


Portugal heads to the polls for the third time in barely three years
Can a political culture of compromise survive the turbulence?
IT IS AN election that almost nobody except the main party leaders wanted. But when the Portuguese vote on May 18th, for the third time in a little over three years, they face some important issues. One is whether they can engineer stable and decisive leadership to deal with the social dislocations accompanying a vigorous economic recovery from the grim years of austerity that followed the financial crisis of 2008. Another, common to many European countries, is whether they can preserve a habit of pragmatic consensus that in Portugal is under threat from Chega (”Enough!”), a fast-growing hard-right party. They will also decide how much importance they give to ethics in public life.
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This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “When enough is not enough ”

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