The context of the political crisis
This year marks 50 years since the establishment of democracy in Portugal on April 25th 1974, thanks to the military coup d’état that overthrew the right-wing authoritarian regime of the New State (Estado Novo 1933-1974). Just over a month before the anniversary— on March 10th—legislative elections will take place in Portugal that could cause a political earthquake with structural consequences for the country’s liberal democracy.
The democratic consolidation functionally established a two-party system—the center-left Socialist Party (Partido Socialista – PS) and the center-right Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrata – PSD)—alternating in power. The agreement between the PS and PSD allowed the two parties to lead even relative minority governments. The PS maintained a cordon sanitaire against its left flank (Portuguese Communist Party – PCP and Left Bloc – BE) thanks to the PSD’s enabling of its minority governments, while PSD came to power thanks to post-election agreements with the PS (Central Bloc government) or in coalition with the moderate right-wing Social Democratic Centre (Centro Democrático Social – CDS).
This balance suffered its first blow in the 2015 elections. Faced with the victory of a PSD-CDS coalition lacking a parliamentary majority—due to being weakened by years of austerity government under the Troika (2011-2015)—the PS formed a government through the agreed parliamentary support of BE and PCP. The unprecedented formula— which is why it was dubbed Geringonça (contraption)—debuted by Socialist Prime Minister António Costa bipolarized the system by bringing the radical left into the arc of governance. The bipolar strategy favored the PS: in 2022 it lost the support of the radical left but won the absolute majority in that year’s elections.
The political crisis that led to the 2024 elections is the outcome of a rapid erosion of support for the Socialist government, due to successive scandals of bad governance and suspicions of corruption. The last decade of Portuguese politics has thus been characterized by three significant phenomena that explain the changes now underway. On the one hand, the center-left began to think in terms of a bloc, breaking down the cordon sanitaire that had kept the radical left at the margins of the system since the first constitutional government in 1976. On the other hand, the center-right suffered a deep internal crisis caused by the wear and tear of governance under the shadow of the international Troika and its failure to define a line of radical opposition to the alliance between the lefts. Finally, the PS and PSD were unable to reverse the growing dissatisfaction of large sectors of voters with the functioning of Portuguese democracy. This feeling of democratic decline was attributed to the elite of the two dominant parties and is evidenced, for example, by the steady increase in abstention.
The rise of radical right-wing populism
These three factors—bipolarization, the crisis of the mainstream right, and the rise of anti-establishment protest—opened up an important window of opportunity for protest populism. Until the 2019 elections, it was taken for granted that in Portugal there was a demand for populism among the electorate but no populist supply. As far as the right is concerned, the absence of populist supply—so-called Portuguese exceptionalism—was attributed to the relative proximity of the Salazar dictatorship and the irrelevance of issues such as immigration, which inhibited right-wing radicalism. In 2019, the window of opportunity was seized by a young PSD politician who had been looking for personal affirmation since 2017: André Ventura.
André Ventura gained national political notoriety in the 2017 local elections when—as a candidate for the center-right coalition in Loures (an important suburb of the Lisbon metropolitan area)—his campaign featured direct attacks on the local Roma community, for alleged micro-criminality and dependency subsidy. The negative reactions from the media, from the left-wing opposition, and also from some coalition allies, bolstered the image of the young politician and university law professor who until then had only been known as a television pundit on football and crime.
Encouraged by his media success, in September 2018 Ventura promoted the internal PSD current, Movimento Chega (Enough Movement), with the aim of influencing the party’s leadership to shift hard to the right. Due to internal resistance, Ventura decided to transform Chega into an independent party project in October 2018, not as a split from the PSD, but as Ventura’s personal initiative, backed by a small group of friends. After several bureaucratic difficulties in legalizing it with the Constitutional Court, Chega ran for the first time in the European elections in May 2019, as part of the Basta (meaning “enough”) coalition with two small parties (one monarchist, the other Christian) and a civic movement.
In the campaign, the coalition’s frontrunner André Ventura debuted his right-wing liberal-conservative formula, with a strong “law and order” and populist protest flavor. His key proposals were: a drastic reduction in the number of members of the national parliament; the introduction of life imprisonment for heinous crimes; and chemical castration for pedophiles. Regarding the European Union, Ventura limited himself to the traditional anti-federalism of the Portuguese right, rejecting the anti-Europeanism of the European radical right. The scarce result—1.49% and just shy of 50,000 votes—meant that no MEPs were elected. Chega also failed in the regional elections in Madeira in September 2019, winning just 600 votes (0.43%). With a still fragile structure—only 700 members registered at the first congress in June 2019—Chega ran in the 2019 legislative elections with a hastily drawn up program that was strongly anti-system, conservative in values and ultra-liberal on the economy.
The hallmarks of the political proposal were its adoption of pure presidentialism to replace the current semi-presidentialism, the reduction in the number of MPs, the fight against the corruption of the partitocracy, the strengthening of security and legalistic policies (support for the police forces, an end to the subsidization of ethnic minorities), and its opposition to political correctness and the post-materialist agenda of the left (the so-called gender ideology, the LGBT agenda, the decolonization of culture, etc.). On the economy, Chega called for the privatization of key sectors such as health and education, according to the principle of the State paying but not providing the service, and for a drastic reduction in taxes. The poor electoral result—just 1.3 percent, with 66,448 votes—was only enough to elect André Ventura to the national parliament.
Rise and consolidation of the Chega party
The election of the first far-right MP in the history of Portuguese democracy put Chega at the center of the media’s and political opponents’ attention, fostering its remarkable growth over the next two years thanks to parallel exposure on social media. Ventura fueled his overexposure with several controversial statements, which led to accusations of racism, such as his proposal to lock down the Roma community due to the resistance of some of its members to COVID-19 testing, or his suggestion that an Afro-Portuguese MP return to Guinea-Bissau where she was born because she requested that African artworks in Portuguese museums return to their countries of origin.
The election of the first far-right MP in the history of Portuguese democracy put Chega at the center of the media’s and political opponents’ attention, fostering its remarkable growth over the next two years thanks to parallel exposure on social media.
In just two years, the party grew from 700 to 25,000 members and reached third place in voting intentions, behind the PS and PSD. The party’s growth was accompanied by two parallel dynamics. On the one hand, the rapid increase in membership multiplied internal tensions between personalities with very different backgrounds (coming from mainstream parties, radical fringes or abstentionism). In order to maintain internal stability and the external image of the party, André Ventura concentrated powers in a small cadre of party members, a strategy he would maintain over the following years. On the other hand, Chega moved forward with ideological clarification: it confirmed its original guidelines of being conservative in values, liberal on the economy, and Westernist in foreign policy (pro-NATO, pro-Israel and Europeanist although anti-federalist). It modified the most controversial aspects of its first program, removing, in particular, the total privatization of public services and betting on the model of collaboration between the public and private sectors.
Finally, the party bet on street mobilization, which is unusual for the Portuguese right. It took part in protests against the policies of the Socialist government, in particular by supporting the security forces’ claims and by promoting demonstrations against the agenda of the radical left, in particular against the denunciation of so-called structural racism in Portugal. On the international front, Chega established contacts with the Spanish party Vox in the context of Iberian relations and with members of the European group Identity and Democracy (ID), which it officially joined in July 2020. Finally, in November 2020, Chega signed an agreement to make the PSD-CDS government viable in the autonomous region of the Azores, despite criticisms from the center-right at the national level, which was unhappy with the rupturing of the cordon sanitaire.
By continuing its focus on anti-establishment discourse, law and order measures and the rejection of political correctness on sensitive issues such as ethnic minorities, Chega achieved remarkable results.
The consolidation of the party had repercussions for two important elections in 2021: the January presidential elections and October’s local elections. By continuing its focus on anti-establishment discourse, law and order measures and the rejection of political correctness on sensitive issues such as ethnic minorities, Chega achieved remarkable results. In the presidential elections, Ventura won 12% of the vote and narrowly missed out on a second-place finish to the incumbent president. In the local elections, Chega achieved a national average of 4.16%, with peaks of over 10% in several localities. The election of dozens of councilors—albeit with several defections over the following months—strengthened the party’s structure and professionalization.
This upward growth trajectory was affirmed in the legislative elections of January 2022: Chega won 7% of the vote (almost 400,000 voters) and went from one to twelve MPs. In the context of strong changes in the composition of the center-right—the historic CDS disappeared from parliament and the newcomer Liberal Initiative quadrupled its 2019 results to elect eight MPs—Chega officially became the third political force in parliament, behind PS and PSD.
These elections reveal a geography of discontent and resentment. Chega is strong in the Lisbon metropolitan area, in the center-south and in the interior of Portugal, where it manages to mobilize abstentionists and win over traditional PSD and CDS voters. On the other hand, it is not possible to say that there was a transfer of votes from the left to Chega: Chega’s best results did not come where the PCP suffered significant drops. Chega also recorded notable results in areas with a strong Roma presence, demonstrating the effectiveness of Ventura’s discourse on micro-criminality and subsidy-dependency rather than immigration, which is still not very mobilizing among the Portuguese electorate.
Two-thirds of Chega’s voters are men, concentrated in the 35-54 age cohort and among those with a secondary education—which is higher than the national average—rather than a basic education or academic qualification. They are disproportionately male voters, very religious, concentrated in rural areas, unaware of the nostalgia for the right-wing dictatorship, and dissatisfied but informed about politics, mainly through the tabloids and social networks. They are modern voters, driven by cultural criticism of globalization and immigration, but not classifiable as economic losers of globalization, as they don’t belong to the social strata most affected by the crisis and economic stagnation in Portugal. The most recent polls reveal a new fact: Chega also seems to have penetrated the youth electorate (18-25 years old), winning the voting intentions of between 20-25% of the sample. There is still no post-election data to confirm this trend, nor any studies to explain the phenomenon. The hypotheses point to Ventura’s reputation as a non-conformist public figure who has also reached younger voters, and to the party’s bet on social networks like Tik Tok or on young right-wing influencers who are very active on social media.
Chega’s voters are disproportionately male, very religious, concentrated in rural areas, unaware of the nostalgia for the right-wing dictatorship, and dissatisfied but informed about politics, mainly through the tabloids and social networks.
Future scenarios
On the eve of the 2024 parliamentary elections, polls show Chega with between 15% and 20% of the vote, with a 10-point lead over the liberals of the IL and the radical left of the BE. Chega has therefore opted for a strategy that presents itself as a governmental party, confirming its willingness to join center-right governments. In order to broaden its electorate, André Ventura has abandoned his more controversial public statements and the party revised its political program, focusing on themes more consensual with public opinion.
On the one hand, it focuses on increasing the incomes of families, young people, pensioners and minimum wage workers, through money recovered from the fight against corruption and extraordinary taxation of banks and oil companies. On the other hand, it has reduced—but not eliminated—the relevance of the most controversial proposals: chemical castration, life imprisonment, etc. Ventura adjusted his discourse on immigration, focusing it on combating illegal immigration, increasing controls, introducing quotas based on Portugal’s economic needs and opposing the open-door policies of the left.
André Ventura is clear: he will only make a center-right government viable on the basis of official agreements that guarantee Chega’s access to power. If this hypothesis materializes, the arc of governance in Portugal will undergo yet another structural change, this time from the right.
To curb Chega’s competition, PSD and CDS formed the Democratic Alliance (AD) coalition, a successful formula that defeated PS in 1980 and which is being reactivated today in an anti-Chega role. The AD has drawn up a cordon sanitaire that is unyielding to any post-election understanding with Chega, even in the event of a parliamentary majority of the right-wing bloc (AD, IL and Chega) in the March elections. According to the polls, the scenario is highly probable and has already materialised in the Azorean elections of February 2024: AD won with a relative majority but only Chega’s five deputies in the regional parliament could guarantee the absolute majority for the right-wing government. Given the expected results, André Ventura was clear: his party will only make a center-right government viable on the basis of official agreements that guarantee Chega’s access to power. If this hypothesis materializes, the arc of governance in Portugal will undergo yet another structural change, this time from the right.
Riccardo Marchi has a degree in Political Science from the University of Padua (Italy) and a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from the Instituto Universitàrio de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL). He is an integrated researcher at ISCTE’s Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL) and Invited Assistant Professor at the Universidade Lusófona, in Portugal. His fields of research are right-wing radicalism (political thought, parties and movements). He is the author of several scientific publications, including The Portuguese Far Right between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy 1945-2015 (Routledge 2019) and The Right and Far Right in Portuguese Democracy 1974-2022, in The Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics (Oxford University Press 2023).
Photo by John Chrobak. Made using “Ballot paper in Portugal European Parliament Elections 2014” by Jcornelius, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; “Pedro Nuno Santos, projecto da alta velocidade Lisboa-Porto-Vigo (2022-10-01)” by Agência Lusa, licensed under CC BY 3.0; “EPP Summit, 15 December, Brussels” by European People’s Party, licensed under CC BY 2.0; “A.Ventura – Presidente Chega” by Duke of Winterfell, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0; “Debate com Paulo Raimundo, Sic Notícias, Fev.2024” by Esquerda.net, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; “Debate com Rui Rocha na CNN, Fev.2024” by Esquerda.net, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0; “Não votes Iniciativa Liberal, Porto 2019” by Joehawkins, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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