The narrow failure of the ruling Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) to gain an overall majority in last Sunday's elections leaves the Prime Minister, Mr Antonio Gut erres, with the prospect of a more interesting four-year term of office ahead of him than he had perhaps expected.
Virtually all opinion polls had given the PS the majority it sought, with scores of from 45 per cent upwards. In the event, it came in at just under 44, and three deputies short of its target of 116 seats.
The main losers in the contest were the centre-right Social Democrats (PSD), and the winners, apart from the PS, the Communists (CDU) and the radical Bloco de Esquerda (BE).
These gains for parties to the left of the PS have led some party members, notably the veteran Mr Manuel Alegre, to propose a new political alignment on the left, modelled on the French gauche plurielle, which groups together Socialists, Communists and Greens.
What Mr Alegre and the PS left do not want to see is Mr Guterres doing a deal with Mr Paulo Portas's right-wing Partido Popular, which returned with a useful 15 seats.
Mr Alegre sees the Communist and Bloco de Esquerdo gains as a warning for his party, which he believes has veered too far towards the political middle ground. The total vote of the parties of the left, he points out, is 55 per cent; Portugal, therefore, should be governed from the left.
A problem with this analysis is that the PS, which contributes four-fifths of Mr Alegre's notional 55 per cent, is very much a centreleft party. The Portuguese Communist Party, on the other hand, is perhaps the most unreconstructed in the West, while the Bloco is a heterogeneous collection of former Trotskyists and Maoists, libertarians and intellectuals with no apparent desire to face the responsibilities of government.
Should the PS decide to embrace comrades such as these its centre-left voters might well defect to the centre-right, from which many of them came.
Mr Guterres will probably spurn any formal arrangement with either right or left and opt to negotiate his programme through parliament over the next four years on a measure by measure basis. It will not be easy.
The PS's relative failure in Sunday's election may be attributed to a certain complacency, encouraged no doubt by erroneous opinion poll figures, and an over-reliance on the electoral strategy of "a smile and a slogan". The Bloco's appeal to young voters and its 5 per cent score in Lisbon should be particularly thought-provoking.
But Mr Guterres might also point to the high rate of abstention, which has climbed steadily from only 13 per cent in 1979 to 38 per cent on Sunday. For worse as well as for better, it seems revolutionary and disputatious Portugal is becoming a normal complacent democracy.