The collapse of the Portuguese political system after a catastrophic two-year period served the far-right André Ventura, leader of Chega, on a plate on Sunday, the opportunity to take a historic leap that he did not waste. It multiplied its percentage of votes in 2022 by 2.5 times and quadrupled its number of seats, up to 48 out of 230. This rise of the extreme right, which occupies the space left by the collapse of the until now ruling Socialist Party (PS), makes to the conservative Luís Montenegro in the virtual next prime minister of Portugal. He will come to office in a clear minority, since he maintains his promise of not dealing with the extreme right and the socialists have only committed to facilitating his entry into power. Thus opens a stage turned to the right through the most extreme route and under the risk of institutional chaos.
All the traditional political actors in Portugal worked in practice in the last two years in favor of the extreme right, even if it was unintentionally in the vast majority of cases. The now resigned socialist Prime Minister António Costa began to do so already in the January 2022 electoral campaign, who achieved an unexpected absolute majority by raising the specter of the far right to feed on the useful vote. Later the media magnified the rise of Chega, since it was the third force, but thanks to the atomization of the small parties, with a percentage, 7%, the most discreet in the European context, half of what Vox had . Ventura’s media prominence in recent times has been extremely excessive.
The defeated matches of 2022 also paved Chega’s upward path by embarking in unison on a slow and ineffective renovation. The fastest, that of the conservative PSD party, brought a weak leader, Luis Montenegro, with no management experience, to the leadership of the opposition in the summer of that year. He had been a gray parliamentary spokesman during the government of his colleague Pedro Passos Coelho. At the polls, his coalition fell almost a point and a half compared to 2022.
The Left Bloc entrusted itself less than a year ago to its apparently most powerful leader, Mariana Mortágua, who failed on Sunday, in the face of competition from the emerging Livre of Rui Tavares, a left-wing party from the same temporary batch as Chega. Things went even worse for the general secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party, Paulo Raimundo, elected in the third change in 60 years in this fossilized formation, because if the Bloco stagnated, the PCP sank even further.
However, the main supporter of Chega was from the first moment the socialist Government, which died of success with the absolute majority. It marked the period of greatest instability in the eight long years in which Costa has been in power, first in alliance with the left and then in a minority. The scandals continued until they reached their peak in November, when a still unclarified case of alleged corruption in his immediate environment caused the resignation of the prime minister, after the prosecutor’s office announced that he was going to investigate him. As if that were not enough, the Socialist Party (PS) chose as its successor the former Minister of Infrastructure Pedro Nuno Santos, who had had to leave the Government due to the TAP airline gold compensation scandal.
The President of the Republic, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, also made his decisive contribution to the success of the extreme right, by refusing to let the socialists recompose his government after Costa’s resignation. He called immediate elections. In them, the only candidate who repeated with respect to 2022 among the six largest parties was the ultra Ventura, who faced little-known, novice and in many cases very weak rivals. Thus, in the campaign the head of the Chega list was the master of the track.
The ideal breeding ground for the formidable rise of the extreme right was completed by other essential factors, such as corruption, since in the case of the socialist Government was added what existed in the regional executive of Madeira, from the same party as the conservative Montenegro. The intense increase in immigration in the last decade, the sharp rise in prices of basic products and the international situation of insecurity, with wars and the climate emergency, completed a scenario in which Ventura, a skilled demagogue trained in the television school of football and events, he played his cards effectively.
Chega won in the Algarve and came second in the southern constituencies, from Lisbon down, in the areas that have always been more left-wing, while achieving considerable results in the fiefdoms of the traditional right, in politically Galician Portugal, with a marked conservative imprint. Altogether it rose from 12 to 48 deputies, which, without yet the four seats from outside, which will be awarded in the coming days, generates a Parliament shifted to the right that already has 136 of its 230 deputies, after increasing in votes from the 43% to 53%.
Although Ventura appealed on election night to that clear majority of conservatives and the extreme right, Montenegro did not want to hear from him, as he reaffirmed his electoral commitment to the cordon sanitaire with the ultras, so that a Portuguese version thus emerges. of “no means no”. Even if it were to obtain three of the four seats from abroad, although everything indicates that it will obtain only two, Montenegro could add at most 91 deputies, the 8 of the Liberal Initiative and 82 or 83 of its own, well below the 116 of the absolute majority. The socialist Santos, after the shock of losing 13 points and more than 40 seats, announced that he is joining the opposition and that he is withdrawing from the Government.
In this chaotic institutional landscape, in which the worn-out President Rebelo will begin to maneuver immediately, Montenegro’s options are very complicated. The ideal for him would be to achieve socialist abstention for the budgets, but it not only clashes with what Santos announced, but also because of his line further to the left than Costa’s. The solution that Montenegro rules out is the pact with Ventura. And what is on the horizon consists of new elections for next year. But recent history invites caution. The “geringonça”, the leftist alliance of 2015 seemed doomed to immediate failure and was most stable, unlike what happened with Costa’s absolute majority two years ago.
The evidence is that, after being the one that resisted the best in southern Europe in recent decades, the Portuguese political system has also collapsed, just when participation has recovered, up to 66%, which is the maximum of this century. , which shows that abstention was a reflection of a deep discomfort that was not channeled at the polls. The ocean of instability roars in Lisbon, with Portugal turning to the right along the most extreme path.
