The Socialist Party of Portugal’s Prime Minister Costa has decisively won the early parliamentary elections and obtained the absolute majority of seats in the Lisbon Parliament.

The ruling Socialist Party (PS) surprisingly won the new parliamentary elections in Portugal and won the absolute majority of the seats. Prime Minister António Costa’s moderate, more social-democratic PS received a good 41.6 per cent of the vote on Sunday, taking at least 117 of the 230 seats in Lisbon’s “Assembleia da República,” according to the electoral authority.

After counting more than 99 per cent of the votes, the PS improved by more than five percentage points compared to the last election in autumn 2019. According to the preliminary results, the largest opposition party, the conservative PSD under its top candidate Rui Rio, only got about 27.9 per cent. All other parties remained in the single digits.

Besides the PS, the right-wing populist Chega led by top candidate André Ventura was able to celebrate. It improved from 1.29 to 7.15 per cent compared to 2019 and increased the number of its MPs from one to at least eleven.

Costa lost support in parliament in November, where his party has pushed legislation through with the help of the Left Bloc and the Communists since 2015. The country’s economy has been hit hard by the corona pandemic.

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