Chega’s Advance and the Future of the Dissident Right in Europe and the US

An electoral breakthrough signals a turning point, but lasting victory demands cultural conquest.

Kenneth Schmidt views Chega’s surge in Portugal as a major step for the European populist right, while arguing that true power lies beyond elections — in capturing culture, institutions, and the long-term levers of influence.

When Portuguese parliamentary elections were held on May 18th, the center-right Democratic Alliance won the election, and its leader, Luís Montenegro, managed to remain prime minister, albeit in an awkward minority government. On the evening of the election, André Ventura’s populist-nationalist party Chega was tied with the Socialist Party, with both parties taking 58 seats. In Portugal, citizens living abroad make up a rather large percentage of the electorate and are represented by four members of parliament. It takes a week to count the overseas vote, which was announced Wednesday. Chega is popular with Portuguese émigrés and picked up three of the four seats, making it the second most powerful party in the legislature with 60 seats. A notable achievement.

I always thought that countries like Portugal and Spain would take many decades to develop dissident right movements that have any level of success. I felt, wrongly, that nations like France and Italy, who had nationalist movements that got started right after World War Two and gained decent followings, would come to power first. Men like Giorgio Almirante and Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour worked for years to revive nationalism and, like Moses, died long before their movements got any closer to the promised land. The rise of populist nationalism is fairly even now in most European countries, but can they actually rule?

Fratelli d’Italia is in power in Italy but struggles against a far-left court system that won’t let it actually control things in a meaningful way. Trump is having a similar problem with the US federal court system, which is eager to block the deportation of illegal immigrants and other important reforms. What we are learning is that it’s a lot easier to win elections than to win the policy battles which follow. Geert Wilders, the de facto Dutch leader, is threatening to take his party out of the ruling coalition because his attempts to limit immigration have come to naught thanks to judges and Brussels bureaucrats. I need not even mention the anti-democratic means being used to sideline right-wing movements in Germany, Romania and other countries. It is a time of uneasiness among populist nationalists and the dissident right in general.

My first piece of advice is not to succumb to despair. I am already beginning to hear the voices of those among us that want to throw in the towel. Such defeatism is foolish in the extreme. Liberalism is dying. It is no longer a means to human flourishing and the good life. Whatever disagreements I may have with the French New Right and Duginism, they are both entirely correct in their contention that liberalism and neo-liberalism have become more oppressive than useful and are on the way out. What replaces liberalism is the question of our time.

The way out of our current situation lies with the thought of my favorite communist, Antonio Gramsci. He was a man that lived for a bad cause, but he understood the nature of political and social power on a genius level. We must strive not only to win elections but to gain cultural hegemony. A very conventional establishment American conservative, Andrew Breitbart (certainly not part of the dissident right), was correct in saying that “politics is downstream of culture.” We say that a lot, but often we don’t mean it. We must not just win elections, we must capture the culture and institutions of European and Euro-American society and gain cultural hegemony.

One of the things that sends me into a blind rage is that many pro-Trump conservative influencers are telling right-wing young men to stay away from university and go to trade school; this includes the normally sensible journalist Tucker Carlson (B.A. History Trinity College). How in the world are we going to take over institutions like the media, law, academia and big business with uneducated people? The trades are an honorable way to make a living, but we need a new elite to replace the old. Winning a march on the institutions is possible. After all, the “Generation of 1968” was successful at it on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were a bunch of sex-crazed, drug-addled hippies with poor personal hygiene. We can do it too, with all our weaknesses. This would include infiltrating the legal profession and getting judges in place who will permit the expulsion of third-world immigrants.

The dissident right must resist the impulse to become like the worthless conservative movement in the US (1950-2016). My late friend, Dr. Samuel Francis, called them “beautiful losers” and wrote a book with that title. Francis contended that conservatives were willing to champion attractive ideas but were content to be defeated by the left because they did not believe in the ruthless use of power and a desire to win. Being right-liberal, they felt uncomfortable fighting their cousins, the left-liberals. They failed to heed Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction and were crushed. The same thing can happen to the dissident right if we are not careful.

So let’s raise a glass of some excellent port wine in congratulation of Chega inching closer to the levers of power in Portugal. Ventura and his people have done a good job, but they, like us, must begin a march on our institutions or we will be wasting our time. The “baby-boomer” leftists, both elite and non-elite, are dying off. The youth of Europe and the US are veering in our direction and they will, hopefully, complete the job we have begun if they act wisely.