The current political regime emerged when the extreme left’s intention of “not losing through electoral means what had cost so much to gain” was frustrated. Vasco Gonçalves’ formulation alluded, without subtlety, to the two paths that were open to what remained of Portugal after a year of revolution: «popular power» or «liberal democracy». The 25th of November resolved the dilemma and defined the regime.
The system, however, is not the regime. Unlike him, it does not arise from a founding decision. It is rather the result of practices that, extended over time, consolidate what counts as “normality”. In Portugal, the practice normalized a “presidentialism of the Prime Minister”, as Adriano Moreira said. This is the best characterization of the party system that has governed us for fifty years; system that to date only the emergence of Chega, openly anti-system, has managed to challenge.
The “Prime Minister’s presidentialism” inherited the Salazarist imaginary of an all-powerful Head of Government appointed by a decorative President. After the Revolution, democracy prolonged it, combining it with the political homogenization of the new parties. This began on September 28th, with the persecution and prohibition of movements that demanded a referendum on the overseas issue. The liquidation of the right was later complemented by the metamorphosis of the PCP into a respectable bourgeois party, following the “electoral path” once repudiated. In this context, it was up to the CDS, after March 11th and the «suspension» of the PDC, to bring the opposition into the Constituent Assembly. An opposition that did not free us from constitutionally prescribed socialism, nor from a system where everything revolves around the influence of socialists and social democrats.
In the 1980s, “Prime Minister presidentialism” was consolidated. In 1980, the dream of AD emerged – «one Government, one Majority, one President» – where it was clear that the Government, not the Presidency, was the aggregating pole of the triad. Then came the limitations on presidential powers from the 1982 constitutional review. Eanes’ PRD came in 1985, when he exchanged presidentialism for another social-democratic party, equal to PSD and PS. The 1986 presidential elections came and the defeat of Freitas do Amaral, who a year earlier had seen the Gaullist presidentialism of the Fifth French Republic as “a solution for Portugal”. “Soares is cool” came to the presidency, in conjunction with Cavaco’s technocratic omnipotence. All of this came, in addition to a press that, submissive and dependent, placed legislative elections at the center of the system and specialized in selling them as a dispute between «two candidates for Prime Minister».
After so many years, it is perhaps time to look critically at the model. It helps that an anti-system party has managed to impose itself, against everything and everyone, as the second largest national party. The presidential candidacy of your President cannot fail to be an occasion to rethink the logic of “Prime Minister presidentialism”. Chega presents itself as an alternative to the alternation between nothing and nothing with which PS and PSD cyclically anesthetize the country. This also implies considering and discussing alternatives to the “Prime Minister’s Presidentialism” underlying this anesthesia. One thing doesn’t go without the other. Therefore, for André Ventura, this is not a wrong election. It might even be the right election. Anyone who wants to maintain the system has a lot to choose from: they will choose the same substance adorned with the color they like most. Anyone who is fed up with it knows what they have to do.