There is an air of calm in Portugal. Like Greece and Spain, Portugal was bailed out by international creditors and underwent austerity measures that included tax hikes and salary cuts across the public sector. But the political effect of this has been starkly different.
Greece has had five general elections in the past six years and seen the rise of the left-wing, anti-austerity Syriza party. Spain too has seen a surge in popularity of the ideologically-similar Podemos. Portugal, meanwhile, has enjoyed significant continuity.
As the country’s Oct. 4 general election approaches, the center-right ruling coalition of the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats, which has overseen the implementation of austerity and structural reform, has begun to stretch out ahead in opinion polls over the main opposition center-left Socialist Party. This has been a huge turnaround since January when the Socialist Party had a significant lead.
One factor that has played a central role in the stability of Portugal’s electoral outlook has been the condition of the economy. It is without question that the austerity prescribed with their bailout and the recession that subsequently followed hit ordinary people hard in Portugal. But, as the graph below shows, it did not have such a dramatic effect on GDP as it did in Greece which lost 25 percent of GDP between 2008 and 2014.
