All across Portugal, cities and towns reverberated with the blare of loudspeakers and the roar of party rallies. Walls everywhere were plastered with posters peeling in the light spring rains. After three weeks of hard campaigning, as well as some bloodshed—at least three lives were lost in pre-election violence—some 5.4 million Portuguese went to the polls calmly, as if benumbed, to cast ballots in the nation's first free parliamentary elections in half a century. As they did a year ago, in elections for a Constituent Assembly, the returns suggested that if there was a consensus of any kind among Portugal's fractious electorate, it was against extreme politics of all shades.
None of the 14 parties competing for the 263 seats in the Assembly reached the 40% mark that might have provided a working majority. Although the two mainstream parties—the Socialists and the center left Popular Democrats—together polled almost 60% of the vote, the nation's increasingly polarized electorate also gave boosts to Communist and conservative forces. The chief results:
> The Socialists, with 35% of the vote, remained the strongest party, although they were down slightly from the 38% they polled last spring. Party strategists blamed the slippage on the popularity of the Communists' radical land-reform proposals among southern farmers and the hostility of right-wing refugees from Angola, who blame the Socialists for their part in the rapid decolonization there.
> The Popular Democrats were second with 23%, off from last year's 26%. Party Leader Francisco Sà; Carneiro's acerbic campaign attacks on opposition leaders seemed gratuitously harsh to many Portuguese and may have cost the party votes.
> The conservative Center Social Democrats (C.D.S.) were the big gainers, doubling their share of the vote from 7.6% last year to 16%. Although the C.D.S. won a majority in only one northern district, the party succeeded in edging out the Communists for third place in Portugal's political ladder and now considers itself a candidate for a role in the future government.
>The Communists, while running behind the C.D.S., managed to increase their share of the vote modestly from 12.5% to 15%. They did so by holding on to their small but ardent constituency in the Lisbon industrial belt and among the landless peasants in the southern rural district of Alentejo, while picking up new strength as a result of a decision by a Communist splinter party to withdraw from the election.
Seeking to make the most of the results, Communist Leader Alvaro Cunhal assessed the election as a "victory for the left," meaning a popular mandate for a coalition of Socialists and Communists. But Cunhal's rivals did not agree. Describing the vote as a clear rejection of the Communists, Sà Carneiro called for a coalition of center parties that would bar a role for Cunhal. Socialist Leader Mário Soares insisted that he would deal with no one and promised to try to form a minority government on his own.