Election of the weekend II: The Azores

The main course is coming up in about five weeks, but before Portugal holds a national election, the Autonomous region of The Azores will hold a snap early election on Sunday. I don’t have much to say about this, but I did a post about the Madeira election in the fall so symmetry demands I cover the Azores.

Why a snap election in the Azores? The government in the regional assembly (52 seats elected by MMD PR, with each district an island, ranging from 2-20 seats, D’Hondt method, with 5 “compensation” seats to even things out, and significant malapportionment between seats per capita favoring smaller islands) was comprised of a coalition of three center right parties: the social democrats, CDS/People’s Party, and the People’s Monarchist Party. That wasn’t quite enough to make a majority so they made arrangements with Chega (2 seats) and the Liberal Initiative (1 seat). Since that arrangement was made, the Liberal Initiative withdrew support for the coalition, and one of the Chega representatives switched to independent and did the same. They chugged along as a minority government, until it was time to pass a budget. Their proposed budget did win over the independent formerly Chega representative, but nonetheless failed 27 for, 28 against, with the remaining Chega representative and the “Peoples Animals Nature” representative abstaining. Under the constitution, the government must propose another budget within 90 days or a budget failing. Seeing the writing on the wall, legislative leader José Manuel Cabral Dias Bolieiro called for a snap election instead quickly, in order to complete it before the national election.

What were the objections to the budget? What is likely to happen today? Here I run up against the limits of English language coverage of this particular election. One of the only stories I found, from the Fall River Herald, gives us the nuts and bolts but no real clues as to what’s going on. As we’ll talk about in a month or so, the Socialists are expected to suffer massive losses in the upcoming national election. So on one theory, maybe the center-right coalition gains and can pass their budget, since the national mood is to shift to the right. On the other hand, maybe the anti-Socialist mood is actually more of an anti-incumbent mood, and will come for the governing coalition as well. On the third hand, maybe the Azorean political mood is entirely divorced from that of the mainland. Which of these scenarios is likely to play out today? There are many questions I don’t know the answer to, and this is definitely one of them.

I encourage any Azorean or Azores-adjacent readers in possession of knowledge I lack about today’s election to share with us said knowledge in comments.