of Cavaco's new Citroën". Cavaco Silva had the support of the wings against the Central Bloc, and against all odds he defeated Salgueiro by just 57 votes. The results were the following: |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" ! align="center" colspan=2 style="width: 60px"|Candidate ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|Votes ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|% |- |bgcolor=| | align=left | Aníbal Cavaco Silva | align=right | 422 | align=right | 53.6 |- |bgcolor=| | align=left | João Salgueiro | align=right | 365 | align=right | 46.4 |- |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" | colspan=2 style="text-align:left;" | Turnout | align=right | 787 | align=center | |- | colspan="4" align=left|Source: Results |} PS 1985 nomination selection After the fall of the Central Bloc government, Mário Soares was acclaimed as the PS candidate for the 1986 Presidential election, and shortly after, António Almeida Santos was unanimously selected as the party's candidate for Prime Minister in the 1985 general elections. |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" ! align="center" colspan=2 style="width: 60px"|Candidate ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|Votes ! align="center" style="width: 50px"|% |- |bgcolor=| | align=left | António Almeida Santos | colspan="2" align=right | Voice vote |- |- style="background-color:#E9E9E9" | colspan=2 style="text-align:left;" | Turnout | align=right | | align=right | 100.0 |- | colspan="4" align=left|Source: |} Electoral system The Assembly of the Republic has 250 members elected to four-year terms. Governments do not require absolute majority support of the Assembly to hold office, as even if the number of opposers of government is larger than that of the supporters, the number of opposers still needs to be equal or greater than 126 (absolute majority) for both the Government's Programme to be rejected or for a motion of no confidence to be approved. The number of seats assigned to each district depends on the district magnitude. The use of the d'Hondt method makes for a higher effective threshold than certain other allocation methods such as the Hare quota or Sainte-Laguë method, which are more generous to small parties. For these elections, and compared with the 1983 elections, the MPs distributed by districts were the following: Parties The table below lists the parties represented in the Assembly of the Republic during the 3rd legislature (1983–1985) and that also partook in the election: Campaign period Party slogans Candidates' debates Opinion polling The following table shows the opinion polls of voting intention of the Portuguese voters before the election. Those parties that are listed were represented in parliament (1983-1985). Included is also the result of the