This has been the campaign for Local Elections that is full of cases, quarrels, and tensions that I can remember. And I've been following elections for many years, even before I was a journalist.
The explanation for all this tension may lie in the fact that the country finds itself in a situation of great difficulty, which is reflected in the elections, even though they are intended to elect local and non-national leaders.
But, even at the local level, there have been many disputes, starting, from the outset, and for many months, with the famous question of the possibility of mayors leaving a municipality where they can no longer apply for any more present the suffrage in the municipality next door. The vagueness caused by the different interpretations of the law gave a bad spectacle of the world of politics and justice to citizens.
All these cases and disputes, added to the very difficult financial situation that most City Councils are experiencing, make the campaign more full of personal attacks, sometimes even offenses, than usual in previous years.
The fact that these are the first Municipal Elections in which social networks and the internet play a really important role in Portugal has not helped, paradoxically, to raise the level of the campaign. On the contrary.
Under the anonymity and extreme mediation of social networks - especially Facebook -, many people have said and written inconceivable things. Things that they wouldn't dare say face to face and that before they wouldn't even dare to write, for example, in a printed newspaper, because, despite everything, the act of writing took longer, gave rise to more prior reflection...and certain more untimely, more thoughtless things would never get published.
The result of all this is that little or nothing was discussed that was really important to people. We didn't talk about projects, didn't talk about proposals, didn't talk about the future – even though the word is part of Slogans of many candidates, from all political persuasions. The campaigns ended up with the news, by the rosemary and marjoram fights, also largely due to the unrealistic law that, in practice, makes it impossible for newspapers, radios and televisions to provide news coverage worthy of the name.
Therefore, I can only hope that, until Sunday, on Sunday itself and in the days that follow, things go normally as they should in a country that claims to be democratic. And that abstention is not, once again, the big winner in these elections!
This is the text of the radio chronicle that I subscribe to every Thursday at Rádio Universitária do Algarve (RUA) and that can be listened to podcast here.
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