Portugal will go to the polls in a snap election on March 10th next year as the nation comes to terms with the dramatic chain of events which culminated in the arrest of multiple members of the Portuguese Cabinet on November 7th. The arrests were part of a corruption probe into the issuing of hydrogen and lithium mining contracts by the ruling Socialist Party.
The police raids resulted in the downfall of Prime Minister António Costa, a regular fixture on the European centre Left. He had been in office since 2015 and had his official residence raided as part of the criminal investigation.
The crisis stems from Portugal’s enhanced role in lithium and hydrogen production in recent years. The country is Europe’s largest lithium producer and the flow of green subsidies enabled Costa’s party to create a patronage network from dodgy contracts and grift.
Costa requested the President of Portugal to dissolve parliament and is expected to retire after serving as caretaker PM until the March election.
The turmoil has thrown the hegemonic rule of his Socialist Party into disarray and opened the door for the right-wing Chega party to be kingmakers after the election.
Founded in 2019 on a fiscally conservative and politically nationalist platform, Chega received a comfortable 7.2% share of the vote in last year’s elections, winning twelve parliamentary seats.
Led by former sports pundit and seminarian turned populist leader André Ventura, the party has experienced something of a surge since the November crisis and sits at 16% and rising in the polls.
The party has the wind in its sails with its anti-grift message striking a chord among Portuguese voters, the party’s Director of International Relations Ricardo Regalla Dias Pinto told The European Conservative.
Regarding the potential of a Chega coalition with the centrist Social Democrats, Dias Pinto stated that they would impose “serious conditions” around immigration, tax reductions and combating corruption, with the long-term objective of ultimately freeing Portuguese society from socialist rule forever.
Dias Pinto outlined his belief that, on the current electoral trajectory, it is not impossible that Chega could become Portugal’s primary party of the Right. The party could even become the primary partner for government should it achieve north of 20%.
Chega is so hated by the Portuguese establishment that one socialist PM candidate suggested the formation of a grand coalition of the Left and the Right “Bloco Central” just to keep the populist party out of power.
So far, Chega has played up its anti-corruption credentials and made specific moves against an alleged spike in crime by Roma gipsies with party posters around Lisbon decrying the political inertia among the current Portuguese establishment,
On the international stage, Chega is politically aligned with the right-wing Identity and Democracy (ID) faction within the European Parliament, the same bloc that hosts Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, Geert Wilders’s PVV, and the German AfD.
Two days after Wilders’s shock upset in the Netherlands last month, Chega hosted a meeting of ID leaders in Lisbon hopeful about their strong expected performance for next year’s European elections.
While the campaign has yet to step into gear, a major breakthrough for Chega could be enough to severely undermine decades of two-party power in Portugal as well as the institutional dominance of the socialist left for most of the post-Cold War period.
A combination of factors from socialist complacency to endemic corruption has opened the political door for Chega and the next few months will show if the party can walk through it.