Portugal held national elections on Sunday after four years of an unusual governmental solution known as the contraption (geringonça), drawn up in 2015 by the social-liberal Socialist Party (PS), the Left Bloc (BE), and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).

To the surprise of many observers, this parliamentary agreement did prove able to sustain itself for a full term — PS premier António Costa went into the vote championing his party’s record as a force for “stability.” Responding to advances for his party in Sunday’s contest, he suggested the possibility of another such pact for the next term.

Yet if many on the international left consider the “pluralism” of the Portuguese government a model, this unusual solution (in which the Left Bloc and the Communists gave their outside support to the Socialists) was, in fact, a response to the very particular context emerging in the postcrisis period. And as yesterday’s election results showed, it is not necessarily a sustainable one.