As far-right parties gained momentum across Europe, Portugal long stood out as an exception. One by one, other countries seen as immune to extremism saw far-right parties enter parliament: The Alternative for Germany party won its first parliamentary seats in 2017; two years later, Spain’s Vox party followed suit. Those parties joined well-established ones in Austria, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and elsewhere, quickly cementing their place in their countries’ political landscapes.
As far-right parties gained momentum across Europe, Portugal long stood out as an exception. One by one, other countries seen as immune to extremism saw far-right parties enter parliament: The Alternative for Germany party won its first parliamentary seats in 2017; two years later, Spain’s Vox party followed suit. Those parties joined well-established ones in Austria, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and elsewhere, quickly cementing their place in their countries’ political landscapes.
In Portugal, however, a smattering of small far-right parties had tried but failed to win serious influence over the five decades since the 1974 revolution that toppled the country’s dictatorship. When Chega, a far-right party led by the charismatic André Ventura, came onto the scene in 2019, it looked likely to face the same headwinds as its predecessors.
But the campaign dynamics ahead of the March 10 snap legislative election are proof that the political scene is changing in this country of 10 million. According to recent polling, Chega (“Enough”) could take almost 20 percent of the vote. With the center-left Socialists and center-right Social Democrats running neck and neck for first place, Chega may well end up being the kingmaker for the next government if, as expected, neither mainstream party gains enough seats to form a majority. The results will serve as the latest data point in the far right’s ascent across the continent ahead of European Parliament elections in June.
Ventura, a 41-year-old former TV soccer commentator running on the message of “Portugal needs a clean-up,” has been spurred on by a perfect storm of factors, including the corruption-related resignation of Prime Minister António Costa late last year, rising frustration with the political system, and a rightward shift among young voters. A wide-ranging corruption probe into members of Costa’s Socialist government triggered this month’s vote and propelled newfound support for Chega.
As a result, when it comes to the far right, Portugal is no longer the outlier. In fact, it was never really immune to far-right politics, experts say—it just hadn’t had the right moment or the right leader to capitalize on them.
That said, since the 1974 revolution, a confluence of historical factors has helped limit the far right’s ability to gain traction in Portugal. One of these was the nature of the revolution itself, which was a reaction to a conservative dictatorship. Led in large part by left-leaning movements, the revolution prevented “anything to the right of the mainstream right from emerging for a very long time,” said Luca Manucci, a political science researcher at the University of Lisbon. “But it’s not that these parties didn’t exist.”
Portugal’s long history of immigration from its former colonies, such as Brazil, Cape Verde, and Angola, also meant that immigration has been less divisive here than in many other European countries. “Immigration is not politicized in Portugal almost at all,” said Lea Heyne, who researches Portugal’s far right alongside Manucci. “This has limited Chega to some degree in the way that they can act as other populist radical right parties act in other countries.”
Five years ago, Chega barely made a dent on the national level. In the 2019 elections, the newly founded party won just 1.3 percent of the vote and a single constituency in parliament: Ventura’s, located just outside Lisbon. It may not have been a strong showing, but it was a historic first and gave Ventura a springboard to get into the political spotlight.
Ventura has all the right characteristics to draw in voters. As António Costa Pinto, a political scientist at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, put it, “Ventura is the party.”
Ventura came from the center-right Social Democratic Party (PSD), which gives him the veneer of respectability needed to win over a broader range of voters. He broke from PSD in 2018 after an unsuccessful 2017 mayoral campaign near Lisbon, during which he espoused harshly anti-Roma rhetoric, a message he has built on as a member of parliament. Ventura refers to Portugal’s Roma population, which has been in the country for centuries, as “criminal,” arguing they disproportionately rely on government benefits.
Ventura has also built up a persona based on his willingness to say things other politicians won’t. “He introduced a new type of political speech, an anti-elitist political speech—the typical populist radical right recipe,” Pinto said. On top of that, Ventura’s role as a professional soccer commentator made him well known across the country. “The moment he created Chega, all the cameras were pointed at him,” Manucci said.
In the 2022 election, Chega drew increased attention on the national stage as it won 12 seats and 7.2 percent of the vote. Since then, Ventura has been able to tap into a swath of voters dissatisfied with the Portuguese political system, including young people and many who had previously not voted.
A more recent wave of migration—the number of people of foreign origin living in Portugal rose for the seventh consecutive year in 2022—has also allowed Ventura and Chega to begin instrumentalizing an issue that long played a minor role in Portuguese politics. Ventura has advocated harsher penalties for illegal immigration, saying it “destroys Europe,” and called for “the drastic reduction of the Islamic presence in the European Union.”
Chega has also pledged to “put an end to corruption” among Portugal’s political elite—a slogan found on its campaign posters plastered around Lisbon. This message resonates with voters in an election where corruption plays a central role. Costa, the prime minister, resigned last November after police arrested his chief of staff and raided his residence and government buildings in relation to alleged influence-peddling surrounding Portugal’s lithium mining industry. (Costa himself has not been accused of wrongdoing.) Another former Socialist prime minister, José Sócrates, will stand trial for a separate corruption scandal.
“When a party tells everybody that the elites are corrupt, and then the elites are corrupt, this can only play into the hands of the far right,” Manucci said.
Ventura clearly sees himself as part of an international far-right movement. After Javier Milei won Argentina’s presidential election in November 2023, Ventura posted on X, formerly Twitter: “The fight to defend society is taking place in several territories and in Argentina the first battle has been won!” Recently, he told the Financial Times that he considers Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini “a very good friend” and that he has “a great relation” with Dutch politician Geert Wilders, whose far-right Party for Freedom came in first in the Netherlands’ November parliamentary elections. “I believe we are united,” Ventura said. “We are strong.”
Portugal is part of “the unfortunate pattern of the far right growing everywhere,” said Daphne Halikiopoulou, a comparative politics professor at the University of York who focuses on far-right parties. With European Parliament elections on the horizon, major gains for the country’s far right—combined with growing momentum for similar parties across the continent—will be seen as a bellwether for political trends across the continent, spurred on by anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-establishment populism, and cost of living crises.
Not only are these parties growing in many countries, Halikiopoulou said, but they are also becoming increasingly normalized. In Europe, the far right is in power in Hungary and Italy; it has joined governing coalitions in Finland and previously in Austria; and it has informally supported governments across the continent, such as in Sweden, where the far-right Sweden Democrats are not officially part of the governing coalition with the center-right Moderate Party but support its legislation.
That normalization gives people who are sympathetic to far-right policies moral and political cover to vote for them. “A lot of people who had certain attitudes and didn’t want to be stigmatized—now they’re free,” Halikiopoulou said.
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