Chega: 5 things to know about Portugal’s surging far-right party

Sunday’s election in Portugal yielded two things: a divided parliament and a resurgence of the far right.

For the first time since the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship 50 years ago, the country’s nationalist forces are set to play a decisive role in Portugal’s political future.

Here’s what you need to know about Chega, the populist, far-right party that has grown to become Portugal’s third-largest political force in the five years since its founding by the lawyer and sports commentator André Ventura.

Rocky beginning 

Chega got its start after Ventura, who was running for mayor in the city of Loures on behalf of the center-right Social Democratic Party, made a series of comments disparaging the Roma ethnic group. The resulting controversy turned Ventura into a pariah within his party. Two years later, he founded Chega, describing it as an anti-establishment, nationalist party.

Chega’s debut in the 2019 European Parliament elections was a debacle. Ventura was widely ridiculed for skipping the main electoral debate to participate in a football chat show. After his party failed to secure any seats in Brussels, many began to wonder if it had been created as a stunt.

Ventura got another shot just a few months later when Portugal held national elections. That time, he secured a single seat in the country’s parliament, obtaining a platform from which to rail against the country’s left-wing government and the alleged rot within the country’s democratic institutions.

“Confinement” for the Roma 

Hostility to the Roma community has continued to play a central role in Chega’s messaging, with Ventura repeatedly accusing its members of exploiting the social welfare system and having a “chronic problem” of “delinquency and violence.” 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ventura again sparked controversy for proposing to create a “specific confinement plan for Roma communities.” After the rest of the parliament shot down his idea, the far-right leader complained that he was being treated as if he had proposed something akin to “Auschwitz or the Soviet exterminations.”

Later that year, he was fined for discriminating against the Roma community on social media.

Racist controversies

The Roma haven’t been the only targets of Ventura’s rancor. In 2020, he wrote on social media that Joacine Katar Moreira, a Black MP from the eco-Socialist party Livre, should go back “to her own country.” Moreira, who has dual Portuguese-Guinean citizenship, had proposed that items in Portuguese museums obtained from former colonies should be returned to their countries of origin. 

Ventura was also accused of Islamophobia after he claimed that the “Islamic wave” poses a “real danger” to Europe and called for “the drastic reduction of the Islamic presence in the European Union.”

Harsh policies

Chega’s growth as a political force has been accompanied by a series of radical proposals, including an attempt to introduce chemical castration as a penalty for some sex offenders, in particular pedophiles. The proposal — dubbed unconstitutional by the Superior Council of the Judiciary — was widely criticized by all other parties in the parliament.

Chega has also advocated for a harsher immigration policy, including establishing “quotas” for the entry of foreigners, and for stricter criminal penalites and the reintroduction of the death penalty and life sentences.

Old slogan made new

In 2021, Chega adopted a new slogan: “God, country, family and work” — an appropriation and elaboration of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo’s “God, country, family.” In Sunday’s election, the party cemented itself as Portugal’s third-largest political force and will now control at least 48 of the 230 seats in the parliament.

Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed reporting.