Lisbon – POP

A year ago, in March 2023, I published the first half of this experiment. I took pictures of political billboards in Lisbon, Portugal, and analyzed them. That first part, which you can read here, was about the billboards of all major (and some minor) Portuguese right-wing parties. Since then, I continued my strolls and even intensified my flâneur activities, taking pictures of left-wing parties’ political advertisements across the city. Like last year, most pictures are taken while I bike to my office, crossing some of the most traffic-intense avenues of Portugal’s capital.

The national elections are already here, and soon afterward it will be time for the elections of the European Parliament, with the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in between. The Portuguese Left is in the middle of an internal reconfiguration, with the incumbent Socialist Party affected by a huge corruption scandal that caused Prime Minister António Costa to resign. What will happen to the Portuguese Left? Is the last orthodox Communist party in Western Europe going to survive? Will the socialists be able to surprise their detractors, rising once again from their ashes?

To stay updated about the day-by-day semiotic analysis of political billboards, follow the Telegram channel of POP (here) and the BlueSky account (here).

Meanwhile, enjoy the read.

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When I go to the office, I usually take the bike lane along Avenida da República, one of the principal arteries of Lisbon. All political parties rely on the traffic to force the countless drivers to stare at their billboards as they wait for the green light. Whenever I pass, I get a free class on Portuguese politics.

When I arrived in Lisbon in 2019, I started working on a project that tried to answer the following question: why is there no populism in Portugal? By now it is clear that populism is a common feature of Portuguese politics, the question would be perceived as naive at best. Another aspect changed since 2019: the party system has been evolving rapidly, with the populist radical right entering the parliament for the first time since the Carnation Revolution that in 1974 started the third wave of democratization across the world.

The Portuguese party system was famous for its stability, and on the right the two main parties were PSD and CDS. Now CDS is out of the parliament, and PSD is challenged by many new parties. Opportunity structures on the right are so favourable that many are trying to carve out their own space: it is the Wild West out there.

For this reason, I started taking pictures of all the billboards of right-wing parties I see when going to the office: to map the political space, understand its future evolution, and have a better grasp at the strategies of all the actors involved.

This work was first published on Twitter, and now it is polished and expanded in this new format to have all the information in one place (and to have it somewhere that is not Twitter, a space by now unusable for ethical and technological reasons, but that’s another story).

Enjoy the read…

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