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Andre Ventura, the leader of the party, is casting his vote to elect the new Prime Minister of Portugal at the Parque das Nacoes school in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 10, 2024. Pre-election polls are indicating that the Democratic Alliance (AD) is the likely winner of the legislative elections.
Winning isn’t everything in Lisbon
Portugal’s election over the weekend had two winners.
The mathematical winner: the center-right Democratic Alliance, which took 79 seats in the 230-seat Parliament, eking out a narrow victory over the left-leaning incumbents of the Socialist Party, with 77.
The zeitgeist winner: the far-right Chega party, which quadrupled its seats to 48. Chega, which means “Enough!” is fiercely anti-immigration and has adopted the “God, Country, Family, and Work” slogan of Portugal’s former dictatorship.
The trouble is that those two winners can’t work together. DA leader Luis Montenegro has ruled out a coalition with Chega which, despite its strong performance, carries the stigma of the country’s fascist past.
That leaves Portugal in its most fragmented and uncertain political state since the end of the dictatorship.
But this isn’t the first time in recent months that a European far-right party has found itself unable to use its kingmaker’s powers. Precisely the same thing happened in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV party was popular enough to sing at the polls, but too toxic to enter government.
As the EU heads towards European Parliamentary elections, bear this in mind – the recent “resurgence of the right” in Europe is more nuanced than it looks.
People wait for Socialist Party (PS) Secretary General Pedro Nuno Santos to arrive for a campaign rally ahead of the snap elections in Afurada, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, March 4, 2024.
Portugal election after corruption scandal fuels far-right
“A good place to stash books. Or to stash 75,800 euros." So reads a bold IKEA bookcase ad with a wink to the scandal of that amount of cash being discovered in books in Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa's office. That tells you everything you need to know about the country’s election this Sunday.
Portugal’s vote is all about corruption, and we think IKEA’s marketing team deserves a raise.
The discovery brought down the center-left government and fueled the hard-right populist party, Chega, which is expected to double its seats thanks to voters disenchanted with mainstream political parties. One of Western Europe’s poorest countries, Portugal has shifted right due to economic malaise over stagnated wages and inflation.
The center-right Democratic Alliance is expected to win the most votes but fall short of a parliamentary majority, positioning Chega as the kingmaker of the right-wing coalition.
The historical irony: The election takes place on the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that swept away the right-wing dictatorship that had kept the country in shackles for four decades.
Chega’s rising popularity is a sign that Portugal may not be immune to rising populism across Europe, which is expected to result in major gains for the far-right in European elections in June.
A harvester carries coca leaves on his back in a coca plantation. He has put in half a day for this. For each 12-kilo sack, he receives the equivalent of about $1.50. A worker can harvest about 20 bags of coca leaves a day.
Hard Numbers: Colombia sees coca boom, Denmark sends museum pieces to Ukraine, World Food Program warns of “doom loop”, a river of wine flows in Portugal
6: In order to fulfill its promises to send Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine, Denmark had to pull half a dozen of the Cold War-era classics from local military history museums. The tanks in museum collections were found to be in better condition than those in Danish army storage.
24 million: The United Nations World Food Program has warned of a “doom loop” of global hunger as it faces a 60% budget shortfall this year. Unless the WFP can make up the deficit, some 24 million people around the world could fall into emergency hunger situations as the program can no longer provide for them.
600,000: Two wine tanks at the Levira Distillery in São Lourenço do Bairro, Portugal burst open, flooding the village with enough red wine to fill a 600,000 gallon Olympic-sized swimming pool. Local authorities managed to divert the torrent into an empty field before it reached the nearby Certima River - no word yet from local field mice on how they like the vintage.
10 billion: As part of its landmark antitrust case against Google, the US Justice Department says Google spends $10 billion every year to unfairly maintain its status as the internet’s most widely used search engine. The trial opened in Washington, DC on Tuesday and is expected to go on through the winter.
Israeli protesters demonstrate against the right-wing government outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.
Hard Numbers: “Anarchy” in Israel, Michigan State University shooting, the plight of Black mothers and babies, alleged abuses in Portuguese Catholic Church, the new promised land for Scotch
90,000: As Israel’s Knesset began a contentious debate over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms on Monday, a whopping 90,000 people hit the streets of Jerusalem to protest against the measures, with another 100,000 joining demonstrations nationwide. Netanyahu accused his opponents of “pushing the country to anarchy.” Here’s more from GZERO on the back story.
3: At least three people were killed, and five injured, when a gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Monday night. The assailant then turned the gun on himself. It is the latest in a string of mass shootings on college campuses and schools across the country in recent years.
87: New data on US childbirths shows that, even when correcting for income, Black mothers and their babies fare worse than white ones. The infant mortality rate for rich Black mothers is 87 points higher than that for poor White mothers, according to a decade-long study, which was conducted in California.
4,815: A new report commissioned by the Portuguese Catholic Church alleges that its priests and other authority figures sexually abused at least 4,815 children over the past seven decades. The investigating commission says this number is merely the “tip of the iceberg.” But under Portuguese law, only 25 of those cases are recent enough to be prosecuted.
219 million: India is now the world’s leading importer of Scotch by volume, taking in 219 million bottles of the stuff last year. An increase of some 60% over 2021 helped to push India past France for the top spot. Still, billion-strong India remains a tiny part of the global scotch market — the industry hopes that a long-awaited UK-India trade deal could help to crack things open more.With electric bills soaring, should the EU cap natural gas prices?
Energy prices in the EU have skyrocketed since Russia invaded Ukraine. This week, the cost of electricity across the bloc reached 10 times the decade-long average — mainly due to surging gas prices as a result of Moscow cutting natural gas supplies as payback for sanctions.
As consumers feel the pinch, EU leaders are now under intense pressure to do something to tame runaway energy costs. One way is putting a cap on gas prices for electricity.
How would that work? One proposal, floated by Italian PM Mario Draghi, is a bloc-wide ceiling on the price of Russian gas bought by EU energy companies.
That would wipe out Vladimir Putin's main leverage over Europe in one fell swoop, but also risks the Kremlin turning off the tap completely. (Russian energy giant Gazprom shut down Wednesday the Nord Stream 1 pipeline serving Germany for three days, citing highly suspicious maintenance work.)
The more popular — and populist — option is capping the price of gas from any country used to generate electricity, which is getting a lot of buzz in Brussels these days. EU governments would pay energy firms the difference between that cieling and the higher market price of gas, so companies don't have to pass on the cost to consumers.
Whatever Putin does, price-capping fans argue, come winter ordinary Europeans would be able to keep the lights on and their homes warm.
The price cap is a short-term political gambit that gives EU leaders some breathing room to diversify away from Russian gas without the political backlash from Europeans struggling to pay their electric bills, says Raad Alkadiri, managing director for energy at Eurasia Group.
Brussels, he adds, is desperate to kick its Russian gas habit, but EU member states need more time to import and store enough LNG from alternative sources like Algeria or Qatar. And in the future, the bloc hopes that more renewables in the energy mix should reduce the EU's overall reliance on gas for electricity.
A gas price cap targeting consumers is already in place since June in Spain and Portugal, which got the green light from Brussels to pilot the system. So far so good, but the Iberian Peninsula doesn't buy much Russian gas and is somewhat disconnected from the broader EU wholesale market (although this would change if France agrees to build a pipeline to Germany under the Pyrenees).
Still, it's unclear if an EU-wide cap would need sign-off from all member states, and in any case, extending the Iberian scheme to the entire bloc might have some unintended consequences.
For one thing, artificially “cheap” gas could actually encourage Europeans to consume more gas barely a month after EU member states painstakingly agreed to “voluntarily” cut gas consumption by 15% until April 2023 to avoid winter rationing. More demand will push prices up, and over time make the subsidy unsustainable for cash-strapped governments.
What's more, two of the governments pushing the hardest for an EU-wide cap — Italy and Spain — are already highly indebted, and would get even deeper into the red if they borrow more money to shield their citizens from sky-high electric bills if the war drags on.
For another, this could all throw a wrench into EU plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. For those against the price cap, it’s as much a subsidy for consumers as it is for fossil fuels, and public funds would be better spent on accelerating the renewables transition.
"The cost of diversifying away from Russian gas is really expensive," Alkadiri says. But if you're an EU government, he adds, you must choose between making consumers pay or picking up the tab yourself. And while you might style yourself as fiscally responsible, the last thing you want is to face angry voters who feel they’ve become poorer — and might force you to let Putin get away with murder in Ukraine.
"Russia is sitting there, saying: you want cheap gas? We have it in droves. And you have all the infrastructure you need to get it. Europe is saying: yes, but that gives you political power over us. So we don't want your gas. We don't want to be dependent on you.”
A serviceman of the Russian Southern Military District's 150th Rifle Division looks through binoculars during a military exercise at Kadamovsky Range.
What We’re Watching: Ukraine updates, Qatari gas, North Korean missile tests, Rwanda-Uganda thaw, Portuguese election
Ukraine troops, talks, and TV. As Russia moved medical units to support its troops at the Ukrainian border — which the Pentagon assessed as a Cold War throwback — US President Joe Biden now says he’ll send a small contingent of American troops to Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, US lawmakers are working on a bipartisan “mother of all sanctions” bill that aims to preempt a Russian invasion. The UK, for its part, upped its game with more troop and air deployments of its own, as well as possible action against Russian oligarchs with London-based assets and connections to Vladimir Putin. On Monday, US diplomats will face off against the Russians at the UN Security Council, although Russia and its ally China will veto any measure they don’t like. As for bilateral diplomacy, the US formally rejected Russia’s demand that Ukraine be barred from NATO, but another round of talks with Moscow is likely. (By the way, don’t miss SNL’s take on Russian misinformation in the Ukraine crisis.)
Qatar’s energy diplomacy. With European countries like Germany worried about being cut off from Russian natural gas if Putin invades Ukraine, the emir of Qatar will arrive at the White House on Monday to offer a possible safety net. NATO has warned that Europe, which relies on Russia for a third of its gas supplies, needs to diversify its energy sources, fast. Washington agrees. That’s why the meeting, the first one-on-one between Joe Biden and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani will focus on rerouting energy shipments to Europe. Qatar is the world’s second-largest producer of liquified natural gas, but is already pumping at full capacity, mostly to Asia. Still, the Qataris are looking for a solution because that’ll allow them to punch even more above their tiny country's weight in global geopolitics. Beyond gas, Biden and al-Thani will also discuss the Iran nuclear talks and especially Afghanistan, where Doha is a big diplomatic player.
North Korean missile tests. North Korea conducted on Sunday its longest-range missile launch since 2017, and seventh test this month. The latest was an intermediate-range ballistic missile that Pyongyang claims can hit the US Pacific island of Guam, one step short of ICBMs that could reach the US mainland. Kim Jong Un’s playbook on brinkmanship is well-known: launch a weapon, make global headlines, grab American attention, then get concessions to wiggle out of a diplomatic stalemate on sanctions. But as he tightens his grip on a starving nation beset by COVID and decades of isolation, the timing is significant. Later this week, China, Pyongyang’s only major ally, is hosting the Beijing Winter Olympics. Is Kim trying to crash Xi Jinping’s party with his own parade? Also, in a sublime twist of irony which can be credited to the bureaucratic whims of international diplomacy, as well as the alphabetic order upon which it grants the position to countries, heavily-armed North Korea will chair the UN Conference on Disarmament for the next four weeks.
Bickering, borders and bottom lines. After a three-year closure that led to rising tensions and big economic losses on both sides, Rwanda plans to reopen its border with Uganda on Monday. Triggered by accusations of Rwandan espionage in Uganda and countercharges of Ugandan interference in Rwandan politics, the truce between the two African countries was reached by a mix of diplomacy and personnel reshuffling. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni sent peace envoys — including his heir-apparent and son Lt. Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba — to negotiate personally with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame. He also removed his military intelligence chief, who had chafed Kigali for years. Uganda is almost four times more populous and ten-fold the size of its southern neighbor. But the border closure hurt its exports more, and the failure of regional intervention compelled Kampala to negotiate a solution to the impasse.
Socialists win Portuguese election. The ruling center-left Socialist Party of PM António Costa won Portugal's legislative election on Sunday, with an unexpected outright majority of seats to form a government. In other big election night news, the far-right Chega (Enough) party secured almost 9 percent of the vote, becoming the third-largest force in parliament. The result gives a big boost to Costa, who just four months ago failed to push through his 2022 budget because the leftist parties that backed his government voted against it, forcing the president to call a snap election. Once he gets his spending plans approved, the PM will be able to tap into the 16.6 billion euros ($18.7 billion) allocated to Portugal by the EU's pandemic recovery fund. COVID battered the country's tourism-dependent economy, but under Costa’s watch it has bounced back to pre-pandemic levels — thanks in no small part to one of the EU's highest per capita vaccination rates.
What We’re Watching: West dents Russian gas leverage, Honduran president sworn in, Portuguese vote
Nord Stream 2 used as a bargaining chip with Russia. The US now says that if Russia invades Ukraine, it’ll block the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is set to transfer even more natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea. This is a big deal, considering that Germany – thirsty for more Russian gas – has long been pushing for the pipeline to start operating despite ongoing objections from Washington. The $11 billion energy project, which would double Russian gas exports to Germany, is seen as (a big) part of the reason why Berlin is reluctant to push back hard against the Kremlin over its troop buildup at the Ukrainian border. Still, German officials admit Nord Stream 2 could face sanctions if the Russians invade, suggesting that the Americans’ threat was likely coordinated with Berlin in advance. This comes amid ongoing diplomatic attempts to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis, with US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz set to meet at the White House on February 7.
Castro’s challenges in Honduras. Honduras on Thursday inaugurated its first female president. Xiomaro Castro is a 62-year-old democratic socialist and wife of former president José Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a military coup in 2009. But she assumes office in the middle of a dispute within her own party over congressional roles that could make it hard for her to pass legislation. Several international heavyweights flew in for the ceremony in one of Central America’s poorest countries. US Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s been charged with the very daunting task of addressing the root causes of migration to the US from the Northern Triangle, attended as a sign of solidarity. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai also flew into Tegucigalpa to shore up Taiwanese support for Honduras as it tries to challenge Beijing’s expanding influence across Latin America. (Castro previously said that she might cut off ties with Taipei to bolster economic cooperation with Beijing.)
Portuguese vote. Portugal goes to the polls on Sunday, more than three months after the president was forced to call a snap election over failure to pass the 2022 budget. The ruling center-left Socialist Party of PM António Costa is now slightly ahead in the polls of the Social Democrats, the main opposition center-right party. Meanwhile, the far-right Chega party could become the third-largest parliamentary force after benefiting from some Portuguese blaming leftist parties for forcing an election amid the pandemic. Costa has made it easy for Portuguese to vote early to avoid crowds amid the omicron wave, but turnout is still expected to be low. Whatever the outcome, it's unlikely either of the two main parties will win a majority of seats. This means one of them will need to abstain for the other to take power, or call a second election. That would be very bad news for Portugal, which has so far been one of the EU's most politically stable countries and one of the bloc's economic success stories since the euro and sovereign debt crisis almost a decade ago.
What We're Watching: Israel finally gets a budget, US expands vax mandate, Portugal elections loom
Israel's political breakthrough. Israel's government has passed a budget for the first time in more than three years. This might sound boring, but it's actually a big deal: for years, former PM Benjamin Netanyahu refused to do it for political reasons, resulting in a lengthy stalemate with four divisive elections in just two years. Getting it done is a big win for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who managed to get his ideologically-diverse coalition of eight parties to agree on the 2021 budget. Failure to pass it by November 14, as per the coalition deal, would have resulted in yet another election, likely a death knell for the current government which only came together this summer at the eleventh hour. The bill includes $10 billion for Arab communities over five years demanded by Mansour Abbas, head of Ra'am, an independent Arab party that serves in the coalition. For now, Bennett and his main partner, the centrist Yair Lapid, are proving wrong the naysayers who warned that the diverse coalition was doomed to collapse. Negotiations now continue over next year's budget ahead of the March 2022 deadline, but passing the 2021 budget has made a fresh vote — and Netanyahu's dream of returning to power — even less likely.
Joe Biden's New Year's vaccination mandate. In a bid to boost slowing vaccination rates in the US, the Biden administration has ordered that workers at all companies with more than 100 employees around the country must be fully vaccinated by January 4 or submit to weekly COVID testing. The order will apply to more than 80 million workers, according to the AP, and will include exemptions for medical or religious reasons. Companies that fail to comply will face fines of up to $14,000 per violation, though it's not clear exactly how the Feds plan to enforce the measure at every one of the thousands of companies affected nationwide. At the moment, 58 percent of US adults are vaccinated, a figure that trails other large democracies such as the EU (75 percent), Japan (73 percent), the UK (68 percent). Even Brazil, which had a lousy start to the vaccine rollout, has now surpassed the US in first doses. The new mandate will likely boost the US numbers, but it's also certain to further inflame the political polarization around vaccine mandates. Although a recent Gallup poll showed 58 percent of Americans support a mandate for companies with 100 employees or more, the split was sharply partisan: only 17 percent of Republicans agree with the idea.