Portugal: The End of a Political Cycle?

A look at Portugal's political history leading to the meteoric rise of Chega, a national conservative Party from 1 seat five years ago to 50 now.

From The European Conservative

By Jaime Nogueira Pinto

Chega managed to break the siege and assert itself as an instrument of protest by the ‘people’ against ‘the regime.’

The standout phenomenon of the Portuguese legislative elections earlier this month was undoubtedly the rise of Chega over a period of five years—from 1.29% of the vote in 2019 to 18.1% today. André Ventura’s party, which had already increased its number of deputies from one to 12 between 2019 and 2022, managed to elect as many as 50 deputies on March 10. In terms of votes, the rise is even more impressive: 68,000 in 2019, 400,000 in 2022, 1,108,000 in 2024.

The growing national and patriotic Right was late in coming, but in Portugal it arrived quickly and with considerable force, despite the constant abuse from tenacious political opposition and hostile media coverage. Accusations of every ‘-phobia’ and ‘-ism’ in the Woke book have been never-ending. To discourage Catholic voting, some went so far as to forge and publicize fake statements atrributed to Portuguese Cardinal Tolentino de Mendonça, condemning Chega as an anti-Christian party that promoted values opposed to the teachings of the Bible.

Contemporary Portugal

As a rule, regime changes in Portugal have been brought about by ruptures, generally caused by the action, inaction, or collaborative neutrality of the army. This was the case in the cycle opened by the revolution of 1820 and the liberal Constitution of 1822, followed by the traditionalist reaction and the civil war, which ended with the liberal victory in 1834. Then came the Constitutional Charter and a period of convulsive liberalism until the military coup by the Duke of Saldanha—a “left-wing aristocrat,” as the historian Rui Ramos classifies him—which stabilised and regenerated the system, creating the conditions for ‘rotativism,’ a political arrangement allowing the two main parties to rotate in power, as if in closed circuit. Thus, during the second half of the 19th century, two conservative-liberal or liberal-conservative parties—one more conservative, the Regenerators, the other more liberal, the Progressives—alternated in power.

The monarchy fell in 1910 and, with the First Republic, the neo-Jacobin Democratic Party accustomed the Portuguese people to the Left’s style of governance in a democracy: based on the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of the children of the enlightened bourgeoisie, the vanguard of brilliant minds as against the troglodytes of reaction, hopelessly attached to things that have rightly fallen into disuse, such as religious faith and national identity.

Instability and misery led to the military uniting in 1926, after 16 years and almost 50 governments, to remove the Democratic Party from power. Then came the military dictatorship.

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917, with its excesses of class extermination, set in motion a chain of authoritarian reactions across Europe—from Italian fascism and German Nazism, both violently nationalistic, totalising brands of Caesarism, to conservative but less ideologically fervent military dictatorships. Portugal got the latter.

Unable to find a political solution, the Portuguese military facilitated the rise to power of António de Oliveira Salazar, an academic from Coimbra who was an expert in public finance, inspired by Catholic social teaching and the rationalistic nationalism of Charles Maurras.

In 1936 came the Spanish War between the highly radicalised Right and Left: the violence of the socialist and anarchist Left was matched by the violence of the military commanded by Franco, who emerged victorious.

The authoritarian regimes of Franco and Salazar survived the Second World War, thanks in large part to the Cold War. After all, the peninsular leftists were unable to convince the Anglo-Saxon victors, now focused on the struggle against the Soviet Union, to overthrow these anti-communist dictators.

The Portugal of the Estado Novo remained thanks to these post-war geopolitical dynamics and Salazar’s savviness in taking advantage of them. The powers of the West felt that his demise—or Franco’s for that matter—risked a communist takeover on the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, the Salazar and Franco regimes, in their final phase, developed their respective countries economically and, in the case of Portugal, also the overseas territories of Angola and Mozambique.

But being highly personalised and characterised by a non-democratic institutional ambiguity, the Iberian regimes could not withstand the physical deaths of their founders. Francoism had a transition designed, without illusions, by Franco himself: a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. Salazarism collapsed between Marcelo Caetano’s liberalising attempt and a long war in Africa that generated discontent in the officer corps.

April 25 and the Revolutionary Left

The military coup of April 25, 1974, was followed by a revolutionary attempt to seize power by the radical Left—communists, Maoists, and the like—which was only stopped a year and a half later, on November 25, 1975.

It must be said that, when the military coup by the captains took place, the Left with its Marxist inspiration had long ago become dominant in cultural magazines, in the literary pages of leading newspapers, and in the publishing world generally. As is always the case with this kind of rupture, the Gramscian conquest of mentalities preceded the seizure of power.

But due to the dynamism of the revolutionary process—the banning of right-wing parties, the imprisonment or exile of their young cadres, and the conditioning of the centre-Right and centre-Left parties that had been formed—Portugal was left entirely in the hands of the Left. The Left was divided, however, between Mário Soares’ Socialists, Álvaro Cunhal’s Communists, and the Maoist-inspired extreme Left. And Soares ended up allying himself with the Right on an anti-communist front.

It was an objective alliance against the risks of a “Prague coup” in Lisbon, one that ranged from socialists to national conservatives. In the aftermath of November 25, the popular Catholic reaction throughout the spring and summer of 1975 ended up being taken advantage of by Mário Soares and the moderate left-wing military faction, supported by Europe and the United States. From then on, the regime was intellectually dominated by the so-called ‘anti-fascist’ Left, which enshrined some of its principles in the 1976 Constitution.

After the confrontation, the Left managed to maintain and extend its hegemony in the culture and information sectors. The likes of Sá Carneiro’s Democratic Alliance and Cavaco Silva’s PPD-PSD in the 1970s and 1980s were anti-left, liberal and technocratic movements, with a certain cultural openness to the Right, but above all preoccupied with the idea of economic recovery.

However, the taboo against the Right remained and its values, national in politics and conservative in customs, were not adopted by the leaderships of the parties in which right-wing voters voted. These parties—the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the Democratic Social Center (CDS)—with the exception of the CDS-Popular Party under Manuel Monteiro’s leadership, gradually gave in to the political and cultural hegemony of the Left. Meanwhile, the Left cunningly imposed an infinitely manipulable and malleable “anti-fascism” as a red line against the re-emergence of genuine right-wing politics, exploiting such language inflation to spook mainstream conservatives and secure in the knowledge that the media would do their bidding.

On the surface, there was nothing to stop the centre Right parties from defending under a democratic regime the patriotic and conservative values that Salazar and the Estado Novo had stood for under an authoritarian one. But the Left capitalised on its cultural supremacy, insisting on the intrinsically Salazarist and dictatorial character of anything that sounded rightist. Thus did it succeed in conditioning the party agendas, forever in power if not always in office.

This complacency, along with the passage of  time, generational renewal, and the cronyism of the ‘Centrão,’ (Socialists and Social-democrats) has contributed to a gradual alienation among many voters, few of whom can really be said to identify—given abstention rates upwards of 50%—with the “arc of governance” parties.

A New Political Cycle

It has been plausibly remarked that, until André Ventura’s Chega appeared on the scene, there was no proper party of the Right in Portugal, only parties to the right of the Left—a Right which, apart from angling for greater economic freedom, assented to practically all of the most fundamental progressive dogmas, whether on gender ideology or racial identity politics.

Meanwhile, ironically enough on the eve of the regime’s 50th anniversary, elections brought forward by a relatively minor scandal—albeit the last straw in a long list of such cases—ushered in the first real sign of change in half a century.

The recent elections saw the great victory of a party that had until recently been classed as all but a marginal party; a party of protest and of rupture, not with the regime, but with the spirit of the regime—in other words, with the ideological hegemony of the Left. The fact is that Chega, sometimes atrociously, sometimes radically, sometimes exaggeratedly, managed to break the siege and assert itself as an instrument of protest by the ‘people’ against ‘the regime’ or ‘the system.’

It should be noted that Chega, which in 2019 received 68,000 votes and elected one deputy, and which in 2022 won 400,000 votes and 12 deputies, has now received 1.169 million votes, electing 50 deputies.

It’s not exactly a coup d’état or a military revolution. The regime is still in place, its institutions continue, and even the fourth or fifth estates remains—that of the media, the analysts, the commentariat class, the evaluators, all of whom presume to tell the ignorant, brutish and uneducated people who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

But, apparently and strangely, this time the people didn’t listen to them. Or even worse, they listened very carefully indeed and opted for ‘the bad guys’ anyway. Despite the propaganda, the warnings, the fears, the insults, the fake news detectors, the voters went to the polls, smashing the abstention rate, not to ‘save the regime from fascism,’ as some still think, but to break the Left’s stranglehold over Portuguese political culture.

And in a grotesque and dislocated revival of what was once tragic—for others, for us, for the country—some of those who, 50 years ago (on September 28, 1974 and March 11, 1975), called for the arrest and slaughter of the ‘fascists’ are once again atavistically calling on the ‘anti-fascists’ to be vigilant. It is plainly difficult for the Left—which, after half a century out of power, has since 1975 enjoyed nothing but power— to accept the idea that the people, the voters on whose behalf it has become accustomed to speaking, can be against it. The far-left parties—Bloco de Esquerda, PCP, Livre and the animalist PAN—together didn’t reach 13% of the popular vote and managed to win just 14 deputies out of 230; the Socialists fell short of 30%, winning them a mere 80 deputies. For the first time in Parliament, the Left finds itself in a minority, facing down a more numerous coalition made up of the centre Right, the liberal Right, and the national-conservative and popular Right.

It is precisely the rise of this new Right that most worries the system and its media spokespeople. The attitudes and explanations differ according to ideological commitment. The far-Left often downplays the election results of the ‘far-Right,’ while at other times adopting an apocalyptic vision, talking about the threat of Chega as if it were Hitler’s Machtergreifung, advising the Democrats, with a mournful air, to be vigilant. The more chic, affluent liberal Left, well-represented by figures like Hilary Clinton, tends to refer to the Chega vote as a phenomenon of the great unwashed masses, the ‘deplorables,’ the marginalised, the uneducated, too easily deceived by populist, ‘hard-Right’ propaganda. This is more or less the version that most in the media recycle, perhaps unaware that they are, in 2024, rehearsing the arguments and tropes of the most reactionary of reactionary opponents to universal suffrage.

Some of the arguments, however, are becoming quite ridiculous, such as the accusations of racism and xenophobia. This despite the fact that Chega is the only party whose elected members include two Portuguese of African origin and one Portuguese-Brazilian.

The truth is that, in Portugal, after half a century of almost permanent political domination by the Left, the country is in a bad way, there are huge pockets of poverty, social services don’t work and the corruption, mediocrity, and detachment from reality of most of the political class is clear for all to see.

Portugal remains a European country. And if in the past it was inevitably influenced by the enthusiasms of an ascendant European Left, it is now caught up in the continental resurgence of national and identity-based conservative values.

Meanwhile, the March elections opened up a serious problem of ungovernability. Luís Montenegro, the leader of the PSD and the winning AD-Aliança Democrática—in an attempt to resurrect the 1979-1980 alliance to capitalise on the centre Right again, bringing together the parties of Sá Carneiro’s historic anti-Left coalition—has repeatedly, publicly, and expressly ruled out forming any kind of governing coalition with Chega.

However, without Chega, the AD, with around 80 elected MPs, falls far short of the parliamentary majority of 116 out of 230, even if it allies itself with the Liberal Initiative, which elected 8 MPs. A stable majority against the Left can only be achieved with the support of 50 Chega MPs.

The alternative to this alliance—for which, of course, the Chega leader is asking for a quid pro quo, although he has not demanded seats in the government—is for the PSD to move closer to the Socialist Party and form a kind of ‘anti-fascist front’ or Central Bloc. But that would only boost the unstoppable growth of the national and identitarian Right.

Luís Montenegro has found himself in a tragic dilemma or facing—to his mind at least—a diabolical alternative. And it doesn’t seem easy to get out of it. He is not likely to be rescued by any magnanimity on the part of the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who, despite his arbitration duties, has been making bitter comments against the danger of the ‘extreme Right.’ Sooner or later, the spooked establishment will have to face the reality that, for the time being, there can be no solution to the current deadlock that does not include Chega and its 1.169 million voters in the arc of power.