Portugal Legislative election 2025 — Results

At a glance

The Portuguese legislative election of 18 May 2025 — the country's third in just over three years — confirmed the centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) in power and cemented the radical-right Chega as a permanent fixture of Portuguese politics. Luís Montenegro's AD won again and improved its position, but the headline shock was that Chega drew level with the Socialist Party (PS) and overtook it in seats, ending the PS's long-held status as one of the two natural parties of government.

The political system

As in every Portuguese general election, voters chose the 230-member Assembly of the Republic by D'Hondt proportional representation in 22 constituencies, with 116 seats required for a majority. The election followed the fall of Montenegro's first minority government in a confidence vote, after opposition parties pressed questions about a consultancy owned by the prime minister's family. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa once more dissolved parliament, sending an exhausted electorate back to the polls.

The campaign trail

Montenegro asked voters for a stronger mandate to govern, defending his record on tax cuts and arguing that only the AD could provide stability. The PS, now led by Pedro Nuno Santos, struggled to present a fresh case after losing office the previous year and was squeezed between the governing right and a resurgent Chega. André Ventura's Chega campaigned hard on immigration, crime and anti-corruption, expanding aggressively into southern and working-class areas that had once been Socialist or Communist strongholds. Iniciativa Liberal and Livre competed at the margins.

How the vote went

The AD won 31.80% and 91 seats, a gain of 11 but still short of a majority. In an extraordinary dead heat, the PS and Chega each took 22.8% of the vote — the PS narrowly ahead with 1,442,546 votes to Chega's 1,438,554 — yet Chega won 60 seats to the PS's 58, becoming the official second party and largest opposition. Iniciativa Liberal rose to nine seats, Livre to six, the CDU to three, and the Left Bloc, PAN and the Madeiran regionalists JPP took one each. Chega's geographic breakthrough was stark: it won four constituencies outright — Beja, Faro, Portalegre and Setúbal, all in the formerly left-leaning south — while the AD swept almost everywhere else and the PS was reduced to winning only Évora.

What followed

Montenegro formed a second AD minority government, again refusing any formal pact with Chega but now facing it as the principal opposition rather than the PS. The result marked a historic reordering of Portuguese politics: the post-1974 duopoly of PS and PSD had given way to a three-way contest in which the radical right held the balance, and the long-term consequences for the formation of stable governments remained an open question.

Compiled and reviewed from official results by ElectioMap. See our data methodology.