1979 Portuguese legislative election

← 1976 2 December 1979 1980 →
← outgoing members elected members →
All 250 seats in theAssembly of the Republic 126 seats needed for a majority
Registered	7,249,346 10.4%
Turnout	6,007,453 (82.9%) 0.6pp
First party Second party Third party   Leader Francisco Sá Carneiro Mário Soares Álvaro Cunhal Party PSD PS PCP Alliance AD APU Leader since 2 July 1978[a] 19 April 1973 14 April 1978 Leader's seat Lisbon Lisbon Lisbon Last election 115 seats, 40.9%[b] 107 seats, 34.9% 40 seats, 14.4% Seats before 110† 105† 34† Seats won 128 74 47 Seat change 18* 31* 13* Popular vote 2,719,208 1,642,136 1,129,322 Percentage 45.3% 27.3% 18.8% Swing 4.4pp 7.6pp 4.4pp
Vote winner strength by district Results by constituency. * Indicates seat change, so this is a nominal figure. †Notional 1976 results with the new seat distribution.
Prime Minister before election Maria de Lurdes Pintasilgo Independent Prime Minister after election Francisco Sá Carneiro PSD

The1979 Portuguese legislative election took place on 2 December. The election renewed all 250 members of theAssembly of the Republic, 13 seats less than those elected in 1976.

The 3 years prior to the election were very unstable withPrime MinisterMário Soares' government collapsing in August 1978 and being succeeded by three Presidential appointed governments, in which the first two also collapsed due to lack of Parliamentary support. In the summer of 1979,President of PortugalAntónio Ramalho Eanes dissolved Parliament and called an election for 2 December 1979 and, until the elections, the President nominatedMaria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, the first and still only woman to lead a government in Portugal, as prime minister.

In the elections, the right-wing parties, the Social Democratic Party, the Democratic and Social Center and the People's Monarchist Party united in the Democratic Alliance (Portuguese: Aliança Democrática or AD) under the leadership of Sá Carneiro won the election, receiving 45 percent of the votes and an absolute majority in seats. The Socialists lost more than 30 MPs and the Communists, now allied with the Portuguese Democratic Movement in the United People Alliance achieved their highest total ever, with almost 20 v of the voting.

Turnout dropped slightly to 82.6 percent, but the number of ballots cast surpassed 6 million.

In the last election, three and a half years before, in April 1976, the Socialist Party, under the lead ofMário Soares, won the elections and became the Prime-Minister of the1st Constitutional Government after the revolution.

However, the Government suffered several attacks and in December 1977, Soares lost a voting of confidence in Parliament, 159 to 100, as all Opposition parties, the Democratic and Social Center, the Social Democrats and the Communists united in order to vote against it, and so, the Soares' government fell. Soares would become Prime Minister again in January 1978, in coalition with the Democratic Social Center, but in July this party would force the end of the government due to disagreements about agrarian reforms. In August,Nobre da Costa became prime minister by personal decision ofPresidentRamalho Eanes, after a failed attempt to unite the parties on the Parliament. However, the program of Nobre da Costa's government was never approved and two months later, Nobre da Costa was replaced byMota Pinto who would govern with extreme difficulties for less than one year.

In July 1979, the President finally decided to dissolve the Parliament and call for a new election for December of the same year. Mota Pinto was replaced in the period between the dissolution and the election byMaria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, the first and still only woman to lead a government in Portuguese history.

The PSD suffered a lot of internal division after the 1976 election. The party was essential divided between those who want the party to pursue a more social democratic path, and those who want a more centrist to center-right approach, these aligned withFrancisco Sá Carneiro.^[1] Because of these disputes, Sá Carneiro leaves the leadership in November 1977, and is succeeded byAntónio Sousa Franco, who leads the party more to the left.^[2] But, internal divisions continue, and in June 1978, a group of 42 PSD MPs release the "Unpostponable Options" manifesto where they attack Sá Carneiro and reaffirm the Social Democratic path with the candidacy to theSocialist International.^[3] Sá Carneiro returns to the leadership in the 1978 July party congress and 37 PSD MPs leave definitely the party and form theIndependent Social Democratic Action (ASDI), which will merge with the PS a few years later.^[4]

A few months after the congress that reinstated Sá Carneiro in the party's leadership, the PSD, CDS and PPM reach an agreement to form theDemocratic Alliance, in order to contest the following elections.^[5]

TheAssembly of the Republic has 250 members elected to four-year terms. The total number of MPs was reduced to 250 from the previous 263, elected in 1976. Governments do not require absolute majority support of the Assembly to hold office, as even if the number of opposers of government is larger than that of the supporters, the number of opposers still needs to be equal or greater than 126 (absolute majority) for both the Government's Programme to be rejected or for amotion of no confidence to be approved.^[6]

The number of seats assigned to each district depends on thedistrict magnitude.^[7] The use of thed'Hondt method makes for a higher effective threshold than certain other allocation methods such as theHare quota orSainte-Laguë method, which are more generous to small parties.^[8]

For these elections, and compared with the 1976 elections, the MPs distributed by districts were the following:^[9]

District	Number of MPs	Map
Lisbon(–2)	56	15 6 38 6 4 15 10 5 12 6 11 12 56 4 5 17 5 9 5 5 2 2
Porto	38
Setúbal	17
Aveiro andBraga	15
Santarém(–1) andCoimbra	12
Leiria	11
Viseu(–1)	10
Faro	9
Castelo Branco(–1),Viana do Castelo(–1) andVila Real(–1)	6
Azores(–1),Beja(–1),Évora(–1),Guarda(–1) andMadeira(–1)	5
Bragança(–1) andPortalegre	4
Europe and Outside Europe	2

The table below lists the parties represented in theAssembly of the Republic during the first half of the 1st legislature (1976–1980), as this election was a national by-election, and that also contested the elections:

• In January 1977, MPsCarmelinda Pereira andAires Rodrigues were expelled from theSocialist Party caucus.^[11][12]
• In March 1977, MPCarlos Galvão de Melo left theDemocratic and Social Center caucus.^[13]
• In November 1977, MPsAntónio Lopes Cardoso,José Justiniano Pinto andReinaldo Rodrigues left theSocialist Party caucus due to disagreements with thegovernment led byMário Soares.^[14][15][16]
• On July 1979, 37 MPs from theSocial Democratic Party, led byAntónio de Sousa Franco andJoaquim Magalhães Mota, left the party and formed a new party, theIndependent Social Democratic Action, following a feud with PSD leaderFrancisco Sá Carneiro, in which was called the "Unpostponable Options" split, regarding the ideological path of the party.^[4]

Party or alliance				Votes	%	+/–	Seats	+/–
	Democratic Alliance[b]		Democratic Alliance[e]	2,554,458	42.52	—	121	—
			Social Democratic Party[f]	141,227	2.35	—	7	—
			Democratic and Social Centre[f]	23,523	0.39	—	0	—
		Total		2,719,208	45.26	+6.20	128	+13
	Socialist Party			1,642,136	27.33	–7.56	74	–33
	United People Alliance[g]			1,129,322	18.80	+4.41	47	+7
	Popular Democratic Union			130,842	2.18	+0.51	1	0
	Christian Democratic Party			72,514	1.21	+0.73	0	0
	Portuguese Workers' Communist Party			53,268	0.89	+0.23	0	0
	Left-wing Union for the Socialist Democracy			43,325	0.72	New	0	New
	Revolutionary Socialist Party			36,978	0.62	+0.23	0	0
	Workers' Party of Socialist Unity			12,713	0.21	New	0	New
	Portuguese Marxist–Leninist Communist Organization			3,433	0.06	New	0	New
Total				5,843,739	100.00	–	250	–13
Valid votes				5,843,739	97.27	+1.97
Invalid votes				120,851	2.01	–2.69
Blank votes				42,863	0.71
Total votes				6,007,453	100.00	–
Registered voters/turnout				7,249,346	82.87	–0.66
Source:Comissão Nacional de Eleições

• 
  Winner and seats by constituency.
• 
  Most voted political force bymunicipality.

• Comissão Nacional de EleiçõesArchived 2005-04-08 at theWayback Machine
• Centro de Estudos do Pensamento Político

• Politics of Portugal
• List of political parties in Portugal
• Elections in Portugal

• 1979 elections in Portugal
• Legislative elections in Portugal
• December 1979 in Europe

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