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Following last month’s national election which resulted in populist-right Chega surpassing the Socialist Party to become the second-largest political force in the country, Portugal’s Left has entered a spiral of despair and upheaval.
Socialist Ana Gomes, a former MEP, has declared she is in the process of “preparing the maquis”—an expression referring to organizing or getting ready for rebel or guerilla warfare. Her close ally Carmo Afonso—who petitioned the Constitutional Court to ban Chega and has asked for the censoring of ‘hate speech’ and conservatives—similarly stated that the resistance to ‘fascism’ is not carried out in the voting booth but in the streets, while TV pundit Daniel Oliveira voiced his desire for the Chega party “to die.”
Various media personalities have expressed fear over their potential future ‘political persecution,’ which is quite ironic given the years of harassment of Chega members and facilities. The party’s outdoors and campaign offices have been regularly vandalised, their demonstrations targeted with insults and provocations, party members were expelled from a number of venues when campaigning, and the leader, André Ventura, was even harassed when in the hospital following a cardiac episode—not to mention that he has been attacked with stones in the past. Daily, the party is insulted and defamed on social media and receives death threats weekly, if not daily.
Why such levels of derangement in one of Europe’s most placid societies?
The Portuguese parliament currently encompasses nine political parties—a historical record for the Iberian republic. Of these, only two have joined European political families to the right of Renew, and the Left’s concern is that the ruling Democratic Alliance (AD)—part of the centrist European People’s Party (EPP) in the EU Parliament—will eventually decide to form a coalition with Chega (Patriots for Europe). Together with the Liberal Initiative (Renew), the parties to the right of the Socialists now amount to 70% of the electorate. In a country whose regime was founded by a para-Marxist revolution a few decades ago, and whose media eco-system is blatantly leftist, the election of 2025 came as a traumatic shock to many; especially those living in ideological bubbles. For the Left, the drama is heightened by the fact that many socialist voters evidently transferred their votes to Chega. All leftist parties lost support except for LIVRE (Greens/EFA), while the animal rights party PAN (Greens/EFA) and the Trotskyist Left Bloc (The Left) came very close to losing parliamentary representation. In addition, the Socialist Party leader resigned, effective immediately. A substantial defeat given he was the one who masterminded the unprecedented parliamentary alliance with the far left during the Socialist governments of António Costa. And after years of a monopoly on the press by the Left, even the media conglomerates obviously biased against Chega are now being forced to reconsider the possibility of hiring pundits aligned with the conservative rising star. The main threat to the Left, however, is that of defunding. Although, for now, nothing seems to indicate that the AD government is ready to do away with its cordon sanitaire against Chega, ad hoc negotiations in parliament could lead to compromises with the party of firebrand leader André Ventura. If dramatically increasing pensions would not be an easy concession to make, cutting the funding to far-left-run Quangos, another Chega demand, would be much more feasible. At the moment, the Portuguese Left finds itself without political leadership, devoid of electoral strategy, and increasingly bereft of institutional power.