The voter abstention rate in the 2024 legislative elections stood at 40.16%, marking the lowest since 2005, when it was recorded at 35.74% during José Sócrates’s first absolute majority with the Socialist Party.
In the legislative elections on January 30, 2022, the abstention rate was 48.54%, which already indicated higher voter participation compared to the 2019 elections. In 2019, abstention reached a record 51.43%, with non-voters outnumbering voters.
The decline in abstention rates during the 2022 and 2024 elections has reversed a decades-long trend of increasing voter apathy since the constituent assembly elections of 1975.
Declines in the high rate of absent voters have only occurred in 1980, 2002, 2005, 2022, and 2024, compared to the figures since April 25, 1975, when the lowest abstention rate of 8.34% was recorded.
Since 2009, the abstention rate has consistently remained above 40%.
Abstention in legislative elections:
- 8.34% – April 25, 1975 (Constituent)
- 16.47% – April 25, 1976
- 17.13% – December 2, 1979 (mid-term)
- 16.06% – October 5, 1980
- 22.21% – April 25, 1983
- 25.84% – October 6, 1985
- 28.43% – July 19, 1987
- 32.22% – October 6, 1991
- 33.70% – October 1, 1995
- 38.91% – October 10, 1999
- 38.52% – March 17, 2002
- 35.74% – February 20, 2005
- 40.32% – September 27, 2009
- 41.97% – June 5, 2011
- 43.07% – October 4, 2015
- 51.43% – October 6, 2019
- 48.54% – January 30, 2022
- 40.16% – March 10, 2024
