Portugal’s PM Urges Centrist Unity Behind Mendes to Block Populists

A week and a half before Portugal elects its next head of state, the campaign took an unexpected turn: the Prime Minister personally urged voters on the centre-right and centre-left to rally around just one contender, Luís Marques Mendes, to stop what he called a “run-off of populists.” The appeal has split the field, energised opponents and reignited Portugal’s long-running debate over so-called voto útil – the strategic concentration of ballots behind a single favourite.

Key take-aways at a glance

• Montenegro calls for a single, centrist vote on 4 January, warning that scattered ballots could hand extremists the initiative.

• Marques Mendes welcomes the endorsement but insists he is not “the Government’s candidate.”

• Rivals from Chega to Iniciativa Liberal accuse the Prime Minister of manipulation and claim the move signals weakness.

• Political scientists note that similar appeals have produced majority victories – and later disappointments – since the 1990s.

Why this matters for Portugal’s crowded January ballot

Portugal heads to the polls on 18 January with a record field that stretches from radical left to far-right. Under the Constitution, the presidency is non-partisan yet wields a crucial veto and dissolution power. In this landscape, even a few percentage points redirected by a “vote-pooling” message can decide whether the race ends on election night or drags into a costly second round.

The Prime Minister’s calculated intervention

Luís Montenegro, who also leads the Social Democrats (PSD), chose Aveiro as the backdrop for his plea. Flanked by mayors from the AD coalition, he looked straight into the cameras and asked “moderate socialists, liberals, social-democrats and Christian-democrats” to vote as one. “Otherwise,” he warned, “Portugal could wake up with two populist finalists.” Never before had a sitting Prime Minister used such stark language in a presidential dispute – a role traditionally kept above day-to-day politics.

Marques Mendes walks a tightrope

The former PSD chairman and TV pundit called the speech “absolutely correct,” arguing that a “fragmented centre only feeds extremism and experimentation.” Yet in the same breath, he rejected being labelled a government mouthpiece: “I will not be Belém’s branch office of São Bento,” he said, invoking the country’s two seats of power. Campaign aides stress that Mendes still courts voters beyond the centre-right, hoping to peel moderates away from Socialist-backed António José Seguro.

Rivals cry foul – and sense opportunity

• Henrique Gouveia e Melo said the intervention tried to turn the president into a “marionette.”

• André Ventura (Chega) framed it as “fear dressed up as strategy.”

• João Cotrim Figueiredo from the Liberal camp argued the plea proves Marques Mendes cannot galvanise the AD electorate on his own.

Socialist hopeful Seguro kept his distance, though party insiders quietly welcome any narrative that paints the PSD as anxious.

The long shadow of “voto útil”

Historians can list multiple elections where appeals to “useful voting” tipped the scales – 2002 for Durão Barroso, 2005 for José Sócrates and, more recently, 2022 when António Costa secured an unexpected absolute majority. Each episode delivered short-term clarity but eventually bred disillusion among voters who felt they had traded conviction for expediency. Political scientist Pedro Magalhães notes that in presidential contests, where party ties are looser, the tactic’s success is far from guaranteed.

What happens next

With televised debates still ahead and no reliable polling on how the electorate perceives Montenegro’s gambit, strategists on all sides are watching early-voting numbers for clues. If centre votes coalesce, Portugal could crown its president on the first ballot for the fourth consecutive time. If not, a bruising February run-off between two very different visions of the republic awaits.

Either way, the episode has already reshaped the campaign narrative: a Prime Minister ready to gamble his political capital, a veteran candidate balancing gratitude with independence, and challengers eager to turn resistance into momentum.