More than a million Portuguese have voted for the far right in Sunday’s elections, called the same year that marks half a century since the Carnation Revolution, which overthrew the longest dictatorship in Western Europe. It seems ironic, although the leader of Chega, André Ventura, went further on election night and considered it “a settling of accounts” with the history lived after April 25, 1974, the day the military carried out a coup. Peaceful state to democratize Portugal and end its colonial wars in Africa. “This result is the reckoning of a country that for decades was suffocated, dominated, manipulated, atrophied by the left and the extreme left that dominated newsrooms, institutions and our economy,” he said during election night. As a symbol of this he cited the loss of the historic communist deputy in Beja, in the Alentejo, which passed into the hands of Chega.
André Ventura, a former member of the Social Democratic Party (PSD, center-right) who founded Chega in 2019, achieved 1.1 million votes, 18% of the total. This historic result breaks with the traditional two-party system that has dominated Portuguese politics in these five decades. Although Parliament has always been distinguished by plurality and the presence of various forces, power has always been a dispute between two: the center-right and the socialists. Both parties obtained very similar support this Sunday, although the Democratic Alliance (AD), the coalition led by the PSD, led the Socialist Party (PS) with 50,000 votes and two seats.
In the absence of a count of the emigrant vote, the provisional distribution of seats gives 79 to AD, 77 to the PS, 48 to Chega, eight to the Liberal Initiative, five to the Left Bloc, four to the Communist Party and Livre and one for the animalist party. The left bloc registers one of its worst results ever and does not add up to constitute an alternative government.
With Chega’s gallop in these elections, which managed to quadruple the number of deputies and has won 700,000 more votes than in 2022, Ventura’s prediction that they could reach the Government in the next elections can no longer be considered bravado. The ultra formation obtained just 600,000 less than the winning coalition Democratic Alliance and the Socialist Party (PS), which each obtained 1.7 million ballots. “It is written in the stars, this has been the last step, whether they want it or not, so that this force, I don’t know if in six months or a year, wins the elections,” he predicted, after describing Chega as “the party most persecuted in Portuguese history.”
The party has achieved representation in all the districts of the country, with the exception of Bragança, in the north, and has received the most votes in the Algarve. In Setúbal, a traditional bastion of the left due to the strength of the labor movement, it came in second place behind the PS and ahead of the Democratic Alliance. Chega’s effort in the campaign to win the northern vote, which until now has been more elusive to far-right messages, has been rewarded with widespread growth. In Porto they managed to obtain seven deputies, five more than in 2022.
700,000 new voters
With more than 700,000 new voters, it seems clear that Ventura fishes in all fishing grounds. It manages to mobilize abstentionist votes, as demonstrated by the historic participation of 66%, but it also attracts voters from both the right and the left. What can a communist voter, a socialist voter, a centre-right voter and an abstentionist have in common? It doesn’t seem like it’s ideology, but it could be discontent and fatigue. As the socialist leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, recognized in the speech where he admitted his defeat, “there are not 18% of Portuguese racist and xenophobic voters, but there are many indignant Portuguese.”
Also her colleague Ana Gomes, in her intervention on the SIC channel, made a self-criticism and blamed her own party for having fattened the extreme right for having failed to resolve serious problems: “In many actions and omissions, the PS ended up giving ammunition to Chega. For example, we have Chega’s overwhelming victory in the Algarve. “I wonder how it is accepted that a basic issue like water has not been assured in the region during the socialist government of these years.” The south of Portugal is experiencing a serious drought, with reservoirs at 25% of their capacity, which will soon lead to drastic water cuts in agriculture and tourism, two basic pillars of the regional economy.
Gomes, who was a European parliamentarian and ambassador, considers that Ventura is an “opportunist” who defends one thing and the opposite to attract support. It is an opinion shared by the former vice president of Chega, Nuno Afonso: “he is neither left nor right, he is moved by power. Today the party functions like a sect where no one dares to criticize André Ventura.” Afonso left the party and broke with its leader in 2022.
The truth is that Ventura’s (Sintra, 41 years old) speech has varied as he broadened his electoral base. He no longer defends the economic ultra-liberalism of the early days and now promises to combat pensions and low wages. But its great banner has been the fight against corruption, a discourse that has been reinforced after Operation Influencer, which caused the arrest of the prime minister’s chief of staff, António Costa, and his resignation due to investigations related to business projects approved by government. The two years of absolute majority of the PS, which have been full of large and small scandals, have fattened the arsenal of Chega, who turned the “cleanliness” of the country into an electoral banner.
Ventura chose for his new party the name of an internal protest movement that he had encouraged in the PSD against the moderate leader at the time, Rui Rio (Enough of Rui Rio, Enough of Rui Rio). The same year he founded it, he managed to enter the Assembly of the Republic with a deputy. During this time it has been consolidated as the personal project of a leader who believes that God has entrusted him with a mission to transform Portugal. “I believe that God placed me in this place, at this time,” he has stated on some occasion. The leader of Chega, who was a seminarian before studying Law, maintains religious faith as a more solid pillar even than his political postulates, which have been changing to win over more voters.
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