2002 Portuguese legislative election

← 1999 17 March 2002 2005 →
230 seats to the Portuguese Assembly 116 seats needed for a majority
Registered	8,902,713 0.4%
Turnout	5,473,655 (61.5%) 0.4 pp
First party Second party Third party   Leader José Manuel Barroso Ferro Rodrigues Paulo Portas Party PSD PS CDS–PP Leader since 2 May 1999 20 January 2002 22 March 1998 Leader's seat Lisbon[1] Lisbon[2] Aveiro[3] Last election 81 seats, 32.3% 115 seats, 44.1% 15 seats, 8.3% Seats won 105 96 14 Seat change 24 19 1 Popular vote 2,200,765 2,068,584 477,350 Percentage 40.2% 37.8% 8.7% Swing 7.9 pp 6.3 pp 0.4 pp   Fourth party Fifth party   Leader Carlos Carvalhas Francisco Louçã Party PCP BE Alliance CDU Leader since 5 December 1992 24 March 1999 Leader's seat Lisbon[4] Lisbon[5] Last election 17 seats, 9.0% 2 seats, 2.4% Seats won 12 3 Seat change 5 1 Popular vote 379,870 153,877 Percentage 6.9% 2.7% Swing 2.0 pp 0.4 pp
Vote winner strength by district Results by constituency
Prime Minister before election António Guterres PS Prime Minister after election José Manuel Barroso PSD

The 2002 Portuguese legislative election took place on 17 March. The election renewed all 230 members of the Assembly of the Republic.

These elections were called after the resignation of the then incumbent Prime Minister, António Guterres after the defeat of the Socialist Party in the 2001 local elections. That fact, plus the problematic state of the country's finances were the main arguments of the right-wing parties, which led them to be the favourites to win the election.

With just over 40% of the votes cast, the Social Democrats regained the status as the largest political force in Portugal, although the Socialists won almost 38% of the vote. This was the closest legislative election in Portuguese democracy until 2024. This short distance also appears on the electoral map, with each party winning eleven of the 22 districts, while the PS won the most populous, Lisbon and Porto. As a result, the Social Democrats fail to win the absolute majority they had between 1987 and 1995.

As no Party got an absolute majority, the Social Democrats formed a coalition with the right-wing People's Party. The left-wing Democratic Unity Coalition achieved the lowest result ever, finishing in the third place in its traditional strongholds, Évora and Setúbal. The Left Bloc gained one MP. Turnout was slightly higher than it was in 1999 but remained quite low, marking a growing separation between the politics and the Portuguese people, mainly due to the image of the politicians as corrupts and the idea that all the parties are the same.

Voter turnout was slightly higher than in 1999, as 61.5% of the electorate cast a ballot.

Background

After the disappointing results of the Socialist Party (PS) in the 1999 elections, the PS government entered in a series of crisis.^[6] Resignations of ministers from government and incapacity of passing legislation in Parliament led to controversial, and weird, alliances, like the 2000 and 2001 budgets which were approved by a sole CDS – People's Party (CDS–PP) Member of Parliament, Daniel Campelo, in exchange for the government approving a cheese factory in Campelo's hometown, Ponte de Lima.^[7]

Fall of the government

The Socialist Party suffered a big, and unexpected, defeat in the December 2001 local elections.^[8] The party lost major cities across the country, mainly Lisbon, Porto, Sintra and Coimbra to the Social Democratic Party. Due to this surprising defeat, Prime Minister António Guterres announced he was to tender his resignation as Prime Minister in order to avoid the country falling "into a political swamp".^[9] Shortly after, President Jorge Sampaio accepted Guterres resignation and called snap elections for March 2002.^[10]

Leadership changes and challenges

PSD 2000 leadership election

After the 1999 election defeat, Durão Barroso's leadership started to be challenged and criticized.^[11] In January 2000, Durão Barroso called a snap party congress to resolve the leadership dispute.^[12] Alongside Barroso, Pedro Santana Lopes and Luís Marques Mendes also ran. Durão Barroso was reelected as PSD leader and the results were the following:

PS 2002 leadership election

Following the resignation of António Guterres as Prime Minister and PS leader,^[13] the party started the process to elect a new leader. The popular minister in Guterres cabinet, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, and PS member Paulo Penedos, were the two candidates on the ballot. Around 121,000 PS members were registered to vote.^[14] In the end, Ferro Rodrigues got almost unanimous support by being elected with almost 97% of the votes.^[15] The results were the following:

Electoral system

The Assembly of the Republic has 230 members elected to four-year terms. Governments do not require absolute majority support of the Assembly to hold office, as even if the number of opposers of government is larger than that of the supporters, the number of opposers still needs to be equal or greater than 116 (absolute majority) for both the Government's Programme to be rejected or for a motion of no confidence to be approved.^[16]

The number of seats assigned to each district depends on the district magnitude.^[17] The use of the d'Hondt method makes for a higher effective threshold than certain other allocation methods such as the Hare quota or Sainte-Laguë method, which are more generous to small parties.^[18]

For these elections, and compared with the 1999 elections, the MPs distributed by districts were the following:^[19]

District	Number of MPs	Map
Lisbon(–1)	48	18 6 38 5 4 15 9 4 10 5 10 10 48 3 3 17 3 8 5 5 2 2
Porto(+1)	38
Braga(+1)	18
Setúbal	17
Aveiro	15
Leiria, Santarém and Coimbra	10
Viseu	9
Faro	8
Viana do Castelo	6
Azores, Castelo Branco, Madeira and Vila Real	5
Bragança and Guarda	4
Beja, Évora(–1) and Portalegre	3
Europe and Outside Europe	2

Parties

The table below lists the parties represented in the Assembly of the Republic during the 8th legislature (1999–2002) and that also partook in the election:

Campaign period

Party slogans

Candidates' debates

Opinion polling

The following table shows the opinion polls of voting intention of the Portuguese voters before the election. Those parties that are listed were represented in parliament (1999-2002). Included is also the result of the Portuguese general elections in 1999 and 2002 for reference.

  Exit poll

Date Released	Polling Firm	PS					Others	Lead
17 Mar 2002	Leg. election	37.8 96	40.2 105	6.9 12	8.7 14	2.7 3	3.7 0	2.4
17 Mar 2002 (20:00)	RTP1 - Universidade Católica	36.0–41.0	37.0–42.0	5.5–8.0	7.5–10.0	3.0–4.0	—	1.0
17 Mar 2002 (20:00)	SIC - Eurosondagem	35.5–39.3	40.1–43.9	6.2–8.4	6.2–8.4	2.0–3.4	—	4.6
17 Mar 2002 (20:00)	TVI - INTERCAMPUS	35.5–40.5	37.8–42.8	6.8–9.8	5.3–8.3	1.6–4.2	—	2.3
15 Mar 2002	Marktest	35.2	43.7	8.1	6.0	3.7	3.3	8.5
15 Mar 2002	Lusófona	40.9	43.6	5.7	7.1	2.8	—	2.7
15 Mar 2002	Eurosondagem	39.3	41.4	6.9	5.6	3.5	3.3	2.1
15 Mar 2002	Eurequipa	33.9	44.7	7.1	9.1	3.2	2.0	10.8
15 Mar 2002	Universidade Católica	37.5	42.2	6.9	6.8	3.6	3.0	4.7
14 Mar 2002	INTERCAMPUS	39.0	41.0	8.0	5.0	3.0	4.0	2.0
14 Mar 2002	Aximage	40.0	44.0	7.0	6.0	2.0	1.0	4.0
13 Mar 2002	SIC/Visão	36.2	41.0	6.6	5.2	2.0	9.0	4.8
8 Mar 2002	Marktest	36.0	43.0	6.0	7.0	4.0	4.0	7.0
2 Mar 2002	Eurosondagem	35.0	38.0	6.0	5.0	2.0	14.0	3.0
27 Feb 2002	Universidade Católica	35.6	43.5	—	—	—	20.9	7.9
Feb 2002	Marktest	34.7	45.7	6.7	7.3	2.5	3.1	11.0
Jan 2002	Marktest	33.8	41.8	9.6	8.1	2.5	4.2	8.0
22 Dec 2001	Marktest	34.0	39.0	11.0	9.0	3.0	4.0	5.0
16 Dec 2001	Local elections	37.1	41.0	10.6	4.0	1.2	6.1	3.9
Nov 2001	Marktest	35.4	33.7	10.6	11.6	2.9	5.8	1.7
Oct 2001	Marktest	35.9	33.9	10.5	11.5	2.7	5.5	2.0
26 Jan 2001	Marktest	37.0	33.0	10.0	11.0	3.0	6.0	4.0
8 May 2000	Universidade Católica[b]	40.9	32.5	6.7	8.1	3.0	8.8	8.4
10 Oct 1999	Leg. election	44.1 115	32.3 81	9.0 17	8.3 15	2.4 2	3.9 0	11.9

National summary of votes and seats

Summary of the 17 March 2002 Assembly of the Republic elections results

Parties		Votes	%	±	MPs					MPs %/ votes %
					1999	2002	±	%	±
	Social Democratic	2,200,765	40.21	7.9	81	105	24	45.65	10.4	1.14
	Socialist	2,068,584	37.79	6.3	115	96	19	41.74	8.3	1.10
	People's	477,350	8.72	0.4	15	14	1	6.09	0.4	0.70
	Democratic Unity Coalition[c]	379,870	6.94	2.1	17	12	5	5.22	2.2	0.75
	Left Bloc	149,966	2.74	0.3	2	3	1	1.30	0.4	0.47
	Portuguese Workers' Communist	36,193	0.66	0.0	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	Earth	15,540	0.28	0.1	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	People's Monarchist	12,398	0.23	0.1	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	Humanist	11,472	0.21	0.1	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	National Renovator	4,712	0.09	—	—	0	—	0.00	—	0.0
	Workers Party of Socialist Unity	4,316	0.08	0.0	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	Left Bloc/People's Democratic Union[d]	3,911	0.07	—	—	0	—	0.00	—	0.0
	National Solidarity[e][27]	0	0.00	0.2	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
Total valid		5,365,881	98.03	0.0	230	230	0	100.00	0.0	—
Blank ballots		55,121	1.01	0.1
Invalid ballots		52,653	0.96	0.0
Total		5,473,655	100.00
Registered voters/turnout		8,902,713	61.48	0.4
Source: Comissão Nacional de Eleições

Distribution by constituency

Maps

• 
  Strongest party by district.
• 
  Most voted political force by municipality.

Aftermath

After the elections, PSD and CDS–PP formed a coalition government, the first since the Democratic Alliance (AD) in the early 1980's.^[28] This government was marked by the fragile fiscal and economic situation of the country and the 2003 Casa Pia child sexual abuse scandal. During this government, Portugal became a major ally in the War in Iraq, which divided public opinion.^[29] In the 2004 European Parliament election in Portugal, the PSD/CDS–PP coalition Força Portugal suffered a big defeat by gathering just 33% of the votes, against the 44% of the Socialist Party. A few days later, José Manuel Durão Barroso announced he was resigning from the post of Prime Minister in order to become President of the European Commission.^[30] Despite pleas for a snap legislative election from Opposition parties, President Jorge Sampaio decided to nominate the new PSD leader, Pedro Santana Lopes as Prime Minister.^[31]

Fall of the government

Santana Lopes government was marked with deep disagreements and disputes within his own party, the Social Democratic Party, which began to damage the government's actions.^[32] One of these disputes was the resignation of Youth and Sports Minister, Henrique Chaves, which was a close ally of Santana. This resignation precipitated the fall of the government, with Chaves accusing Santana of not being "loyal and truthful".^[33] Just five months after swearing in Santana Lopes as Prime Minister, President Jorge Sampaio gave a speech in which he accused the government of "contradictions and lack of coordination that contributed to its discredit",^[34] and used his power of dissolution of Parliament and called a snap election, so far the only time till date such power was used in Portuguese democracy by a President.^[35][36] Santana Lopes disagreed with the President's decision but respected it and announced his resignation.^[37] A new election was called, by the President, for 20 February 2005.^[38]