Portugal’s prime minister and opposition leader canceled a televised election debate scheduled for Monday due to a massive electricity blackout across the country, local media reported.
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro of the center-right Social Democratic Party and Pedro Nuno Santos of the main opposition, center-left Socialist Party were supposed to face off Monday night.
But with most of the country without power, both leaders agreed to postpone their debate to a later date, Portuguese news agency Lusa reported.
Monday’s monster outage saw the entire Iberian Peninsula lose power. In Lisbon, the metro was shut down, ATMs and traffic lights stopped working, and phone and internet traffic was disrupted.
The cause of the blackout was a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network,” Spain’s transmission system operator Red Eléctrica said Monday afternoon, and would take several hours to rectify.
Portugal’s next election will take place on May 18. The snap vote was called after the center-right minority government, led by Montenegro, lost a vote of confidence last month.
Meanwhile, the European Union’s Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath said on social media on Monday he would cancel an upcoming trip to Madrid due to the outage.
This article has been updated.
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