The Diplomat in Spain

SUMMARY

Pedro Araújo

P

ortugal’s Socialist Party (PS) lost its absolute majority after eight years in power and recognized the victory, albeit tangential, of the Democratic Alliance (AD), a coalition formed by the social democrats of the PSD, the centrists of the Christian Democrat-inspired CDS and the monarchists of the PPM. The big surprise was the result of a far-right party that did not appear on the Portuguese political scene until 2019. More than one million Portuguese voted for Chega in the 2024 legislative elections. The country is divided in three: the moderate left of the PS, the centrist right of AD and the right-wing populism represented by Chega.

Luís Montenegro, leader of the PSD and of the AD coalition, accepted the victory and promised an intense dialogue with other political forces. An alliance with Chega would give them an absolute majority, but this scenario has always been rejected by the Social Democrats, despite the will expressed almost daily by André Ventura, leader of this extremist formation. The President of the Republic himself, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, had already hinted on several occasions, indirectly and discreetly, that he would never swear in an executive that included Chega. All that remains is for AD, which is itself a coalition of parties, to ally itself with the Liberal Initiative (IL), which would only add eight deputies to the 79 it has already won at the polls, an insufficient number to guarantee stability in Parliament.

Although there are still four deputies to be elected from constituencies outside Portugal, Pedro Nuno Santos, the newly elected leader of the PS, preferred not to wait a week to acknowledge defeat, since most emigrant voters tend to vote more to the right. In the current scenario, the slim advantage of two deputies gained by AD in the country could, in theory, be overcome with these votes from abroad, but the probability of this happening is practically nil. Pedro Nuno Santos decided to bury the issue and assume the leadership of the opposition.

Abstention stood at 34%, the lowest figure in 19 years. However, this additional participation of the Portuguese in the choice of the future government ended up rewarding the third party, Chega, and some of the smaller political formations. Livre, a party of the Europeanist and ecologist left, went from having one deputy elected in 2022 to four, equaling the communists represented by the CDU coalition (PCP and an ecologist grouping), which lost about 35,000 votes in the space of two years. The Left Bloc (BE), a party which, together with the communists, was essential to keep the socialists in power between 2015 and 2019 (minority government), remained (electoral result decreased by 0.1 percentage points compared to 2022).

In the medium and long term, the most curious question concerns Chega. Will approve the General State Budget for 2025? Will present vote of censure against an AD Government that stubbornly closes the door to any kind of understanding, even if parliamentary? The 48 deputies elected by the extreme right are going to make a lot of noise in the Portuguese political scene. In the absence of credible political cadres, André Ventura’s party has attracted former deputies from other parties, especially from the PSD. However, this accelerated recruitment following the dissolution of the Assembly of the Republic at the beginning of the year has not been enough to compensate for the poor quality of its militants and sympathizers.

André Ventura’s party was not born until 2019 and we may be witnessing its maximum growth. Chega knew how to capitalize on the Portuguese discontent with the austerity imposed by the troika after the imminent bankruptcy in 2011. The measures taken until 2014 caused some damage and traumas that have lasted over time. Afterwards and up to the present day, the corruption cases that affected the traditional parties (PS and PSD) created the ideal environment for the emergence of an extreme right-wing party. The last government fell precisely because of suspicions of corruption among high-ranking socialist.

On election night, António Costa, still leader of the Socialist government that lost the absolute majority and will go to the opposition, raised an interesting question: how many of Chega’s votes were the result of a structural change in Portuguese society and how many were motivated by a feeling of revolt and protest against the PS? Have bad policies and cases of alleged corruption inflated the vote for the extreme right?

André Ventura, enthusiastic about the vote, went so far as to say that no third political force in Portugal had ever achieved this growth. However, the history of Portuguese democracy shows that the Democratic Renewal Party (PRD), created in 1985, went from zero to 45 deputies that same year, achieving more than one million votes, as did Chega in 2024. By 1991 it was out of Parliament and was abolished at the beginning of the following decade. The PRD was born around the supporters of Ramalho Eanes, who was President of the Republic between 1976 and 1986, and who went on to lead the party in 1987. Eanes, a moderate leftist politician, was nothing like André Ventura, neither in personality nor in ideology. However, the PRD was born precisely as a protest against the austerity policies imposed by an unusual PS-PSD central bloc government (1983-1985), and turned out to be an ephemeral phenomenon.

© This article was originally published in EditoRed

 PEDRO ARAÚJO

Editor-in-Chief of Jornal de Notícias

With a degree in Journalism, a master’s degree in International Relations and a postgraduate degree in Marketing, Pedro Araújo has been a journalist for 25 years and has worked as an editor in the areas of International Politics, Economy and Society.

He is currently editor-in-chief of Jornal de Notícias, one of Portugal’s leading daily newspapers, based in Porto.