(18 Jan 2022) Portugal is gearing up for national elections at the end of the month amidst a surge in omicron cases across the country.
The election is scheduled for 30 January and the government is still waiting on a decision from the attorney general on whether voters who are in isolation or are infected will be allowed to vote.
With the peak expected to come in days, potentially hundreds of thousands of voters could be in isolation at the end of the month, and authorities are searching for ways of holding the ballot.
The official two-week campaigning period kicked off on Sunday, though due to the coronavirus pandemic, the usual large, flag-waving rallies associated with the build-up to the vote are expected to be pared back.
Around 89% of Portugal’s population of 10.3 million people is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, and more than 3.5 million people have received booster shots.
Despite the successful vaccination campaign, new daily cases have set records of around 40,000 in recent weeks.
Even so, hospitalizations have remained much lower than in previous surges, and Portugal has been recording on average around 20 deaths a day in recent weeks.
The ballot comes two years ahead of schedule, after parliament in November rejected the minority Socialist government’s 2022 state budget and the country’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, called a snap election.
The state budget is particularly important now because it sets out how billions of euros in European Union aid to recover from the pandemic will be spent.
Voters will elect 230 lawmakers to the Republican Assembly, Portugal’s parliament.
Lawmakers will then vote on who forms a government.
The center-left Socialist Party has governed Portugal since 2015 under Prime Minister António Costa, and recent opinion polls unanimously indicate the Socialists will collect most votes.
But the Socialists could again fall short of an overall majority, forcing it once again to seek support from its left-of-center allies, the Left Bloc and the Portuguese Communist Party, to pass legislation in parliament.
The parliamentary votes of those two parties helped keep the Socialists in government, consigning the center-right Social Democratic Party – the country’s other major party – to opposition.
The election could see a rise in the influence of smaller parties, including the populist Chega! (Enough!) which earned one seat in parliament in 2019 but could far exceed that this time.

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