INE Charts the Long Decline of Portuguese Voting — From the 91.7% Constituent-Assembly Peak in 1975 to the 30.7% European Trough in 2019, With a Recent Bounce Back Above 60%

The Instituto Nacional de Estatística timed its release for the 52nd anniversary of 25 de Abril and answered a question Portuguese politics has argued about for decades: how much has the country stopped voting since the revolution? The answer, in numbers: a lot, then a little less.

From 79% to 51% — and Back

Across all 53 national elections held between 1975 and 2026 — presidential, legislative, municipal and European — the average turnout among registered voters resident in Portugal and abroad was 58.5%. Strip out external residents and the figure for those registered and voting in Portugal rises to 61.2%. But that long-run average masks a cliff. In the 1970s, on average, 79% of registered voters cast a ballot. By the 2010s the average had collapsed to 47.5%.

The recovery is the part of the story most analysts have missed. INE's own data for the current decade shows the average climbing back to 51% — driven mainly by the 2024 and 2026 cycles. Between 1975 and 1987, turnout cleared 70% in election after election. Since 2006, it has crossed the 60% threshold only twice — and only among voters resident in Portugal.

The Peaks and the Troughs

The historical peak is unambiguous: 91.7% in the April 1975 election to the Constituent Assembly, the first national vote after the revolution. The trough is equally unambiguous: 30.7% in the 2019 European Parliament election, a number that ranks among the lowest in the EU.

Election type is the single biggest predictor of turnout. Legislative Assembly votes — the ones that decide who governs — average 65.4%. Municipal elections, where local services and personal networks pull voters into polling stations, average 60.7%. Presidential elections sit at 58.8%. European elections, by far the lowest, average 40.8%. Referendums sit lower still in the few cases Portugal has run them.

Where the Voters Went

INE breaks the decline down by demographic. Two structural shifts explain most of it. First, emigration: the population on the electoral roll abroad has expanded faster than turnout abroad has grown, dragging the registered-vs-cast ratio down on the external side. Second, ageing without replacement: cohorts that voted at high rates in the 1970s and 1980s are being replaced by younger cohorts that vote at lower rates, particularly in European elections.

Geography matters too. The interior districts have lost population faster than they have lost voters on paper, which inflates registered totals against actual ballots cast. Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas, with the youngest age structures, also produce some of the steepest drop-offs in low-salience elections.

The Recovery Is Real but Narrow

The 2024 legislative election and the 2026 presidential cycle pulled the decade average back above 50% for the first time since the 2000s. The driver was salience: the political crisis that triggered the 2024 vote and the unusually polarised 2026 presidential race produced higher mobilisation than anything in the 2010s. INE is careful not to call it a structural trend. Two cycles do not break a half-century pattern.

Why the Numbers Land Now

Portugal's parliament has been debating, intermittently, whether to make voting compulsory or to expand digital voting for the diaspora. The INE release puts hard numbers under both debates. A compulsory-voting argument now has to confront a system where the registered-resident average is closer to 60% than to 50% in legislative votes — high enough to make the case ideological rather than emergency. The diaspora-voting debate, conversely, has to confront the gap between expanding registration abroad and the much slower expansion of actual ballots cast.

The full INE release is available on the institute's destaques page. It is, as the union of Portuguese democracy commentators have already noted, the most complete civic-participation dataset Portugal has produced since the 50-year mark of the revolution.