In the year that marks the 50th anniversary of their democratic uprising, the Portuguese elected 50 members of parliament for Chega, a far-right party that draws on nostalgia for the Salazar dictatorship. This coincidence between the half-century of the Carnation Revolution and Chega’s half-hundred MPs is symbolic but inevitably invites interpretation.
Above all, the situation definitively dispels the myth of Portuguese exceptionalism, this notion that Portugal is somehow immune to the far-right ascendancy that we see in Europe and the wider world. It turns out that it was only a matter of time – the phenomenon was bound to arrive in Portugal too, eventually.
In 2019, the year Chega was founded, it got just one MP elected – André Ventura, its long-time leader and a former chief of the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD). In the 2022 parliamentary elections, its increased tally rose to 12. And on 10 March, again in early elections, Chega more than quadrupled its parliamentary seats. Chega’s flirtation with the former dictatorship took shape at a party congress at the end of 2021, just before the penultimate legislative elections, when Ventura revived the Salazarist dictatorship (1933-1974) motto “God, Homeland and Family” to declare: “We are the party of God, Homeland, Family… and Labour”.
The upcoming EU Parliament election thus takes place only three months after a general election, and so the Portuguese are preoccupied with questions of governance and coalition-building. The strengthened Chega is now Portugal’s third political force, behind the two largest parties, the PSD and the centre-left PS, which each have 78 out of a total of 230 in the Assembly of the Republic.
‘This is the era of national-populism, and it has arrived in Portugal with these parliamentary elections’ – Teresa Nogueira Pinto, professor of politics and international relations
However, this time the PSD ran in coalition with the conservative Social Democratic Centre (CDS), which got two MPs elected, and the Monarchist People’s Party (PPM). Together, this Democratic Alliance returned 80 MPs and scraped 54,000 more votes than the PS, the narrowest win in Portuguese democratic history. PSD leader Luís Montenegro was appointed prime minister by the Portuguese president, while PS secretary-general Pedro Nuno Santos promptly accepted defeat and took over as leader of the opposition.
Luis Montenegro will therefore head a minority government. A right-wing majority would only be possible with Chega, but the PSD president promised during…
