National-Conservative Party Advances in Portugal

by Kenneth Schmidt

Kenneth Schmidt offers an overview of Portugal’s parliamentary elections, highlighting Chega!’s notable gains and exploring the broader context of national-conservative movements in Europe.

On the weekend of March 9-10, Portugal held its parliamentary elections and the center-right Democratic Alliance edged out the Socialist Party by two seats and will likely form a new government. Most observers, correctly, credited corruption in Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s administration. It should be recognized, though, that the parties in the Democratic Alliance don’t have much of a reputation for clean government either.

The trading out of a center-left government for a center-right government in a European nation is hardly big news. However, what made the headlines scream was the huge expansion in the number of seats held by a national-conservative party named Chega! Chega! (the exclamation point is part of the official name), which in Portuguese means Enough!, grabbed 48 seats, up from 36 seats gained in the 2022 contest. Altogether, Chega! got 18.1% up the vote, up from 12 seats and 7.2%. Chega! is a relatively new party on the Portuguese scene, having been founded in 2019, when it gained only a single seat in parliament in that year’s elections.

Chega! is strongly anti-immigration. It takes a hard law and order stance and advocates for life sentences (which apparently disappeared a while back in Portugal) and the chemical castration of rapists. What might disappoint some nationalists is that the party takes a liberal position on big business and economic freedom. This is probably a kind of reaction to the long string of fairly dogmatic socialist governments in Portugal and the really poor job prospects for young people there. Over the past year or so, Chega! has moderated its capitalistic positions a bit, but not to the point that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has, for example.

During its entire existence, the party has been led by a man named André Ventura. Mr. Ventura is a charismatic individual and compelling orator. Ventura describes himself as “economically liberal, culturally nationalist and conservative in matters of customs.” He is Catholic and serious enough about religion to have started seminary work, abandoning that route after developing an intense interest in a young lady. He is a man of many parts. Before his deep involvement in the political world, he was best known as a celebrated sports journalist. Ventura is also an attorney, having studied law both in Portugal and Ireland. He taught the subject on the university level for a couple of years.

Observers of the European political scene have, no doubt, noticed that moderate nationalist movements on the Iberian peninsula have been somewhat late to the game compared to such parties on the rest of the continent. The left and even the center-right have sought, over the last fifty years, to portray the period of the 1930s to 1970s in Spain and Portugal as some kind of horrific dark age and this includes educational institutions. Both leaders had their faults, but after their deaths the good that they did has been hidden. As to Chega!’s position on Salazar, Mr. Ventura generally avoids attacking the late leader, but has, at times, complained of what he thinks were Salazar’s poor economic policies. You will remember, of course, that Salazar was an economist and not a military man. Has there ever been a dictator, apart from Salazar, that’s been an economist? I can’t remember any. Interestingly, the faction of Chega! where Salazar’s patrimony seems to be the most esteemed is in the party’s youth wing.

As far as reactions to Chega! solidifying its role as the third most important political force in the country, and rising, there was the usual pearl clutching in the establishment media when an “unapproved” party makes some gains. Some made comparisons with the other Portuguese-speaking country, Brazil, and its former leader, Jair Bolsonaro. There was the usual “racism-sexism” sloganeering, pretty much without giving any examples of racism among Chega! members. They also seemed to think that typical Portuguese are sitting in their basements, shaking at the thought of a re-born Estado Novo regime. I remember reading recent public opinion polls taken in Portugal reflecting the view that the Novo Estado period is looked upon more positively by the ordinary Portuguese man on the street than how the cultural elites view it.

On the mild nationalist spectrum, the advance of Chega! has met with positive acclaim. Santiago Abscal of Spain’s Vox Party, Max Krah, the AfD’s European Parliamentary leader, Jordan Bardella, President of National Rally and Ádám Balázs, head of Orbán’s International Secretariat within the Fidesz Party, all released press statements congratulating Chega! on its achievement.

What role do these national-conservative political parties, like Chega!, have to play in the advancement of nationalism? It’s not an easy question. One school of thought is that they provide a “gateway drug” to more steadfast forms of nationalism — shifting the “Overton Window” of change. More and more Europeans (and Americans) now feel free to criticize third-world immigration and other obvious evils but with a lesser degree of social condemnation. I think national-conservative parties can be productive in some cases and destructive in others. Viktor Orbán has done a magnificent job in Hungary over the last 14 years. His experiment in “illiberal democracy” has been mostly a positive one. On the other hand, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy has been a sad disappointment, ruling more or less as a center-right Atlanticist party that does little or nothing to stem the migrant tide.

There is one possible fly in the ointment for André Ventura and Chega! as the Portuguese try to put together a government. Before the election, the head of the center-right, Luís Montenegro, said before the election that he would refuse to go into coalition with Chega!, even if it meant not gaining power. There will be pressures on Montenegro by its constituent parties to concede and form a government with Chega! Still, it’s possible that Chega! and Ventura may be left out in the cold. If Montenegro sticks to his guns, Ventura may end up like Geert Wilders, who won a magnificent victory in the Netherlands, but who was forced to concede a possible prime ministership after other parties refused to go into coalition with him. We can only hope that a sense of southern European pragmatism can make Chega! a part of a Portuguese government.