How do you win a presidential election and not get elected president?
Presidential election 2026
If you missed my last politics post, it might be worth taking a look before diving into this one. It sets the stage for what you’re about to read by outlining the duties and responsibilities of the Portuguese president and prime minister.
Portuguese citizens around the world will go to the polls tomorrow (Sunday, January 18) to elect a new President of the Republic. Barring any unforeseen and/or tragic circumstances, he (and it will be a he) will serve a five-year term and will be eligible to run for re-election in 2031.
In all likelihood, however, the name of the new president won’t be known until the second Sunday in February. Why? Let’s dive a little deeper and find out.
How does one run for president of Portugal?
Anyone can say they’re going to run for president of Portugal. The first step in the process is to register online as a “pre-candidate” for the office. As of this writing, 43 people were listed on the online portal, which closed to new entries on December 18. Moving from “pre-candidate” to candidate, though, takes a bit more work than sitting behind a keyboard.
The next step is to formalize your candidacy to the Constitutional Court for review. The deadline for this is 30 days prior to the election. Interested parties must hand over a variety of paperwork - documenting citizenship, age, and status as a registered voter; indicating profession and residence in Portugal for communication purposes; a criminal record certificate; a declaration of assets, income and interests; and, perhaps most challenging, the names of 7,500 to 15,000 “nominators,” registered voters who support their candidacy. These nominators’ signatures are validated by the court - they must include a Portuguese identification number and no nominator can appear on more than one candidate’s list.
It’s common for some pre-candidates to not actually submit all of the paperwork and, occasionally, some of those who do to fail to meet the requirements.1 In this election cycle, a record 14 pre-candidates formalized their candidacy with the court. (The previous high for this step had been 13 in 2006.) Of those 14, three candidates did not meet the requirements, leaving 11 eligible to be elected president, also a record. (The previous high for this step was 10 in 2016.) Because I stumbled on it and think it’s cool, here’s the link to the actual Constitutional Court’s ruling.
While the reviews are taking place, there is a random draw held to determine the order in which candidates will be listed on the paper ballots for the election. Likely due to the need to start printing millions and millions of those ballots, this draw can happen before candidates have been accepted and sometimes leads to ballots offering ineligible candidates.
This year’s ballots will list 14 candidates.23
The election
Why the record number of candidates for this election? It’s hard to say for sure but it seems probable that the lack of an incumbent is one factor - President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has served two consecutive terms and cannot be elected to another for at least five years; 2016, the year of the previous record number of candidates, was the last time there was no incumbent. Presidents have traditionally been among the most popular of all Portuguese elected officials.4 In fact, since the start of the Third Portuguese Republic in 1976, every president has been re-elected and served two terms.5 Portugal has had a new president every ten years. It’s been quite orderly.
It’s also possible that people see Portugal as being at a historical inflection point and this election as an important one. The country has been tacking to the right politically since the founding of the Chega party in 2019 and this will be the first presidential election since Chega broke through the two-party stranglehold on the system to become the second-largest seat-holder in the Assembly of the Republic. The president of Portugal is granted some significant abilities by the Portuguese constitution. Among other things, he can appoint or dismiss a Prime Minister, dissolve the Assembly of the Republic, and delay or challenge new laws passed by the legislature. If things are going smoothly, the president won’t need to use most of these powers. In a closely-divided assembly debating controversial legislation, the president becomes more important.
And maybe some people just want to get their name in the news.6 Who knows?
The 11 accepted candidates range in age from 38 to 68, though seven are 62+. Ten are men, four are listed as independents, and three have never held a political office before.
Earlier, I mentioned that the new president likely won’t be unveiled until February 8. That’s because the constitution mandates that the winner of a presidential election receive more than 50% of the votes cast. In elections where nobody exceeds that threshold, a runoff election between the top two vote getters is held three weeks after the first round. The winner of the runoff becomes president.
It’s remarkable that since the institution of this system in 1976 there has only been one runoff. That occurred in 1986 after a five-way race. Even in 2016 when there were 10 candidates, Rebelo de Sousa took 52% of the votes. Clearly it’s not the number of candidates that matters but their appeal.
Polling in this year’s election cycle suggests that this race is wide open. It’s a virtual certainty that there will be a runoff on February 8. The only question is Who will be in it?
There are five candidates with a realistic chance at a top two spot tomorrow. In alphabetical order by first name (all candidate photos culled carefully from their website, most pictures of their campaign billboards taken by us7), they are:
André Claro Amaral Ventura (Chega), the 42-year-old disruptor who founded a political party in 2019 and is now the opposition leader in the Assembly of the Republic. Ventura is a master at getting his name in the news and playing to his base. He seems to seek controversy and turns it to his advantage.
António José Martins Seguro (PS), 63, a former head of the Portuguese Socialist party who’s been out of politics since 2014.
Henrique Eduardo Passaláqua de Gouveia e Melo (independent), 65, retired Navy Admiral who most recently served as Chief of Naval Staff (the head of the Portuguese Navy) until stepping down in December 2024.
João Fernando Cotrim de Figueiredo (IL), former president of the IL party8 and currently serving as one of Portugal’s 21 representatives to the European Parliament, one of the European Union’s two legislative bodies.
Luís Manuel Gonçalves Marques Mendes (backed by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s center-right AD coalition), 68, the oldest candidate in the running and a former head of the PSD; currently a member of the Council of State, a high-level advisory body to the President of the Republic.
What’s at stake?
Five years is a long time, especially in the world today. The last Portuguese presidential election took place amidst a nation-wide lockdown due to COVID. Much has happened since. Think about where you were in January 2021, how much your life has changed between then and now.
The President of the Republic has been a position of stability for 50 years. And for the last 40, that president has come from either the center-left PS or the center-right PPD/PSD parties.
There’s a reason why there are five candidates polling evenly and why three of them are neither PS nor PPD/PSD. Those parties have both been disappointing lately.
There’s a reason why Chega is seeing such growth. There’s space for fresh voices and ideas.
Ventura has been cozying up to high-profile far-right European leaders like Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. Chega became the fourth member of the newly-formed European-wide right-wing alliance “Patriots for Europe” that is now the third-largest body in the European Parliament. Ventura spoke last February at the Make Europe Great Again conference in Madrid.9
He has said, “If elected President of the Republic, I will not be a figurehead or a ribbon-cutter; I will be interventionist and a head of state of action.”
The right-of-center parties in the Portuguese Assembly of the Republic have the necessary 2/3 majority to modify the constitution. Ventura has been pushing to do just that. Montenegro has been unwilling to make this a priority but needs to forge alliances to pass any legislation in his minority government.
There is recent bad blood between Ventura and Montenegro as well. Ventura was outspoken in his criticism of Montenegro during the scandal that ultimately brought down the government last March. And the prime minister sued Ventura, demanding that he remove billboards10 accusing him of corruption.
The campaign
Technically, the “campaign” for president lasts from the time the candidates are legitimized by the Constitutional Court until the election. Which is essentially 3+ weeks. Realistically, these folks have been going at it for months.
The earliest story lines involved what has been called “the worst-kept secret in national politics,” namely, whether or not Admiral Gouveia e Melo would run for president. He’d spent his entire life in the Portuguese Navy, serving mostly on submarines, and has never been elected to a political office. He rose to prominence as head of Portugal’s COVID-19 Vaccination Plan Task Force,11 which earned international acclaim for vaccinating 85% of Portuguese against the disease. Whispers that he might run for president started as early as 2021. He retired from active duty in December 2024 and, after a few months of “will he or won’t he,”12 announced his decision to seek the presidency on May 29, 2025.
Polling data suggests that Gouveia e Melo was wildly popular … before he became a candidate. In fact, he was the runaway favorite to win with consistent double-digit leads in what was basically a two-man contest with Marques Mendes until he actually entered the race. His lead dropped precipitously in June/July 2025 and his support has slowly eroded from there.
Since November, the race has tightened considerably and three other contenders have surged into viability.
Removing the highest and lowest value for each candidate to mitigate the outliers, the things that jump out at me as I pore over these numbers from November on are:
Ventura has the most consistent level of support; his base is loyal and will turn out for him
Cotrim and Seguro have the late momentum which seems to be coming at the expense of Marques Mendes more than Gouveia e Melo, whose support seems to be leveling off
Seguro, Ventura, and Cotrim are all comfortably within the margin of error on the most recent polls
For those who prefer graphs to numbers, here you go:
Even the prediction experts have been pointing in different directions the last couple of weeks.
Though they’re starting to zero in on a Seguro-Ventura top two.
Observador tracker
Estimador tracker
Kalshi betting odds
With 35% of the voters still undecided, though, it’s hard to know what will happen tomorrow.
A tiny focus group
I was at the gym last week and I don’t remember how it came up but I asked my trainer du jour, Zé (a common Portuguese nickname for José), if he’s planning to vote in the election. He is. Zé’s a pretty chatty guy so it didn’t take much for me to learn the following…
He’s torn between Marques Mendes and Cotrim. He likes Cotrim because he connects better with younger voters. (Zé is 28.) Marques Mendes is more of a centrist, though, and has a high position in the government now which is important. Zé likes some of Ventura’s ideas but thinks he’s “a little bit crazy.” I asked what he thought of Gouveia e Melo and he said he was interested at first but as he watched some of the (28!) televised debates,13 he didn’t like some of what he heard. (Editor note: Clearly, he was not alone.)
Zé was also operating under some interesting misconceptions. For example, he believes the president can only veto up to two bills per year, which is not true. He thinks a president who could just veto anything he didn’t like would be bad because even though the assembly can override a veto, “all parties would have to agree” which he believes would never happen. (As we discussed last time, it often takes merely a simple majority of the Assembly of the Republic to overturn a presidential veto, though it depends on the type of law in question.)
Zé thinks taxes need to be lower. Interestingly, he seemed to be approaching this from a corporate rather than a personal perspective. He says big companies can avoid paying taxes and smaller ones can’t afford them so it’s better to get less money from more companies. He gave an example of Prozis, a Portuguese-founded global nutritional supplement/fitness company, who he says moved its headquarters from Portugal to Spain because of taxes. While I didn’t spend hours hunting this down, what I was able to find suggests that Prozis continues to be incorporated in Portugal. Possibly because the owner benefits from some pretty substantial tax incentives. Zé also told me there is a 40% corporate tax on employee bonuses, which makes companies far less inclined than they would otherwise be to reward their top performers.14
Several days later, in an attempt to distract myself from the burning in my quads during an isometric exercise, I asked Zé if he’d decided yet who he was voting for. He had not, but he told me he’d gone back and watched some videos on Gouveia e Melo after our previous conversation. While this had helped to humanize the submariner, it didn’t sway Zé’s voting preference.
Zé then surprised me by asking the other trainer, Bernardo, who he’s planning to vote for.
Bernardo is a Seguro supporter. The next 10-15 minutes saw a lively exchange between Bernardo, Zé, and Bernardo’s two clients, Margarida and another woman whose name I don’t know. It was, of course, in rapid-fire Portuguese and I was dealing with my own muscular fires so I didn’t follow most of it but I heard “Cotrim” and “Seguro” several times so I know it was about the election.
I’d love to hear from you
If you’ve read this far (thank you!) and you’re eligible to vote tomorrow, I’d love to hear your thoughts:
Do you plan to vote tomorrow? Why or why not?
What factors are most important to you when it comes to deciding who to vote for?
What qualities would you most like to see in the next president?
When did you make up your mind about who you would support?
What to watch for tomorrow
The results
In short, who are the top two and in what order do they finish?
For Ventura, just making the runoff would be significant. Finishing first would be a huge milestone. While polls suggest he would lose handily in a two-way race against any likely opponent on February 8, winning a presidential election a mere seven years after being his party’s only member in the legislature would be remarkable. Only 42, he could have a long political life ahead of him.
And let’s not overlook Cotrim here. A spot in the runoff would put his party on the map. The IL has been a fringe player since its founding in 2017. But Cotrim occupies a niche that might resonate with voters: he’s outside the Big Two parties, farther right politically than PPD/PSD, and not openly racist. He also has momentum on his side. Ventura almost certainly won’t win the runoff election but Cotrim could attract votes from Chega, Gouveia e Melo, and Marques Mendes supporters, especially if he’s up against Seguro in a 1:1 on February 8.
Big support for Seguro could signal a desire for a check on the right. Lots of votes for Marques Mendes could mean people are still gravitating to the Big Two parties.
The margin
The polling is really tight. It’s entirely possible that the difference between 2nd and 3rd place is small. Perhaps small enough to encourage calls for a recount. Recounts have happened in Portugal recently. It’s a possibility.
The reaction
How do the candidates respond to the results? Do the top two declare victory? Does the one who finishes third put up a fuss?
The turnout
Voter fatigue is a possibility; the Portuguese have been to the polls a lot lately. But this is an important election and I think people realize that. Ventura’s supporters will show up no matter what. The higher the turnout, the worse it is for him, though.
Which begs the question What can affect turnout? There’s always …
The weather
Nobody likes to stand in line.15 The possibility of standing in line in the cold and/or rain can keep some less-invested voters away from the polls. Could the weather play a role tomorrow? Here’s what the forecast says for Lisbon:
So who will be the next President of the Republic?
We won’t be able to anoint anyone tomorrow but we can be pretty sure it won’t be André Ventura regardless of whether or not he takes the top spot. While his supporters are loyal, they are a vocal minority. He’s a divisive figure.
Voters will coalesce around his opponent - some with more enthusiasm than others, of course - in the runoff.
If he does finish first, though, it would enable us to answer the question at the top of this post. He can claim he won a presidential election, but he won’t be elected president on February 8.
The most intriguing outcome tomorrow would be a Seguro-Cotrim top two. Cotrim might be able to give Seguro a run for his money in three weeks.
But we may never know.
That’s all for now.
Love from Lisbon,
Scott
In late 2020, André Ventura was notified by the Constitutional Court that his candidacy would not be accepted unless he indicated a profession on his application. He was given two days to address this omission, which he did. This year, his profession on the pre-candidate portal is listed as “jurista.”
Strangely, this marks the second consecutive presidential election where the candidate listed at the very top of the ballot is not actually eligible to be elected. In 2021, a guy named Eduardo Nelson de Costa Baptista said he would run and submitted a list of nominators to the Constitutional Court. His list included only 11 names, six of which were deemed invalid. Because the ballots had been printed before the court ruled him ineligible, his name appeared on them.
I don’t know about you, but I love, love, love that there are photos of the candidates right there on the ballot. I wonder how many people walk into the voting booth (do they have booths here?) and are like, “Who was I voting for again? Yeah, that one looks familiar!”
Rebelo de Sousa appears to be bucking that trend as his polling numbers have plummeted towards the end of his second term.
Only one president, Mário Soares, has attempted to run for a third term. Soares served from 1986-1996 and finished third in 2006 at the age of 81.
There’s a “satirical politician” in the running. Manuel João Vieira’s name has been in the mix for president in 2001, 2011, and 2016 but this is the first time he’s met the qualifications to be on the ballot. His slogan? “I’ll only give up if I’m elected” 😂
One prominent way candidates advertise is via billboard. They’re everywhere. And they help give an idea of what the politicians stand for. Some candidates have more messages than others.
We haven’t talked much about IL in any of our politics posts. It stands for Iniciativa Liberal or Liberal Initiative and, despite the connotations of the word “liberal” in US politics, this is more liberal in the classic sense of the word. Which is to say, generally to the right of the political center. Ideologically, the IL sits somewhere between center-right PPD/PSD and far-right Chega. It’s a small party, they only hold nine seats in the Assembly of the Republic (which, to be fair, does make them the 4th largest party in that body) and Cotrim - as he seems to go by on his website - was elected its head with a mere 181 votes. It’s also a new party, founded in 2017, just two years before Ventura founded Chega. The IL elected its first member to the Assembly, Cotrim, in 2019.
Raise your hand if you knew that was a thing. Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, me neither.
what else?
Members of which got (get?) to wear this very cool patch on their uniforms.
Really it was more, “of course he will but when will he actually say so.”
Yes, this is yet another thing that there’s no real room for in the main article but is totally fascinating. RTP1, SIC, and TVI - the three main TV stations in Portugal, hosted a series of 1 on 1 debates between the 8 top candidates.
This, too, appears to be not entirely correct - though not necessarily that far off in some cases - if I’m reading the answer to question 8 of this document correctly.
Zé told me he votes at a school close to his home. Once inside the building, voters are directed to different rooms based on the first letter of their first names. Apparently there aren’t as many “J” names as there are “As” and “Ms” as he says he frequently breezes in and out of his room after a short wait only to see the Anas and Marias standing in the same places they were when he entered the building.
Well done! Thanks for this.
This is the kind of comparison I would like to see in the States. Especially for local elections. I rarely know anything about the people I am voting for.
Love you both. ❤️