The 2009 Portuguese parliamentary elections Paula do Espı ´rito Santo ISCSP, Universidade Te´cnica de Lisboa, Rua Almerindo Lessa,1349-055 Lisboa, Portugal article info Article history: Received 20 October 2009 Accepted 9 February 2010 The 2009 Parliamentary elections took place in a very busy electoral year for Portugal. There were three elections during a four-month period, starting on 7 June with the European Parliament elections and ending on 11 October with local elections. But the centrepiece was the parlia- mentary election on 27 September, which attracted intense media coverage and an unusually large number of contend- ing parties. The incumbent Socialist Party (Partido Socialista, PS) lost its overall majority but retained its status as the largest party and went on to form a minority government. 1. Electoral system The Portuguese political system, on a national level, is based upon two principal sovereign institutions which are the President and Parliament. Parliamentary elections allow the country’s 18 districts and the two autonomous regions (the islands of The Azores and Madeira) to be represented at a national Assembly composed of 230 MPs (four of whom are elected to represent Portuguese emigrants abroad). The electoral system is basically that put in place following the 1974 revolution. Members of Parliament are elected, for a four-year term, via a closed list system of proportional representation. Seats are allocated according to the d’Hondt method in multi-member constituencies based on the 18 districts, the number of seats in each district being propor- tional to the size of its electorate. The constitution explicitly rules out any formal threshold for representation, and the relatively large district magnitude means that the effective threshold is low. The use of closed lists and multi-member seats has been criticised for placing power in the hands of parties rather than voters, and a 1997 amendment to the constitution allowed for a new mixed member proportional system. However, although discussions continue – espe- cially at election time – concerning the possibility of reform (Braga da Cruz,1998; Freire et al., 2008), the electoral system remains that used at the first democratic election in 1975. 2. Contenders and campaigning One singular feature of the 2009 parliamentary election was the large number of parties competing. There were fifteen parties on the ballot, the largest number since the first democratic parliamentary elections in 1975. These spanned a wide political spectrum from left to right, and the breadth of choice not only generated interest but may also have helped to mobilize voters. Despite the abundance of choices, however, only five parties had realistic hopes of achieving Parliamentary representation. Among these, the two leading parties were the incumbent Socialists and their principal rivals, the largest party of the right, the Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrata, PSD). Competing with the PSD for centre-right votes was the Christian Democratic alliance known as CDS-PP (a union of Centro Democra ´ tico Social and Partido Popular). The other two main contenders were on the left. One of these, the CDU (Coligaça ˜o Democra ´ tica Unita ´ria), was a ‘red–green’ coalition of the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Portugue ˆs, PCP) and the Green Party (Partido Ecologista Os Verdes, PEV). The other, further to the left, is the Marxist-Trotskyist Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda, BE). Another interesting aspect of the election was the fact that, for the first time in the history of Portuguese democracy, there were three women standing as party leaders (although only two of these were top of their party’s list). The most prominent of these was Manuela Ferreira Leite, leader of the PSD and thus the main rival to Jose ´ Socrates, leader of the PS and Prime Minister since the 2005 Parliamentary election. Both of the two leading parties devoted much of their campaigning to criticism of their rival’s leadership rather than focusing on ideology or policy proposals. The PS’s task was made easier in this respect by the widespread suggestion that some of Leite’s statements during the campaign caused widespread controversy. Particularly at issue was her defence of Alberto Joa ˜o Jardim, President of the Autonomous Regional Government of Madeira. Jardim, who has enjoyed power for over thirty years, is renowned for limiting freedom of speech, particularly in relation to broadcasting. Leite’s support for the Madeiran government was seen as sitting uneasily with her defence of ‘‘transparency’’ and ‘‘truth’’ as fundamental values during the PSD’s campaign. The campaign more generally was dominated not by the presentation or discussion of political positions but by a variety of incidents and issues that arose during the campaign period itself. One of these was the decision made by the Media Capital group to cut a popular Friday news programme (on the TVI channel) which presented an anti- Government and, in particular, an anti-Prime Ministerial E-mail address: espsanto@iscsp.utl.pt Notes on Recent Elections / Electoral Studies 29 (2010) 276–296 279