AVIS, Portugal — Leonor Xavier was not letting the Portuguese Communist Party's worst ever national election get her down.

"I'm optimistic for the future of the party," the veteran activist said.

"If the workers can unite, I'm sure we can stop the upper classes having their own way in this country and in others," she mused in a chilly meeting room decorated with red flags and an imposing portrait of Lenin. "Those of us that are over 60 have to pass on that responsibility to the younger comrades."

Xavier has spent over 30 years as a local organizer for the PCP in Avis, a pretty, white-washed town of 4,500 where the Communists have won every election since democracy was restored to Portugal in 1974.

In presidential elections on January 24, Avis stood alone among Portugal's 308 municipalities in voting for the PCP candidate, Edgar Silva. It is a defiant — but increasingly isolated — bastion for one of Europe's last politically significant, old-style Communist movements.

Silva won just 3.95 percent of the national vote, finishing in a humiliating fifth place.

"The central government has taken away people's rights, including to health care and education, but the party always stands by the people, in good times and in bad" — Leonor Xavier.

He failed to challenge the runaway center-right winner Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. Even worse, Silva was thrashed by Marisa Matias, the candidate of the Left Bloc (BE) — an upstart radical rival — who scored over 10 percent.

That defeat compounded disappointment in October's parliamentary elections, when the PCP was again outshone by the Left Bloc.

In both votes, the Left Bloc was fronted by media-savvy, female candidates who appeared more in touch with younger voters than the grey-haired men running the PCP.

The disappearing Left

Those double defeats are triggering speculation that the long-dominant force on Portugal's far left risks heading the way of its comrades in Greece and Spain, where Communist parties have been eclipsed by the radical neophytes of Syriza and Podemos.

"The last two elections show the Portuguese Communist Party is crumbling away fast," author Alexandra Lucas Coelho wrote in the newspaper Público. "By remaining unchanged while everything around it changes, the PCP risks seeing its political space disappear."

Ironically, the clouds over the PCP's future have emerged at a time when the party wields greater influence over government than at any time since the revolutionary mid-1970s.

Prime Minister António Costa's minority Socialist government depends for survival on support from PCP and Left Bloc lawmakers.

Since taking office in November, Costa has rushed through a slew of measures from the left-wing wish list — liberalizing abortion laws and gay couples' adoption rights; reversing pension cuts and planned privatizations; and rolling back other unpopular economic reforms passed by the previous, center-right administration.

The sudden easing up on austerity has the European Commission worried. It's warning that Portugal's 2016 budget plans could violate eurozone rules. Ratings agencies threaten downgrades that could force the country into a second bailout.

Communist leader Jerónimo de Sousa, and the PCP's powerful trade union allies, are urging Costa towards defiance. They are telling him not to back down in the face of foreign "blackmail."

"The European Union (aims) to perpetuate a policy that they call austerity, but is effectively plunder," de Sousa told a party rally. "This is a moment for important decisions, when the interests of our people confront those of high finance and big capital."

Fighting talk goes down well with the party faithful.

"We don't need fancy words to say what we need to say," said Xavier. "The central government has taken away people's rights, including to health care and education, but the party always stands by the people, in good times and in bad."

Decades of defiance

The resilience of PCP support in this area of rural Portugal can be traced to its resistance to the dictatorship that ruled the country for over four decades until a 1974 revolution led by leftist army officers.

Under the old regime, workers on the large agricultural estates in the southern Alentejo region worked long hours for little pay. Efforts to organize were repressed, but the party worked clandestinely to undermine the regime. Activists risked imprisonment, torture and death playing cat-and-mouse with the notorious PIDE secret police.

"We were subjugated by the bosses," says João Manuel Neves, a 72-year-old bricklayer and sometime Communist voter.

"Those were hard times. We were oppressed, many were arrested. People turned to the PCP because it struggled against the PIDE," he said beneath the shade of orange trees outside the town church.

Many older people in Avis look back to the period immediately after the fall of the dictatorship as a golden age. Inspired by the party, farm laborers occupied big estates to form collective and cooperative farms under the slogan "land for those that work on it."

For Xavier, a 24-year-old farm laborer when the revolution came, these were heady times.

She became a union representative and worked on the May 1 Cooperative — one of the biggest worker-run farms.

"The agrarian reform brought work for everybody. Students would come in summer to work at the cooperative, harvesting tomatoes, vegetables, cereals," she said. "The political consciousness of the people was built up that way."

In the post-revolutionary period, the Communists were a potent force in national politics and dominant across the plains of the Alentejo.

It didn't last. Post-revolutionary Portugal shifted towards Western-style democracy, market economics and European integration. The collective farms struggled to compete and land returned to private ownership.

Electoral support for the PCP peaked in the early 1980s at close to 20 percent. The collapse of the Soviet Union — which the PCP still laments as a defeat "with tragic consequences" — hit the party hard. Would-be reformers quit over the leadership's refusal to change with the times.

New kid in town

At 8.3 percent, October's parliamentary election score was the PCP's best in over 15 years, reflecting voter discontent with centrist parties after the eurozone debt crisis. Celebrations were muted, however, as the party was overtaken by the Left Bloc, which captured 10.2 percent of the vote in its best result since the party was founded in 1999.

The two parties have much in common: they want public control of banking and other key economic sectors, withdrawal from NATO and a rejection of eurozone budget restraints.

Yet the Bloc has managed to reach out to a younger, more urban electorate, projecting itself as a cool party of the future.

A telling moment in the presidential campaign came in a televised debate between the two parties' candidates just after North Korea's January 5 H-bomb test. The PCP's Silva declined to join Matias in denouncing the North Korean regime as a dictatorship. After some prodding, he acknowledged it was not "an advanced democracy."

Reflecting on an election night defeat, party leader de Sousa drew fire from feminists when he suggested "we could have presented a cute little candidate" — an apparent reference to 39-year-old Matias. De Sousa later denied the comment was aimed at anyone in particular.

A craggy-featured 68-year-old former steel worker, de Sousa blames the poor results on low turnout, tactical voting and media bias, but he has failed to counter perceptions of a party losing touch with voters.

The Communists are still a force to be reckoned with. The party machine maintains a formidable ability to call out activists for demonstrations. Its allies in the CGTP union confederation are promising to mobilize against any attempt to slow down the rollback of austerity.

Even among political opponents, the PCP commands respect for its historic role resisting the dictatorship and a record of clean and effective local governance in towns like Avis.

Yet even here, the party faces pressure to adapt if it is to avoid the fate of other previously powerful Marxist movements in southern Europe that have faded into insignificance, absorbed into broader centrist movements like in Italy, or eclipsed by trendy newcomers as in Spain and Greece.

"I'm Communist," says Felisberta Almeida, a retired hospital worker taking a pause from cleaning her home in Avis. "My daughter at university in Lisbon is a Communist. My mother, who's 86, is a Communist, but I like that girl from the Left Bloc, she's a trustworthy person. I could vote for them."