Latest news and stories about voter behaviour in Portugal for expats and residents.
The politics of the meat pie, Melhoral and the chemistry in the campaign's final debate
The first round of the presidential election confirmed trends that had been emerging in the legislative polls, but it freed them from a party discipline that increasingly feels artificial. What emerged from the first round was a fragmentation of the right, tactical voting that favoured the left, the normalisation of the far right, and an electorate that is increasingly volatile, slower to decide and less loyal to party labels. Pedro Magalhães, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, PhD from Ohio State University and former director of the Polling Centre at the Catholic University, is the guest on the programme “Perguntar Não Ofende”.
An analysis of the second round of voting, exploring the tension between uncertainty and predictability in electoral outcomes, including the roles of polls, campaign strategies and voter behaviour.
The Socialist candidate prevailed where the race was still open: among undecided voters, the least loyal supporters and those who waited until the end to choose. It was in that final sprint that he went from a recovering candidate to winner of the first round.
Both null votes and blank votes increased compared with 2021
The AD electorate split into four in this presidential contest. Ventura was the most successful at retaining votes from the legislative elections. Gouveia e Melo ended up with more votes from the AD than from the PS. Data from the Expresso/SIC poll.
Fourteen percent decided their vote on election day. Cotrim closed the gap to Ventura in the final week, but not enough. Seguro surprised by winning among more highly educated voters and almost beating Cotrim among younger voters. See the polling data from ICS/ISCTE, GfK and Pitagórica for Expresso and SIC.
These presidential elections present a kind of paradox for the electorate.
