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Portugal
Index
The history of the Socialist Party (Partido
Socialista--PS)
in Portugal dates back to the late nineteenth century.
Like the
PCP, it was persecuted and forced into exile by Salazar.
The
party was reestablished in 1973 in the Federal Republic of
Germany (West Germany) under the leadership of Mário
Soares, who
had opposed the regime as a young man and had been
imprisoned for
his political activities. Soares returned to Portugal a
few days
after the coup of April 25, 1974, and the PS began to
function
openly as a political party. It had both a moderate and a
militant wing, but the militancy was tempered by the
articulate
and politically shrewd Soares.
The PS, as one of the two largest parties in Portugal,
has
often formed governments. In the revolutionary situation
in 1974-
75, the socialists were looked on as the most viable
moderate
opposition to the PCP. The PS therefore received
considerable
foreign support, as well as domestic votes, that it might
not
otherwise have had. It regularly received about 28 to 35
percent
of the vote and was in power from 1976 to 1978 and in a
governing
coalition with the PSD from 1983 to 1985.
In power the PS followed a moderate, centrist program.
As the
Portuguese electorate became more conservative in the
1980s,
however, the party lost support. In the 1985 election, it
got
only 20.8 percent of the vote, although this percentage
improved
slightly in the 1987 national elections. The party won the
1989
municipal elections, but despite an impressive improvement
in the
1991 national election when it polled 29.3 percent of the
vote,
it still lagged far behind the PSD. Persistent leadership
problems since Soares left the party when he was elected
president in 1986 and inept campaigns were seen as causes
of the
party's secondary position in Portuguese politics. At
times the
disputes between the moderate and Marxist factions were
renewed,
but the party as a whole had moved far enough to the right
that
in the 1991 national election the PS had difficulty
distinguishing itself from the PSD on most major issues.
Data as of January 1993
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