Thread by @alexandreafonso

A thread on why I think that the lessons to be learned from Portugal and the victory of Antonio Costa for the European left are quite limited (after reading this piece by @jonhenley) theguardian.com/world/2022/feb…

In a nutshell, Portuguese social democracy looks more like European social democracy's successful past than its successful future.

That's because the class structure of the Portuguese electorate looks a bit like the one of other West European countries a few decades ago (and like some CEE): a higher proportion of skilled and manual workers, the traditional electoral base of social democratic parties

You can see this especially clearly when you look at education, where Portugal has a very high proportion of voters with only compulsory schooling, and a small proportion of people with university degrees.

In the Netherlands or Germany, educated middle classes have partly transitioned to the Greens or other parties with liberal positions on values (e.g D66 in NL), weakening social democrats. In Portugal the size of these middle classes is still small.

Things are changing of course, and younger generations are much more educated, but few people abroad realise that more than half of the Portuguese born before 1960 (the generation of my parents) completed *less than 5 years of full-time education*

If you have that kind of electorate, politics is still to a large extent about bread-and-butter economic issues: minimum wages, healthcare, old age pensions (issues in which social democrats are strong) and less about issues like the environment, or immigration.

Compared to other countries, the salience of immigration in Portugal is still low. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Again, things change, and the radical right has made a breakthrough. Here I analysed the drivers of the vote shares of Chega in the presidential election last year.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

IL, PAN or Livre are perhaps similar to the kind of parties (Greens, D66) that educated middle classes elsewhere vote for, but their social base in Portugal is still small. Here the relationship between % IL and % with university degrees across Portuguese parishes (n=3000)

When they grow, in a PR system, they will probably eat out some of the PS electorate like elsewhere. It's a question of time.

Some of these points are already made in this excellent article by @PCMagalhaes socialeurope.eu/portugal-socia…

Pedro links to an article I wrote with @FabioBulfone which notably looks at the class structure of the Portuguese electorate, with some evidence on how this social structure also shapes politics. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…