Long heralded as an exception to the rise of far-right political movements in Europe, Portugal’s snap legislative election in May, the third in just over three years, has seen the right-wing populist Chega (Portuguese for “Enough”) party go from a single seat in 2019 to becoming the second-largest party in the Assembly of the Republic, the country’s unicameral parliament.

Considering that it was only in 1974 that the Carnation Revolution overthrew the fascist Estado Novo (“New State”) dictatorship, this early onset of far-right resurgence and the velocity with which Chega, a party known for its admiration for long-term despot António de Oliveira Salazar, has managed to exponentially enlarge its share of the votes is deeply worrying.

'Organized forgetting'

Chega has successfully weaponised voter discontent with home-grown woes, such as government corruption scandals, a persistent cost-of-living crisis, and a criminal lack of affordable housing, against immigrants.

Yet beyond these bread-and-butter concerns that made voters flock to Chega, a common denominator among the root causes for the party’s historic showing, which were cited by various left-leaning Lisboetas I talked politics with during my most recent stay in the Portuguese capital, was Portugal’s failure to confront its colonial and fascist past. 

A recent poll by Lisbon’s Catholic University, public broadcaster RTP, and a commission commemorating the fall of the dictatorship found that 58% of respondents in Portugal were against issuing an apology to former colonies, while 78% said colonial monuments should not be taken down.

This intransigence can be explained by what Miguel Cardina, a historian and senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, describes as Portugal’s “organized forgetting of colonial violence” in which “[o]fficial ways of remembering the past glorify maritime expansion and redefine Portuguese colonialism based on its purportedly convivial character.”

When Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa tried to challenge this narrative in 2024 by floating the idea of paying reparations for the country’s leading role in the transatlantic slave trade, Chega’s leader André Ventura accused him of committing “treason against the fatherland” and even threatening to take legal action.

Now, an even bolder Ventura, empowered by over 1.4 million voters who sanctified his toxic, tripartite brand of misogyny, xenophobia, and historical revisionism, has introduced a bill that would strip people of their Portuguese nationality should they insult “in an ostentatious and notorious manner, with the aim of encouraging hatred or humiliation of the nation, the national history and its fundamental symbols.”

Pandering to the far-right

Across Europe, the unstoppable march of far-right parties from the outer fringes of political relevancy toward probable electoral victory has seen traditional establishment parties, both liberal and conservative, appropriate right-wing policies in a desperate attempt to stay in power.

In the lead-up to Portugal’s snap election, the centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) coalition government under Prime Minister Luis Montenegro announced it would begin to expel some 18,000 foreigners from the country, most of them from South Asia.

This mass deportation scheme in a country where immigrants make up only 10% of a steadily declining population is a far cry from the mass regularisation drives of 2007 and 2018 under the then-Socialist government, which cemented the image of Portugal as one of the EU’s most welcoming countries for migrants from the Global South.

Those halcyon days are definitely over. Having narrowly survived a challenge to his leadership after a lost confidence vote which triggered May’s early election, one of the first orders of business Montenegro’s reelected minority government attended to was to tighten Portugal’s liberal residency and naturalisation requirements.

“For years, Portugal stood out in Europe for its openness to immigrants, with a relatively straightforward five-year residency path to naturalization and automatic birthright citizenship for many children born on Portuguese soil,” writes a news contributor on the popular real-estate platform idealista.

Now, the new rules have doubled the required residency period, imposed tougher civic knowledge and language requirements, and put an end to automatic birthright citizenship for most children born in Portugal to immigrant parents.

Chega serves as a warning

Chega might be Portugal’s most prominent far-right actor, but it is by no means the only one. The US-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) lists 16 active far-right and extremist groups in the country, among them national chapters of household names like the US-based Proud Boys and the UK’s Blood & Honour.

Walking through downtown Lisbon after the election, I couldn’t help but notice how many of the lampposts and sign poles that I passed featured fly-posted blue, white and red campaign stickers (a colour scheme that is hauntingly similar to the one of the far-right AfD party logo in Germany) of the national conservative Nova Direita (“New Right”) party led by a former Lisbon mayoral candidate of Angolan descent.

The party’s “Priorities for Portugal” manifesto includes run-of-the-mill far-right obsessions, such as combating “uncontrolled migration” and “the fight against woke culture and gender ideology.”

GPAHE’s Portugal entry includes a stark warning with regard to Chega’s fast-tracked evolution: “[T]he quick ascension of Chega is a reminder that no country is ever truly immune to exclusionary, demagogic forces, and tiny far-right parties can quickly expand their base of support.”

Whichever way Portugal’s continuing political instability, from which Chega has once again emerged as its biggest profiteer, plays out, it is already safe to say that the country, once considered to be firmly inoculated against the virulent xenophobia and nativism plaguing the rest of the continent, is no longer immune to the pandemic of far-right politics.