Surrounded by a plethora of bodyguards and elected officials from his party, André Ventura advances smiling in the old town of Braga, in the north of Portugal, this Tuesday, February 27. Around the leader of the far-right party Chega (“Enough”), around fifty activists wave flags and chant like a mantra: “Por-tu-gal”. Margarita Paulina does not hide her excitement. With tears in her eyes, she signals to Mr. Ventura who approaches her and kisses her effusively. “This is the best: Portugal needs an iron fist so that order returns to our small country and our young people no longer leave to seek a better future elsewhere, explains this 62-year-old retiree, whose son lives in Dubai and a daughter in Switzerland. Other politicians make many promises, but they do nothing…”
In the streets, curious passers-by take photos and whisper as he passes. “He has ideas that I like and he fights against the status quo. This country needs to change its mentality and people need to wake up,” assures José Campos, a 52-year-old engineer who still hesitates to give him his voice, finding him “sometimes too aggressive”. Two employees of a shoe store are whispering on the landing. “He’s too extreme for me, but he’s right when he talks about housing and inequality”underlines one of them, thirty years old.
Five years after his emergence on the Portuguese political scene, Chega is promised a strong push during the early legislative elections which will take place on Sunday March 10. In 2019, with barely 1.3% of the votes, the party of André Ventura, former local elected official of the PSD (Social Democratic Party, center right) and former sports commentator, won a single seat in the Assembly of the Republic, carried by an anti-system and anti-Roma discourse. “He then fished for voices in abandoned rural areas, among people who did not feel listened torecalls political analyst Patricia Lisa. Now, it is winning among young people, seduced by parties located at the extremes…” After increasing to 7.1% of the votes in 2022 (12 deputies) and having introduced a radical speech, in form as well as in substance, in the hitherto policed space of the Assembly, it is now announced by the the most conservative polls between 16% and 18% of voting intentions.
The end of the Portuguese exception, a country which has long seemed allergic to the far right, should be ratified on Sunday. “In reality, from the consolidation of democracy, after the “carnation revolution” of 1974, we knew that between 18% and 20% of Portuguese society expressed authoritarian conservative opinions. However, the two right-wing parties, the PSD and the CDS [Centre démocrate et social]which came from the moderate opposition to Salazarism, contained them, underlines the historian Antonio Costa Pinto, professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. Chega ultimately emerged in the context of anti-socialist dynamics – under the left-wing government combining Socialist Party, radical left and Communist Party [entre 2015 et 2019], nicknamed the “geringonça”, the “gimmick” – and the inability of the right to return to power. »
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