1996 Portuguese presidential election
Open-knowledge reference entry
A presidential election was held in Portugal on 14 January 1996.
Incumbent president Mário Soares was constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term. The Social Democrats were coming from a clear defeat in the 1995 Portuguese legislative election, and their former leader, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who had left the office of Prime Minister after 10 years at the helm, ran against the Mayor of Lisbon, Jorge Sampaio. This was a rematch of the 1991 legislative election, where Cavaco Silva defeated Jorge Sampaio by a 51 to 29 percent margin.
The other left-wing candidates, Jerónimo de Sousa and Alberto Matos, presented by the Portuguese Communist Party and the People's Democratic Union respectively, both withdrew from the race one week before the elections, announcing their support for Jorge Sampaio, in order to concentrate the left-wing vote and avoid a runoff. These parties had already supported Sampaio in a coalition that won the local elections in Lisbon. It would be the last time that People's Democratic Union presented a candidate, as two years later it merged with other small left-wing parties and formed the Left Bloc.
Cavaco Silva was supported by the Social Democratic Party, failing to get the support of the People's Party, led by Manuel Monteiro. On election day, Sampaio won with nearly 54 percent of the votes and by a more than 400,000 vote margin over Cavaco Silva, which gathered just over 46 percent of the votes and, once more, the right-wing parties did not win the presidential election.
Sampaio gained the majority of the votes in all the districts in the South of Portugal, including the Communist strongholds in Alentejo and Setúbal district.
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