2005 Portuguese legislative election

Deep disagreements and disputes within the Social Democratic Party began to derail the government led by Pedro Santana Lopes.^[3] One of those disputes, the resignation of Youth and Sports Minister, Henrique Chaves, which was a close ally of Santana, precipitated the fall of the government, as Chaves accused Santana of not being "loyal and truthful".^[4] Following this, President Jorge Sampaio had "enough" of crisis and accused the government of "contradictions and lack of coordination that contributed to its discredit".^[5] Therefore, Sampaio used his power of dissolution of Parliament and called a snap election, the only time till date such power was used in Portuguese democracy.^[6][7] A new election was called, by the President, for February 2005.^[8]

Following the resignation of José Manuel Durão Barroso as Prime Minister and PSD leader to become President of the European Commission, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) initiated the process to elect a new leader.^[9] Pedro Santana Lopes, by then Mayor of Lisbon, was the sole candidate for the leadership^[10] and his name was overwhelmingly confirmed in a National Party Council meeting on 1 July 2004.^[11] The results were the following:

Two weeks later, on 17 July 2004, Santana Lopes was sworn in as Prime Minister.^[12]

On early July 2004, PS leader Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues resigned from the leadership against President Jorge Sampaio decision to nominate Pedro Santana Lopes as Prime Minister, following the resignation of Durão Barroso, rather than calling a snap legislative election.^[13] New elections to select a new leader were called for 25 and 26 September 2004. Former environment minister José Sócrates, Manuel Alegre and the son of former President Mário Soares, João Soares, contested the leadership ballot.^[14] José Sócrates was elected by a landslide^[15] and the results were the following:

In the fall of 2004, PCP leader Carlos Carvalhas decided to step down from the party's leadership after 12 years in the post.^[16] Jerónimo de Sousa was selected as candidate for the leadership and was elected in the party's congress during the weekend of 27 and 28 November 2004.^[17] The results were the following:

The Assembly of the Republic has 230 members elected to four-year terms. 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 116 (absolute majority) for both the Government's Programme to be rejected or for a motion of no confidence to be approved.^[18]

The number of seats assigned to each district depends on the district magnitude.^[19] The use of the d'Hondt method makes for a higher effective threshold than certain other allocation methods such as the Hare quota or Sainte-Laguë method, which are more generous to small parties.^[20]

For these elections, and compared with the 2002 elections, the MPs distributed by districts were the following:^[21]

District	Number of MPs	Map
Lisbon	48	18 6 38 5 4 15 9 4 10 5 10 10 48 2 3 17 3 8 6 5 2 2
Porto	38
Braga	18
Setúbal	17
Aveiro	15
Leiria, Santarém and Coimbra	10
Viseu	9
Faro	8
Madeira(+1) and Viana do Castelo	6
Azores, Castelo Branco and Vila Real	5
Bragança and Guarda	4
Beja and Évora	3
Portalegre(–1), Europe and Outside Europe	2

The table below lists the parties represented in the Assembly of the Republic during the 9th legislature (2002–2005) and that also partook in the election:

The table below shows voter turnout throughout election day including voters from Overseas.

Turnout	Time
	12:00			16:00			19:00
	2002	2005	±	2002	2005	±	2002	2005	±
Total	18.00%	21.93%	3.93 pp	45.88%	50.94%	5.06 pp	61.48%	64.26%	2.78 pp
Sources[31][32][33][34]

Summary of the 20 February 2005 Assembly of the Republic elections results

Parties		Votes	%	±	MPs					MPs %/ votes %
					2002	2005	±	%	±
	Socialist	2,588,312	45.03	7.2	96	121	25	52.61	10.9	1.17
	Social Democratic[b]	1,653,425	28.77	11.4	105	75	30	32.61	13.0	1.13
	Unitary Democratic Coalition[c]	433,369	7.54	0.6	12	14	2	6.09	0.9	0.81
	People's	416,415	7.25	1.5	14	12	2	5.22	0.9	0.72
	Left Bloc	364,971	6.35	3.6	3	8	5	3.48	2.2	0.55
	Portuguese Workers' Communist	48,186	0.84	0.2	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	New Democracy	40,358	0.70	—	—	0	—	0.00	—	0.0
	Humanist	17,056	0.30	0.1	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	National Renovator	9,374	0.16	0.1	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	Workers Party of Socialist Unity	5,535	0.10	0.0	0	0	0	0.00	0.0	0.0
	Democratic Party of the Atlantic	1,618	0.03	—	—	0	—	0.00	—	0.0
Total valid		5,578,782	97.06	1.0	230	230	0	100.00	0.0	—
Blank ballots		103,537	1.80	0.8
Invalid ballots		65,515	1.14	0.2
Total		5,747,834	100.00
Registered voters/turnout		8,944,508	64.26	2.8
Source: Comissão Nacional de Eleições

• 
  Strongest party by district.
• 
  Most voted political force by municipality.
• 
  Share of vote for CDU by district.

• 
  Seats won by party.
• 
  Gains and losses by party.
• 
  Share of vote by party.

• Freire, André; Marina Costa Lobo (May 2006). "The Portuguese 2005 legislative election: Return to the left". West European Politics. 29 (3): 581–588. doi:10.1080/01402380600620742. S2CID 154260314.

• Preliminary results of the 2005 election
• Angus Reid Consultants - Election Tracker

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