Portugal has become the latest centre-left bastion to fall in the far-right’s steady march across Europe toward democratically mandated power: after Dutch Demagogue-in-Chief Geert Wilders and his populist Party for Freedom (PVV) secured a landslide electoral victory in the Netherlands last November, the March 10 snap elections in the EU’s westernmost nation following the resignation of Socialist Prime Minister António Costa amidst multiple corruption scandals have seen the far-right Chega party (in English “Enough”) gain 50 of the 230 seats to the country’s National Assembly.

Fifty years after Portugal’s transition to democracy, an anti-democratic party has managed to quadruple its previous parliamentary seat count and become the third dominant party in Portuguese politics.

Official results show that only two votes separate the two main political parties which have dominated the nation’s politics since the Carnation Revolution toppled the fascist Salazar dictatorship in 1974, with the centre-right alliance led by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) at 80 and the incumbent centre-left Socialist Party (PS) at 78.

On Thursday, PSD leader Luís Montenegro was formally nominated by Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to try and form a minority government. With their combined 130 seats, the PSD-led Aliança Democrática (AD) and Chega would have a comfortable arithmetical majority to govern, but Montenegro has ruled out joining forces with a political outfit that supports the chemical castration of sex offenders, has proposed a “specific confinement plan for Roma communities” and wishes to revoke the citizenship of naturalised immigrants convicted of criminal offences.

Capturing imaginations with unimaginative politics

Low wages, high cost of living, and an alarming housing crisis were among the key issues that peeved voters into casting their ballot for Chega, not to mention the sense of overall disillusionment with a worn-out, duopolistic political order in which the PS and the PSD have been divvying up power among themselves for decades; the corruption scandals involving the governing Socialists finally pushed disgruntled voters over the far-right red line.

Portuguese-German journalist Miguel Szymanski succinctly analysed the election result in one sentence: “It almost seems as if a consistently growing number among the Portuguese wanted to be governed by new, unspent political faces, but in the 'good old' Portuguese, fascist way,” he wrote in the left-liberal German weekly Der Freitag.

Voter disenfranchisement with traditional mainstream parties’ inability to solve their electorate’s bread-and-butter problems is a pan-European malaise. But in the poorest nation in Western Europe where, according to the OECD, the median monthly income is 918 Euros (figure from 2022) and the average rental price in the capital Lisbon in 2023, according to a survey conducted by online real estate portal imovirtual.com, surpassed 2000 €, the Socialist government’s failure to reign in the late-stage capitalist excesses of a housing market run amok and to increase wages during its nine continuous years in power has had a visceral effect on the lives of average citizens.

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Chega’s electoral success follows the same copy-paste modus operandi of all far-right populists and their brand of successfully redirecting more or less rightful voter frustration with the failings of the traditional political ruling class towards an uninvolved and easily “scapegoatable” third party of choice, namely immigrants, by appealing to a wronged electorate’s baser, nativist instincts.

Personally, it never ceases to amaze me how the far-right manages to capture the imagination of so many people with such unimaginative politics, and how easily white people’s snooze-mode racism can be activated: Over 18% of Portuguese voters readily bought into Ventura’s lies of “excessive” immigration (according to Statistics Portugal, only 16.1% of the total population were foreign-born in December 2022) and an “Islamic wave” that posed a “real danger” (“Portugal is an overwhelmingly Christian majority country, with adherents of Islam being a small minority,” it says on Wikipedia: a minuscule 0.4 % of the population in 2021, to be exact).

Waning immunity to right-wing populism

What does all this have to do with Germany? Both countries have long been heralded as exceptions to the rule of one European nation after the other giving way to the pressures from the far-right. In 2017, the year the unthinkable happened and the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was elected to the German Bundestag, the first far-right party to do so in the country’s post- WW2 history, the aforementioned Der Freitag yearningly looked towards Portugal, publishing an article in which it lauded the Southern European nation as the “model student of the EU,” because it was “immune to populism.”

Ah, the perils of premature praise!

Little did the editors know that fascism functions much like the flu: those most vulnerable require regular vaccinations to boost immunity. This means regular doses of anti-fascist and anti-racist political education, something that is wholly lacking in both Portugal and Germany, what with the former’s head-in-the-sand approach to its inglorious past, and Germany’s much-lauded Vergangenheitsbewältigung outing itself in these days of vociferous German support for "Israel’s" horrific genocide in Gaza, as having been nothing more than a performative exercise in futility.

With the Netherlands (once also viewed as immune to right-wing populism, before the rise of the proto-Islamophobic Pim Fortuyn in the early 2000s paved the way for mainstreaming anti-Muslim racism in a multiracial society, which had always been the envy of BIPOC Germans like myself who had the misfortune of growing up in the incendiary anti-immigrant climate of 1990s Germany) and now Portugal both shifting toward the far-right, many are asking the question: will this have a knock-on effect on Germany?

The end of centre-left hubris

From the looks of it, it just might: the AfD is consistently soaring in the polls, and with three upcoming state elections in September, in which it is projected to come out on top in all three, there is a realistic chance that yet another major bastion of centre-left exceptionalism in Europe could fall come federal election time in 2025. That is, should the opposition centre-right CDU - current polling numbers putting it in first place and the AfD in second - cross the steadily fading self-imposed red line of making common cause with a party which Germany’s federal domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, is contemplating to designate as “verifiably right-wing extremist.”

The main reason behind the popularity of the German far-right is almost identical to that of Chega’s mass appeal: government failure in alleviating social inequality. And where accusations of government corruption contributed to the downfall of the Socialists in Portugal, many in Germany view the country’s centre-left ruling clique, consisting of Social Democrats, Greens, and the (neo)liberal FDP party, as equally corrupt for wasting billions of Euros (32 billion, to be exact, according to German government figures) on their messianic support for the Ukrainian war effort against Russia and throwing equally astronomic sums at the Bundeswehr in a frenzied and dangerous renaissance of German militarism.

If there is a lesson to be learned from the AfD’s trajectory over the last decade, which saw it grow from an anti-Islam party of minor relevance in Germany’s economically underdeveloped and traditionally xenophobic “Wild East” into a pan-German, far-right force majeure that has successfully transformed a fringe ideology into a grassroots political movement, it is this: the longer so-called democratic parties in power fail to address the socioeconomic (and other) root causes of what makes fascism so attractive to voters, the stronger the far-right will get.

Whatever happens, both in Portugal and in Germany, one thing is clear: the era of centre-left hubris in Europe is coming to an end, and the mainstream political establishments in these two very different, but also very similar nations with their unatoned colonial and fascist pasts, problematic presents and worrisome futures only have themselves to blame.