The Virtues of Indecision

All across Portugal, cities and towns reverberated with the blare of loudspeakers and the roar of party rallies. Walls everywhere were plastered with posters peeling in the light spring rains. After three weeks of hard campaigning, as well as some bloodshed--at least three lives were lost in pre-election violence--some 5.4 million Portuguese went to the polls calmly, as if benumbed, to cast ballots in the nation's first free parliamentary elections in half a century. As they did a year ago, in elections for a Constituent Assembly, the returns suggested that if there was a consensus of any kind among Portugal's fractious electorate, it was against extreme politics of all shades.

None of the 14 parties competing for the 263 seats in the Assembly reached the 40% mark that might have provided a working majority. Although the two mainstream parties--the Socialists and the center left Popular Democrats--together polled almost 60% of the vote, the nation's increasingly polarized electorate also gave boosts to Communist and conservative forces. The chief results:

> The Socialists, with 35% of the vote, remained the strongest party, although they were down slightly from the 38% they polled last spring. Party strategists blamed the slippage on the popularity of the Communists' radical land-reform proposals among southern farmers and the hostility of right-wing refugees from Angola, who blame the Socialists for their part in the rapid decolonization there.

> The Popular Democrats were second with 23%, off from last year's 26%. Party Leader Francisco S`a; Carneiro's acerbic campaign attacks on opposition leaders seemed gratuitously harsh to many Portuguese and may have cost the party votes.

> The conservative Center Social Democrats (C.D.S.) were the big gainers, doubling their share of the vote from 7.6% last year to 16%. Although the C.D.S. won a majority in only one northern district, the party succeeded in edging out the Communists for third place in Portugal's political ladder and now considers itself a candidate for a role in the future government.

>The Communists, while running behind the C.D.S., managed to increase their share of the vote modestly from 12.5% to 15%. They did so by holding on to their small but ardent constituency in the Lisbon industrial belt and among the landless peasants in the southern rural district of Alentejo, while picking up new strength as a result of a decision by a Communist splinter party to withdraw from the election.

Seeking to make the most of the results, Communist Leader Alvaro Cunhal assessed the election as a "victory for the left," meaning a popular mandate for a coalition of Socialists and Communists. But Cunhal's rivals did not agree. Describing the vote as a clear rejection of the Communists, S`a Carneiro called for a coalition of center parties that would bar a role for Cunhal. Socialist Leader Mario Soares insisted that he would deal with no one and promised to try to form a minority government on his own.

Soares' Socialists and S`a Carneiro's Popular Democrats would seem to be natural coalition partners, since their platforms on such issues as nationalization and land reform are roughly parallel, and together they would command a comfortable majority. But the two party chiefs, who are personal rivals, attacked each other bitterly during the campaign, and Scares has insisted that he would rather remain outside government than join a coalition. On election night, Scares indicated that if he is forced to accept a coalition of "national salvation," he would prefer a broad front with all major parties to joining forces with S`a Carneiro alone. S`a Carneiro says that his followers would join any coalition except one that includes Communists. Indeed, he threatened last week to withdraw from the present sixth Provisional Government, which is due to remain in power until presidential elections are held in late June or early July, unless the Communists were immediately removed from their posts.

Fortunately, the politicians have time to work out their differences. Only after a new President is elected will a Premier be appointed and given the task of forming a government. For Portugal, which has weathered two coup attempts and countless other alarms since the 1974 revolution, a few more weeks of noisy political uncertainty will not hurt and may even prove salutary. At least, vacillation has never seemed a vice to President Francisco ("the Cork") da Costa Gomes, who has refused to take ideological sides during Portugal's prolonged political crisis and, not coincidentally, is a possible candidate to succeed himself. A recent Costa Gomes observation: "Portugal has often been on the brink of civil war, and it was only thanks to my indecision that the country was spared this tragedy."

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