The Exceptional Case of Post-Bailout Portugal

Elisabetta De Giorgi, José Santana-Pereira, Elisabetta De Giorgi, José Santana-Pereira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032106205
• eBook ISBN: 9781000462623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the argument that Portugal has been an exception to the trend of political upheaval and electoral instability across Southern Europe following the financial crisis and the bailout period. It does so by mapping and exploring in-depth three key dimensions: the governmental arena, the party system and citizens' political attitudes.

The five chapters in this edited volume show that a number of factors combine to make Portugal not only a very stimulating case study, but also an exception within the South European panorama: the stability of its party system, and that of the mainstream parties' electoral support in particular; the quick recovery of political attitudes after the end of the bailout period (2011-2014); the absence of competitive populist challengers until 2019, despite high levels of populist attitudes amongst the citizenry; the successful and stable union between anti-austerity parties supporting the socialist government (dubbed the 'Contraption') and its adoption of an 'austerity by stealth' model. This book shows that it is possible to combine critical junctures and political stability, responsiveness and responsibility, through the study of one of the most intriguing cases in Southern Europe in the last decades. The Exceptional Case of Post-Bailout Portugal will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of Political Science and European Studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, South European Society and Politics.

The Exceptional Case of Post-Bailout Portugal: A Comparative Outlook

Elisabetta De Giorgi

and José Santana-Pereira

ABSTRACT

The analysis explores government, party system and political attitudes as dimensions revealing Portugal’s exceptionalism during its post-bailout period (2015–19) vis-á-vis three other South European countries, Greece, Italy and Spain. It shows that government stability was greater in Portugal, no party system revolution took place and political trust recovered more quickly than in the other countries. In contrast, Portugal is not dissimilar from the other cases regarding the prevalence of populist attitudes, even though populist actors did not achieve electoral success before 2019. The article includes an update on political attitudes and government-opposition relations during the covid-19 pandemic and introduces the other articles in this collection.

The political landscape across Southern Europe has changed remarkably in recent years. Amidst the shockwaves created by the Great Recession, South European countries first went through a phase of electoral epidemic (Bosco & Verney 2012) as a consequence of economic recession, popular protest, and a steady erosion of support for governing parties. This was followed by a phase of government epidemic (Bosco & Verney 2016), with longer processes of government formation, new parties joining government coalitions and, in some cases, the need to repeat elections. In a nutshell, the last decade has allowed us to witness South European governments being ousted from power, critical elections questioning the structure of (more or less) consolidated party systems, and new challengers making their triumphal entrance onto the political and parliamentary stage (Hobolt & Tilley 2016; Vidal 2018).

The extant literature has devoted a considerable amount of attention to the electoral and government woes of Southern Europe and their short-term and long-term consequences.¹ More concretely, a series of scientific works have explored political changes during the so-called austerity period.² Within this literature, Portugal is often depicted as an exceptional case in Southern Europe, as the only country in which there was significant continuity with pre-crisis political dynamics both during and after the 2011–2014 bailout period.³ Most of the specialised literature notes that the political changes that took place in Greece, Italy and Spain were indeed much more profound than in Portugal.⁴ However, albeit with some exceptions (e.g. Fernandes, Magalhães & Santana-Pereira 2018; De Giorgi & Cancela 2019; Lisi, Freire & Tsatsanis 2020), the specific analysis of the Portuguese case generally stops with the formation of the Socialist government led by António Costa in late 2015 and has not covered more recent developments.

This collection of articles aims to fill this gap by testing whether the main patterns of Portuguese exceptionalism endured in the post-bailout period (2015–2019) and identifying the most distinctive features. Our goal is to contribute to this body of scholarly work by offering an up-to-date and systematic analysis of the main electoral and governmental patterns in Portugal from 2015 to the legislative election of 2019 – to which we devote one specific article – and the victory of the incumbent Socialists. This in-depth analysis allows us to fully understand whether bailout and austerity were a ticking time bomb that was running a bit slow, with its political consequences only becoming visible some years later due to the inertia of the Portuguese political system, or if the post-bailout period is indeed also marked by a great deal of continuity.

In this collection of articles, we explore the argument that Portugal during its post-bailout period also presents distinct patterns vis-à-vis other South European countries: namely, Greece, which was still under a bailout until 2018; Italy which did not have a bailout; Spain which was in a post-bailout period but only had a bank (not a sovereign) bailout. The four research articles that follow show that a number of factors combine to make Portugal a stimulating case study – namely, the stability of its party system (and of the mainstream parties’ electoral support in particular); the nature of the demand side of populism in the country and its mismatch with the supply side; the successful union between left-wing anti-austerity parties supporting the government, which granted António Costa’s first cabinet considerable stability; and the remarkable business-as-usual nature of the 2019 election, despite the entry of three new political parties to parliament. The collection therefore offers the academic community a comprehensive analysis of these trends in the Portuguese post-bailout period.

In this introductory article, we identify and explore three dimensions in which similar patterns can be seen in three South European countries – Greece, Italy and Spain – but not in Portugal. These dimensions are related with both the dynamics of supply and demand in the electoral arena (party systems and political attitudes of the citizenry) and its output (government). South European countries have followed similar paths in all these areas since the onset of the crisis, but Portugal appears to be a deviant case in both the bailout and post-bailout scenario.

The article is organised as follows. The next three sections provide a comparative analysis of government, party systems and political attitudes in Southern Europe, with a focus on post-bailout Portugal. This analysis is enriched with literature and data focusing on the Great Recession period. Following this, we present an overview of political attitudes and the government-opposition relationship during the first phase of the covid-19 pandemic in Southern Europe, another unexpected context in which Portugal has showed a certain degree of exceptionalism. Finally, we discuss how the articles in this collection link to the discussion on Portugal’s distinctiveness. The article concludes with a series of lessons learned about Portugal’s exceptionalism in the post-bailout period and a brief reflection on the reasons behind this status.

Eppur (non) si muove: governmental stability in post-bailout Portugal

It is well known that the government sphere was significantly affected by the economic and political events that followed the onset of the financial crisis that shook Southern Europe from 2009. The ‘political cost of the crisis, which had initially affected the national party systems, seems to have passed to the government level, shaking the process of government formation, changing the identity of incumbents and, ultimately, undermining the stability of the executives’ (Bosco & Verney 2016, p. 383). Until 2015, the situation of Italy and Greece diverged significantly from that of Spain and Portugal. In fact, the governments of all four countries resigned in 2011 but, in Italy and Greece, this was followed by the alternation of several government solutions: first, a technocratic executive in Italy and a technocratic Prime Minister (PM) with a three-party cabinet in Greece (Verney & Bosco 2013), then earthquake elections leaving traditional governing parties with significantly reduced electoral support while challenger parties were successful, and, finally, a number of unstable executives.

In Greece, a short-lived coalition government led by a technocrat Prime Minister from November 2011 to May 2012 was followed by two elections in less than two months (Teperoglou & Tsatsanis 2014) and two cabinets in less than three years (Table 1). Prior to the crisis, Greece had had a long tradition of alternation in power between two parties, namely the centre right ND (Νέα Δημοκρατία – New Democracy) and the centre left PASOK (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα – Panhellenic Socialist Movement). In Italy, the Monti technocratic government lasted from late 2011 until the end of the legislature. In the February 2013 election, both the centre left and centre right coalitions ended up losing millions of voters, while a political force with no previous parliamentary experience, the M5S (Movimento 5 Stelle – Five Star Movement), secured about 25 per cent of votes (Baldini 2013). These results made the formation of a new government very difficult and eventually led to the establishment of an executive supported by a grand coalition formed by the mainstream parties that had previously been competing for power amongst themselves (Bull & Pasquino 2018). While no election was called until the end of the legislature in 2018, three cabinets alternated in office.

Table 1. Elections and governments in Southern Europe, 2011–2014 and 2015–2019

	NUMBER OF ELECTIONS		NUMBER OF NEW GOVERNMENTS
	2011–14	2015–19	2011–14	2015–19	CABINETS	INCUMBENT PARTIES
PORTUGAL	1	2	1	3	Passos Coelho I (21 June 2011–30 October 2015) Passos Coelho II (30 October-10 November 2015) Costa I (26 November 2015–26 October 2019) Costa II (26 October 2019-)	PSD, CDS-PP PSD, CDS-PP PS PS
GREECE	2	3	3	4	Papademos (11 Novem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Exceptional Case of Post-Bailout Portugal: A Comparative Outlook
• 2 How to Combine Public Spending with Fiscal Rigour? ‘Austerity by Stealth’ in Post-Bailout Portugal (2015-2019)
• 3 Party System Renewal or Business as Usual? Continuity and Change in Post-Bailout Portugal
• 4 Demand without Supply? Populist Attitudes and Voting Behaviour in Post-Bailout Portugal
• 5 In the Shadow of the ‘Government of the Left’: The 2019 Legislative Elections in Portugal
• Index