Analysis
‘Nothing
will be the same again’: Portugal’s Chega may be spot on
Sam Jones
in Madrid
The
far-right party is now the main opposition – proof that the country’s era of
political exceptionalism is over
Thu 29 May
2025 17.49 CEST
As a former
football pundit, columnist, seminarian and novelist, André Ventura is not a man
given to understatement. But as the final results of Portugal’s snap general
election confirmed that his far-right Chega party had leapfrogged the
socialists to become the second biggest party in parliament, his words may have
been spot on.
“Nothing
will be the same again,” the newly minted leader of the opposition promised
after Wednesday’s tally. Ventura also told the Portuguese people that Chega
would not be seeking to emulate the centre-left Socialist party (PS) or the
centre-right Social Democratic party (PSD) which have, between them, governed
the country since its return to democracy after the Salazar dictatorship.
“Don’t
expect from Chega what the PS and PSD did for 50 years,” he said. “That’s why
people now want a different party.”
That much
seems certain. Although the Democratic Alliance, led by Luís Montenegro of the
PSD, finished first and increased its share of the vote, it once again fell
well short of a majority. The PS, meanwhile, suffered such a humiliating
collapse that its leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, announced his resignation even
before the final results were in.
Chega’s
triumphant performance offers conclusive proof that the era of Portuguese
exceptionalism – the notion that the country’s still-recent experience of
dictatorship had immunised it against the far right – has come to an end. As in
so many countries across Europe, social democratic parties are in retreat while
strident populists have made once-unlikely breakthroughs.
Chega’s
populist policies – which include stricter controls on migration and chemical
castration for paedophiles – have certainly grabbed voters’ attention, as has
Ventura’s demonisation of Portugal’s Roma population.
But how has
the party, which Ventura founded just six years ago, managed to travel so far,
so fast?
“Chega’s
success has to be understood in the context of the Portuguese electorate’s
attitudes over the past decade,” said Marina Costa Lobo, a professor at the
University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences.
“We’ve had a
great deal of abstention – which was hiding a lot of dissatisfaction with the
political system and a lot of frustration with the political elite – and fairly
widespread populist attitudes.”
All that was
missing, she added, was the right party – and the right leader – to capitalise
on that dissatisfaction: “In 2019, André Ventura got elected to parliament and
he’s a very able leader in terms of articulating these grievances.”
Costa Lobo
said the PSD and the PS also bore some responsibility for Chega’s rapid rise
because of the number of elections the country had endured over the past few
years – three snap general elections in three years. Rather than sensing that
the weary and disillusioned national mood meant that more elections would only
favour Chega’s growth, the mainstream parties “dropped the ball” and chose
instead to focus on their own political squabbles.
She added
that Portugal’s previous status as an outlier when it came to the rise of the
European far right should have given the PSD and the PS pause for thought
before they handed Chega repeated opportunities for electoral growth.
Both Costa
Lobo and Vicente Valentim, a professor of political science at IE University,
also point to the role that the media has played in all this.
“The media
gave Ventura a lot of attention,” said Valentim. “It’s been reported that
between 2022 and 2024, he got more than double the number of interviews that
Luís Montenegro, the leader of the PSD, did – and he was the prime minister.
The amount of media coverage he got was completely through the roof.”
After
initially refusing to touch the unpalatable issues that Ventura would go on to
make his political staples, said Costa Lobo, the media had belatedly realised
that “that kind of speech gets a lot of clicks and audiences … and they have
also contributed, as a multiplier effect, to his success and his ability to
reach the electorate”.
Valentim
said while the Portuguese socialists were struggling with the same issues as
their colleagues in other centre-left European parties, they also had to
contend with a leader who never became as popular as the party hoped – and an
ageing support base. What’s more, having been in government from 2015 to 2024,
the PS was ill-equipped to push itself as a fresh alternative to Montenegro’s
administration.
“The
long-term story is that centre-left parties across Europe are losing many votes
– it’s not just the case in Portugal,” he said. “In Portugal, the socialists
have the oldest electorate of the main parties, so they do have an issue that
their electorate is quite literally dying out and they’ve had a hard time
capitalising on younger voters, which is where the far right is doing well.”
The question
now is whether Chega has peaked – or whether a spell in opposition will help
them grow even more.
“I think
Chega are in the best position they could be right now to keep growing because
they’re the opposition party,” said Valentim, “which is where these parties are
typically better because they’re much better at finding problems than finding
solutions.”
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