There is a certain irony in observing how Portuguese politics, which is so proud of its party plurality and prudent centrism, is happily moving towards a simplification that would make any Anglo-Saxon two-party system blush with envy. But with one difference: it will not be a bipartisanship of civilized alternation. It will be trench bipartisanship.
Within ten to 15 years, it is most likely that we will have two new political blocs in Portugal. On the one hand, a kind of institutionalized “Central Block”, born from the practical – if not formal – merger between the PS and the PSD. Not out of love, obviously, but out of survival instinct. After all, when two injured animals find themselves in the same den, they either devour each other or learn to cohabit. And these two, exhausted from pretending they are different, will end up discovering that they share the essentials: the taste for power and the fear of losing it to those who don’t belong to the club.
On the other side, a consolidated Chega, probably purged of its most caricatured figures, but not of its foundational lies. André Ventura, if luck accompanies him, will continue to embody the resentful messianism that so seduces a relevant part of the electorate, which will continue to increase, as voters who were politically trained in the post-25th of April era disappear. And, if it’s not him, it will be another communicator – because the place of angry prophet is never vacant for long, in a society that cultivates complaining as a national sport.
Between these two, other small parties will survive, like plants that grow in cracks in concrete, from the liberal right, and even from the extreme left, which are speaking to increasingly small assemblies, convinced that their revolution is just around the corner. And it could even be, if the me and the now were not the new universal guide for life.
The most intriguing thing will be to see who will emerge as leader of the Central Bloc. Because this arrangement, to work, will need its own messiah – someone anodyne enough not to scare, but charismatic enough to make you forget that it represents the surrender of two historic parties to fear. We still don’t know who it will be. Maybe you don’t yet know that it will be. But it will come, because politics, like nature, has a horror of emptiness. Especially the leadership void.
This is not just a fictional scenario. It is the logical consequence of the exhaustion of a model that lives on unfulfilled promises and of a society that, refounded on the ideal of the individual, is preparing to choose between organized boredom and instrumentalized indignation.
Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon
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