The president of Portugal, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, was re-elected this Sunday (24) in the first round of the elections, according to the results of the polls.
Former Socialist MP Ana Gomes came in second, ahead of far-right candidate André Ventura, as polls predicted.
The current head of state, a 72-year-old former law professor who became known as a political commentator on television, would have won between 55.5% and 62% of the vote, according to projections.
Ana Gomes would have obtained between 12.2% and 17.1% of the votes, she would therefore be ahead of André Ventura, third in the election, who would have between 9% and 14.1% of the votes.
In this way, the founder of the radical right-wing party Chega would not have achieved his goal of coming in second, but his result seems to confirm the advance of the far right in a country where this tendency was still something exceptional. .
The official results should be announced in the coming hours.
The abstention rate was between 50% and 60%, according to projections, against the record of 53.5% in 2011, when Rebelo de Sousa’s predecessor was re-elected.
Analysts feared greater abstention, up to 70%, due to the explosion of coronavirus cases in the country of 10 million people, who were subjected to general containment for ten days.
With 85,000 new cases and nearly 1,500 deaths in the week that ends, Portugal ranks first in the world in terms of number of cases relative to population, surpassed only by the British enclave of Gibraltar, according to official data obtained by AFP.