The Lisbon airport is so important that one of the jewels of universal cinematography, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca, is about how to get there to escape Nazi barbarism. Although it was in a smaller flow than in the past, tens of thousands of new emigrants departed from the A Portela terminal in recent decades bound for the nearest Europe. Many were not registered abroad, which will prevent them from participating in Sunday's elections. Theirs is the “technical” part of the enormous Portuguese abstention, the largest in recent years in the former 15-member EU, that is, the one that covered almost all of Western Europe.
This participation of barely half of the census is due, above all, to a deep distrust of politics. Thus, at the close of the campaign this Friday, in addition to the tired calls for a useful vote by the large parties and ideological suffrage by the small ones, the topical appeals to participation take on a special meaning.
Landing at A Portela airport is not easy at all. Unless Lisbon is hit by a strong Atlantic storm, the maneuver of landing on land does not entail any special difficulty. The problem lies in whether the plane has its turn on the runway and even whether there is space to park. Tucked inside the city, it has become very small, also in its facilities, within which masses of tourists gather. Furthermore, with its strategic position in the Atlantic, which made Portugal the legendary country that explored the oceans, this airfield functions as a supply point for transcontinental flights.
“Often you have to be circling for 20 minutes or even half an hour before landing,” explains a Portuguese crew member as the aircraft approaches from Barcelona to Portugal. He says that in extreme cases, when the saturation of the airport meets bad weather, he has ended up landing in Porto or the Algarve, between 200 and 300 kilometers away. “Already during the dictatorship there was talk of the new Lisbon airport,” comments a taxi driver who services the terminal with almost Galician reticence.
Against this administrative and political soap opera of more than half a century in duration, the current socialist candidate and then Minister of Infrastructure Pedro Nuno Santos crashed in June 2022, in a fight with António Costa, prime minister since November 2015 and who has held the position. in office since his resignation in November last year due to a still unclarified case of alleged corruption in his environment. Santos himself, before his political resurrection last December, ended up falling as minister in January 2023 due to a scandal also related to the air, with TAP.
In the face-to-face television debate between the two main candidates to replace Costa, the socialist Santos and the conservative Luís Montenegro, there was a moment of tension, precisely, when talking about the eternal airport expansion project, for which everything has been considered. type of failed solutions, from the transfer to the construction of a complementary terminal. With his slow but persistent style, with a certain priestly air, Montenegro touched on the political wound of Santos, who took the opportunity to remember his rival's lack of experience in management positions and proclaim how “difficult it is to make decisions in Portugal.”
The Lisbon airport is the grand entrance to the flood of visitors that Lisbon has attracted in recent decades. Tourism appears as one of the main factors of the good Portuguese macroeconomic numbers, but also, together with real estate speculation by foreign investors, as the main cause of one of the most serious social problems, the housing shortage. On a campaign walk this Friday on the outskirts of Lisbon Santos was approached by a teacher who said he had been living for months in a van in Elvas, next to Badajoz, because after being assigned there, he lacked the resources to pay rent. This is not a specific problem, since the number of students in the capital area without teachers in some subjects has been growing for years because teachers cannot find accommodation they can afford.
The left-wing formations, the Bloco, the PCP and the Livre, emphasize the need for more ambitious measures to reduce housing prices than those applied by the socialist Government, while warning about the setback that, in their opinion, would mean a turn to the right, which is committed to making the most of Portugal's economic potential.
In the camp of the right, in the extreme part, that of the xenophobic André Ventura, leader of Chega, there is special concern about another flow that enters the country through the A Portela terminal, an essential border post in today's Portugal, that of the immigration. The number of foreigners has doubled in the last decade, reaching 8% of the population, which fuels xenophobic discourse, with Muslims in the crosshairs of Ventura.
The last conservative prime minister, Pedro Pasos Coelho, gave the xenophobic message focused on a supposed insecurity due to the increase in immigration the seal of respectability. It is shocking in a country that has never stopped expelling population. Even so, the current situation has nothing to do with that of the very long dictatorship that ended just half a century ago, nor that of thirteen years ago, when the Government of the socialist Socrates was forced by the markets to ask for international bailout.
In the campaign there are many appeals for those young people who marched in recent decades to return. Some who moved within the EU remain on the internal electoral roll. Theirs will be technical abstention on Sunday, due to administrative failures. However, more relevant is the part that corresponds to the pathology of a traditional political system that has resisted the shocks of the last five years much better than that of nearby countries, but in part thanks to the fact that the malaise has translated into political apathy and mass abstention.
We must go back to February 2005, when, for example, in sister Galicia, Manuel Fraga was still president of the Xunta, to find a participation in the Portuguese parliamentary elections, the equivalent of the Spanish general elections, greater than 60%, with 64, 4%. In 2009 it already fell to 59.7%. In 2019 it hit bottom with 48.6%. In 2022, although it rebounded, it remained at 51.4%, a very low figure as shown by the comparison with the rates of the members of the European Union when it had 15 members, before the enlargement to the East.
Taking the last most important elections in each political system, such as the presidential elections in France and the parliamentary elections in Portugal, it is observed that in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany or Sweden, more than two-thirds of the census vote. In Spain in 2023 the official participation was 66.6%, somewhat artificially lowered by the automatic registration of all residents abroad, a method that is uncommon in the world, but which is also used in Portugal. Although the Portuguese rate is higher than that of Eastern European states, such as Bulgaria or Croatia, in the most comparable environment, that of that already extremely surpassed EU of fifteen states, among which was the United Kingdom, is the lowest of all, with 51.4%, compared to 53.7% in the last Greek elections, in June 2023. If instead of putting various obstacles, Greece included its expatriates by trade, such as Spain and Portugal, it would appear with a higher abstention than the Portuguese. However, those Greek elections were the second elections in just over a month. In May, 61.8% had voted, a figure that if it occurred now in Portugal would be considered a record.
Last Sunday, the most representative of all Portuguese people exercised his right to vote in advance, the president of the Republic, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who has much less power than the prime minister. His appears as a much more than symbolic gesture since Marcelo, as this retired professor of Constitutional Law and former highly successful television commentator is known in Portugal, is the great old fox of Portuguese politics of the last 50 years.
Everything indicates that although the head of state considers rampant abstention as a structural problem of Portuguese democracy, his commitment to setting an example in advance, through a modality that does not exist in Spain, responds to a political calculation. Marcelo “will do whatever it takes” to prevent the far-right Ventura from achieving its goal of reaching the Government in coalition with the conservative Montenegro, maintains the influential weekly Expresso, precisely where the current president cut his teeth in journalism.
The best way to begin to prevent it from having the key is for Chega to get the lowest possible percentage of the vote, for which in principle, as it is a small party, but with a passionate base, the greater the influx to the polls, the more difficult it should be in the great climb that the polls announce, according to which it will double or more compared to its meager 7% four years ago. This thesis that the more votes, the worse for Chega could be wrong, since Ventura also plays with the great advantage of being the only one of the main candidates who repeats compared to two years ago.
In Lisbon this Friday at the end of the campaign everything is shrouded in doubt. And in Portuguese today, to say that word, the French loanword “hesitação” is used more than the word “dúvida”, common with Galician, although in this language it is written with a b. It is quite a symbol because the phenomenon of the ultra-right as a first-rate political actor, which was already registered in France more than two decades ago, with the founder of the Le Pen saga, now arrives in Portugal. The doubts reside in whether Chega could actually hold the key to governability, because the cycle of progressive majority and socialist government that began in November 2015 ended and because the conservative Luís Montenegro opted, against his promises, to try to use that way to come to power, in case it is the only one available to him in his duel of rookie candidates with the socialist Santos.
The “hesitação”, that Portuguese-Frenchized doubt, is fueled by the de facto demographic blackout that Portugal is experiencing. Unlike in Spain, surveys can be published in the last days of the campaign. It almost doesn't matter. Not even the most addicted to the demoscopic drug barely consume it. The failures of this decade reach such a magnitude that it is foolhardy to take the polls very seriously, although who knows, maybe they are right.
The polls announce a quite radical shift to the right. According to the average of polls by the Catholic radio station Rádio Renascença, after the joint victory of the center-left forces in 2022 by 52% to 43%, the right would now prevail by 55% to 39%. It seems too abrupt a turn in just two years, even though the exhaustion of the Costa government became more than intense after, paradoxically, two years ago it achieved the absolute majority and there was the December corruption scandal, since in conservative camp also had its own in January, which took out the regional president of Madeira. It is also striking that a clear victory of almost five points for the conservative Montenegro over the socialist Santos is announced, while the far-right Ventura is credited with an increase of almost ten points.
In Alvalade, the neighborhood next to the airport where the Sporting stadium is located, the third in contention in Portuguese football with the two big ones, Benfica and Porto, João, a veteran affiliate of the conservative, who wore his coat The leader of his party, the PSD, assured this Friday that he was confident in a clear victory for Montenegro, although he could not hide his skepticism. “In the 2021 municipal elections, according to the polls, our candidate (Carlos Moedas) was going to lose by more than ten points. And he won. Two years ago the polls said that Costa could fall, but he won an absolute majority. In the Azores, in February, we were going to lose and we won,” lists the retiree from Alvalade.
It must be as difficult to know the result on Sunday as it is to guess when there will be a solution to the Lisbon air traffic jam, in the event that the soap opera of the new airport is not a fictional story, like that of Bogart and Bergman's Casablanca.
