Portugal goes to the polls tomorrow in a general election which may well fail to produce a clear working majority for either the ruling Socialist Party (PS) or their centre-right rivals, the Social Democrats (PSD).
The election was called by outgoing socialist Prime Minister Mr António Guterres after his party suffered a series of heavy losses in Portugal's main urban centres in local elections last December.
Mr Guterres, a centrist figure in the Tony Blair mould, has now passed the baton to his colleague, the more traditionalist Mr Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, and it is he who is seeking to secure a third socialist term against the claims of the PSD's Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso, foreign minister in the last centre-right government which lost power in 1995.
An opinion poll in yesterday's Público newspaper put the PSD in the lead with 42.2 per cent, with the socialists at 37.5 per cent.
All other runners came far behind, with the communist CDU on 6.9 per cent, the conservative Popular Party (PP) on 6.8 per cent and the libertarian Left Bloc (BE) on 3.6 per cent.
With another poll yesterday, in Diario de Noticias, putting the gap between the front-runners at a wider 9 per cent (44 to 35), the social democrats must still be counted favourites, but they have spent the election campaign squandering the large lead they started out with under the uninspiring and somewhat accident-prone leadership of Mr Durão.
Mr Ferro remains well ahead in the personal popularity stakes.
In recent days the social democrats have been raising the spectre of a minority socialist government dependent on communist support - a sure sign of their nervousness, say the socialists.
Portugal's once-powerful communists are in long-term decline, their support base ageing and geographically confined to Lisbon and the red belt of the southern Alentejo region.
The party has largely failed to renew or reinvent itself and has run a lacklustre campaign.
Mr Durão's red scare tactics may be aimed not so much at the left as at the small conservative PP, since his best hope on an overall majority lies in concentrating the greatest number of right-wing votes behind his own PSD.
Such an outcome is far from certain, however, even if the social democrats' lead is in fact as high as nine per cent.
Mr Guterres won 44 per cent of the popular vote in 1999 for the socialists, but still fell just one seat short of an absolute majority in parliament.