Parliamentary Elections in Portugal With 51.96% Turnout

Portuguese citizens go to the polls this Sunday to elect the 230 deputies of the Assembly of the Republic, which in turn, will elect the Prime Minister, in a day that has developed normally.

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Main candidates in Sunday's legislative elections in Portugal are Luís Montenegro, the head of the centre-right opposition, Pedro Nuno Santos, the new leader of the Socialist Party, and André Ventura, the founder of an extreme far-right formation.

According to several polls, the favorites for the position of prime minister are the conservative Luís Montenegro, leader of the Democratic Socialist Party (PSD), and the leftist Nuno Santos, current leader of the Socialist Party (PS).

On the other hand, André Ventura, founder of the Chega ("Enough Party") in 2019, spreading a populist and anti-establishment message, which has placed him third in recent polls.

Until mid-afternoon, turnout in the legislative elections that are held this Sunday in Portugal was 51.96%, about six percentage points more than recorded at the same time in the 2022 elections, according to data from the Ministry of Internal Administration (Interior).

In a country where participation is usually not high, Throughout this day, there have been calls by politicians for citizens to come to exercise their right to vote, and candidates expect the number of voters to be high, or at least more than in 2022, when 51,42 % of the shareholding was registered.

These early elections come a little more than two years after the previous ones because the third legislature of the former minister, António Costa, was cut in half by his resignation in November, after the prosecutor’s office announced that it was investigating him for alleged irregularities. The Public Prosecutor’s Office has disseminated little information and there are no formal charges against him.