The extreme right achieves third place and its leader, André Ventura, puts his position at the disposal of the militants
The current president of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, has obtained more than 60.74 percent of the votes in the presidential elections this Sunday, according to the official results corresponding to more than 99 percent of the vote, thereby confirming the forecasts and achieves a second term with resounding clarity.
“The renewed confidence is now anything but a blank check,” Rebelo de Sousa said for the first time after hearing these results. “Today’s election provided unequivocal answers about our immediate future” with the Portuguese, he has said, choosing “to renew confidence in the acting president.”
Rebelo de Sousa has thus imposed himself on the socialist candidate Ana Gomes, who has obtained 12.97 percent of the votes, who, although she has regretted not having achieved her goal of taking the presidential elections to a second round, her candidacy, has highlighted, “prevented the extreme right from reaching an alternative position.
Gomes thus refers to the far-right, André Ventura, who finally came third with 11.90 percent of the votes. The leader of Basta has congratulated the winner of the night, Rebelo de Sousa, and described the electoral night as “historic”, since “the right was reconfigured”, managing to “crush the extreme left.”
“The night in which an anti-system party managed to break the institutional blockade to create a great anti-system force in Portugal,” Ventura said in reference to his party, which, he presumed, has managed to obtain more votes than the Communist Party , the Left Bloc and the Liberal Initiative all together.
However, he has advanced that having failed to obtain 15 percent of the votes, he puts his position at the disposal of the militants, so that they can decide if they want to maintain this leadership in this project “, as published by ‘Diario de Noticias’.
The next most voted options were Joao Ferreira, from the Communist Party, with 4.30 percent of the votes; Marisa Matias of the Left Bloc (BE), with 3.94 percent of the support, the liberal Tiago Mayan Gonçalves, with 3.22 percent; and finally, the ecologist Vitorino Silva, with 2.94 percent.
The Secretary General of the BE, Catarina Martins, has acknowledged that “the results have not been as expected” and “are far from the objectives set.” In the same way, she has valued what she considers “a very worrying fact”, that the conservative voters of Portugal have opted for “a candidate from the extreme right”.
On his part, Ferreira explained that his candidacy could be harmed by the “bipolarization” of second place, which Ventura and Gomes have disputed. Thus, she points out that many of the votes that could have gone to her project have slipped towards the socialist candidate to prevent the extreme right from reaching second place.
Who has been more forceful in his analysis has been the general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, Jerónimo de Sousa, who has assured that the results of this Sunday were “expected” and has criticized Rebelo de Sousa for having created an image of himself as a “false humanist”, then, he has valued, he will once again show in the next five years “an even more explicit alignment with the agenda of the right.”
LOWEST PARTICIPATION SINCE 1976
The polls already predicted a clear victory for Rebelo de Sousa with between 55 and 62 percent of the votes, which prevents him from attending a second round. However, the news has emerged in the good result obtained by the extreme right with Ventura.
The other news is the low participation, of 60.7 percent, probably due to the coronavirus pandemic and the maximum number of infections registered in recent days in the country. This is the highest rate of absenteeism at the polls since the 1976 presidential elections.
So far, Portugal has registered 636,190 confirmed cases and 10,469 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the balance published this Sunday by the Portuguese Directorate General of Health. This Sunday 11,721 cases have been added and another 275 deaths.
