The costs of the crisis in Southern European
countries have not been only economic but
political. Economic crises tend to lead to
government instability and termination while
political challengers are expected to exploit
this contingent window of opportunity to gain
an advantage over incumbents in national
elections. The current crisis seems to make no
exception, looking at the results of the general
elections recently held in Southern Europe.
However, this did not always lead to a clear
victory of the main opposition parties. In most
of the elections, in fact, the incumbent parties’
loss did not coincide with the official
opposition’s gain. The extreme case is
represented by Italy, where both the outgoing
government coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi
– setting aside for the moment the technocratic
phase – and its main challenger, the centre left
coalition, ended up losing millions of voters
and a new political force, the Five Star
Movement, obtained about 25 per cent of votes.
On the opposite side there is Portugal. Only in
Portugal did the vote increase for the centre
right PSD, in fact, exceed the incumbent
socialists’ loss. The present work aims at
exploring the factors which might account for
this significant divergence between the two
cases.
