Next Portuguese legislative election

The President of Portugal has the power to dissolve the Assembly of the Republic by their own will. Unlike in other countries, the President can refuse to dissolve the parliament at the request of the Prime Minister or the Assembly of the Republic and all the parties represented in Parliament. If the Prime Minister resigns, the President must appoint a new Prime Minister after listening to all the parties represented in Parliament and then the government programme must be subject to discussion by the Assembly of the Republic, whose members of parliament may present a motion to reject the upcoming government.

According to the Portuguese Constitution, an election must be called between 14 September and 14 October of the year that the legislature ends. The election is called by the President of Portugal but is not called at the request of the Prime Minister; however, the President must listen to all of the parties represented in Parliament and the election day must be announced at least 60 days before the election.[1] If an election is called during an ongoing legislature (dissolution of parliament) it must be held at least after 55 days. Election day is the same in all multi-seats constituencies, and should fall on a Sunday or national holiday. The next legislative election must, therefore, take place no later than 11 October 2026.[2]

In the 2022 elections, the CDS–People's Party was wiped out from Parliament for the first time in 47 years of democracy.[3] CDS leader Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos resigned on election night and announced that a leadership ballot would be held.[4] On 11 February, it was announced that a new leader would be elected in a party congress on 2 and 3 April 2022 held in Guimarães.[5] MEP Nuno Melo, former MP Nuno Correia da Silva, 2016 leadership candidate Miguel Mattos Chaves and Bruno Filipe Costa announced they would contest the ballot.[6][7][8][9] During the congress, Bruno Filipe Costa and Nuno Correia da Silva dropped out from the race.[10] Nuno Melo was easily elected as leader with more than 73% of the votes. The results were the following:

After the Social Democratic Party's (PSD) defeat in the 2022 legislative election, Rui Rio announced he would not run again for the PSD leadership and would call a snap leadership ballot in order to elect a new leader.[11] The ballot is set to be held on 28 May 2022.[12] Luís Montenegro and Jorge Moreira da Silva have already announced their bids for the leadership.[13][14]

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.[15]

The number of seats assigned to each district depends on the district magnitude.[16] 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.[17]

The distribution of MPs by electoral district in the 2022 general election was the following:[18]

District	Number of MPs	Map
Lisbon	48
Porto	40
Braga	19
Setúbal	18
Aveiro	16
Leiria	10
Coimbra, Faro and Santarém	9
Viseu	8
Madeira and Viana do Castelo	6
Azores and Vila Real	5
Castelo Branco	4
Beja, Bragança, Évora and Guarda	3
Portalegre, Europe and Outside Europe	2