The 2015 Portuguese Legislative Election: Widening the Coalitional Space and Bringing the Extreme Left in

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the Portuguese legislative election held on 4 October 2015 by exploring the economic and political context in which the election took place, the opinion polls, party positions and campaign issues, the results and, finally, the process that led to the formation of the first Socialist minority government supported by far-left parties. Due to this outcome, despite the relative majority of the votes obtained by the incumbent centre-right coalition, we argue that this election result cannot be interpreted as a victory of austerity, but rather as the first step towards contract parliamentarism in Portugal. The 2015 legislative election constituted a second test of the resilience of the Portuguese party system in a context of severe economic crisis, following that of the 2011 election, which had resulted in few changes in its format and a severe defeat for the incumbent Partido Socialista (Socialist Party-PS). 1 Contrary to what happened in Greece, Italy and Spain, the incumbent defeat was not accompanied by a significant reduction in the electoral weight of the traditional parties or the surge of new, anti-establishment parties (

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