‘Disgusting.’ With his booming bass voice, António Costa chops up the word into pieces, which he shoots at Wopke Hoekstra like verbal flares. It is March 27, 2020, the corona crisis has just broken out. The coffins in countries like Italy and Spain are piling up. Hoekstra, then still CDA finance minister, insisted four days earlier for an investigation into the inadequate buffers of the southern countries that request financial aid. Hoekstra’s statements go beyond all moral boundaries and are even ‘a threat to the future of the European Union’, Costa says.
It was an unprecedented strong strike for Brussels standards, but Costa’s patience with the Dutch had run out. Three years earlier, Hoekstra’s predecessor Jeroen Dijsselbloem had said that you don’t spend all your money ‘Schnapps und Frauen‘ and then raise your hand, a sneer at southern European euro countries. After those ‘racist’ words, Costa demanded that Dijsselbloem resign as president of the Eurogroup, the consultative body of the finance ministers from the euro countries.
The Portuguese Prime Minister’s response was also ‘very, very harsh’, says Frans Timmermans, Vice-President of the European Commission (at the time) and party colleague of PvdA member Dijsselbloem. ‘Because he knew it was necessary. And also because he felt personally addressed. He’s not a softie, not someone who lets himself be put down.’
Will Costa (60) also not be put off in the Portuguese parliamentary elections on Sunday? For months, the leader of the social-democratic PS seemed to be heading for a comfortable victory and a third cabinet, after a resounding vaccination success and a strong recovery of the economy. Costa was brimming with confidence: he demanded an absolute majority from the Portuguese voter so that he could finally rule without the troublesome radical left parties he had been forced to tolerate as his partners of tolerance since 2015.
In the last week before the election, however, Costa has lost much of its lead. The Portuguese seem to shy away from the idea of a PS that only pulls the strings. Pollsters are now predicting a much smaller win, with indications for the first time that Costa could lose to the conservative-liberal PSD. The prime minister, who himself no longer believes in an absolute majority, is now committed to a new government coalition. His future in national politics depends on it: if he loses, he will resign as leader of the PS.
Surprisingly liberal policy
Don’t think Costa has already been beaten, though. If anyone is a political magician, it is this son of a communist writer and a feminist journalist. His father was born in Mozambique, but had roots as far as Goa, an Indian province that long belonged to the Portuguese Overseas Empire. His communist sympathies were not without consequences: he was arrested three times for his support of the opposition to the authoritarian leader António Salazar.
At the age of 14, Costa became a member of the social-democratic PS, in 1975, in the midst of the turbulent period after the Carnation Revolution that would lead Portugal to democracy. It was the start of a political career from the book. After his law studies, Costa became a councilor in Lisbon in 1982, a seat he exchanged after more than ten years for more prominent positions: Member of Parliament, party leader, MEP, State Secretary, minister.
Costa got the pull of a potential prime minister after his return to Lisbon in 2007, this time as mayor. The man with the eternal smile, never too bad for a chat in the street, made himself immensely popular. The capital transformed, thanks to a policy that was more liberal than Portugal was used to from the PS.
Costa, not an ideological sharpener but a pragmatist, opened the door wide to wealthy foreigners and international business. It brought economic prosperity to Lisbon – bureaucracy shrank, local industry grew and tourism took off – but not without excesses in the form of sharply increased house prices and the takeover of entire residential areas by rental platform Airbnb.
Demolition of ‘Berlin Wall’
That these social problems would only really reveal themselves after his departure as mayor was not a bad thing for Costa. After winning election after election in Lisbon, the PS party leadership almost became a logical next step. In 2014, he defeated the incumbent leader by a block.
A year later, the PS came in second in the parliamentary elections. Center-right Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho looked set to continue to rule, until Costa made a move that sent his opponents spinning and turning Portuguese politics on its head: for the first time in decades, a Social Democrat reached out to the Communist Party. The communists had been at loggerheads with the PS since the revolutionary years, but they had remained a power factor in numbers. Despite fierce opposition from his own ranks, Costa pushed back old very much and, with the support of the communists and a second radical left bloc, became prime minister, at the head of a minority government.
He himself spoke of ‘the tearing down of what was left of the Berlin Wall’, but Brussels held its breath. After the financial crisis, Portugal was saved with tens of billions of European euros. Now a communist-backed government took office that promised to break with the harsh austerity policy.
Timmermans remembers the negotiations that he and committee chairman Jean-Claude Juncker had with Costa at the time. “Just trust me,” he told us. ‘You think I’m taking risks, but I think it’s justified. As mayor, I have cleared Lisbon of a huge debt and made it financially sound. I will also do the same with the country, but that has to be done through the social path.”
Success story for the left
The doomsday scenarios did not come true. In fact, in Europe, his government became the success story the reveling Social Democratic family craved. Costa managed to portray his policy as extremely social, with notable measures such as raising benefits and the minimum wage. At the same time, he reduced government spending. The improvement in the eurozone economy also helped. In 2019, Portugal spent less money than came in for the first time since the Carnation Revolution, although the government debt – partly due to the corona crisis – is still sky-high at 130 percent of GDP.
It gave Costa a strong name in Brussels. Since his first EU summits, where he drove his colleagues to despair with lengthy speeches, the shrewd strategist with the friendly round face has grown into an influential government leader (compared to Portugal’s size). In 2019, for example, he conducted negotiations with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on the distribution of European top positions on behalf of the Social Democrats. His name is mentioned as a possible successor to Charles Michel as President of the European Council; according to Timmermans, he is ‘absolutely’ suitable for it.
At the same time, however, suspicion grew in his own country among his left-wing tolerance partners, who have been judged by their voters in successive election rounds for the policy seen as too liberal. After a restart of the informal coalition in 2019, the tolerance construction finally collapsed in November last year, when Costa did not respond to the demand for a more radical annual budget. That was the reason for the snap elections on Sunday. It is a gamble that will turn out dramatically if the right-wing bloc wins on Sunday, but which will confirm his political artistry with a PS victory.