ABSTRACT
In October 1995, after having spent an entire decade in the opposition, the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista – PS) obtained its best electoral result in twenty years of free elections in Portugal, returning to power with only four seats short of an absolute majority in parliament. In retrospect, this victory can be viewed as the founding event of the ‘rose revolution’ that, by the end of the 1990s, would put Social Democratic parties in control of the majority of governments in the European Union. The PS’s leading role in this European-wide electoral shift could be interpreted as a mere chronological accident or the result of an electoral cycle. However, and although the PS has explicitly refused to classify its agenda as part of any ‘new way’, the political platform advanced back in 1995 had already shed most remnants of traditional Social Democracy and sought a new compromise between social concerns, economic liberalism, and budgetary orthodoxy. Thus, the Portuguese Socialists were arguably first in taking to power a political agenda that fell inside what has been called ‘new Social Democracy’ or the ‘Third Way’. Additionally, in the first half of 2000, the Portuguese Presidency of the European Council transposed for the first time to EU level many of the ideas ‘Third Way’ leaders have been trying to implement in their respective countries. This was a remarkable transformation for a party that, in the early 1980s, still espoused Marxism in its statutes, and spent a good part of the 1980s and 1990s in internal crisis and under the hegemony of its centre-right adversaries in the party system.
