite exchanges between Costa and opposition leader Rui Rio. The center-right chief on Monday demanded an urgent parliamentary debate on “the suspicion of connivance by the prime minister.”
Costa in a corner has been characteristically pugnacious. He accused Rio of “bringing shame upon himself” and “undermining the dignity of the campaign” by suggesting he was in on the military shenanigans.
The campaign’s toxic turn could make it harder for Costa to cobble together another governing contraption, but few underestimate his dexterity and determination to stay in the job.
“It wouldn’t be right to say I’m only going to govern if I get one or other set of conditions,” he told the CMTV network last week. “I’ll govern with whatever conditions that the Portuguese give me to govern with.”