Portuguese politics part three

It's elections all the way down

Dec 11, 2025

PREFACE

This article was meant to follow quickly on the heels of part two, which we published on April 23, 2024. Not sure how you define “quickly” but 20 months doesn’t really meet the timeframe we had in mind. There are a couple of main reasons for the delay. First, the political merry-go-round never seemed to slow down enough to wrap our arms around it. And second, we kind of lost our stomach for it. It’s depressing. As you might discover should you keep reading.

Anyway, apologies for the delay.

Hello again!

If you’re just joining us (or, you know, have totally forgotten over the last 600 days), we suggest you start with part one of this series for an overview of how the government in Portugal is structured. Part two covers some of the major issues that plagued the center-left PS party’s government after they won an unexpected majority in the snap elections held on January 30, 2022. We stuck a hastily written part two point five in to cover what were at the time pending elections in the EU. Since then there has been a dizzying array of elections - international, national, and local. The reasons for these are as illuminating as the results.

Today we’ll attempt to wrap our arms around what has happened in the last three years, and what to watch for in the weeks and months ahead.

Let’s dive back in.

But before we do, let’s talk briefly about …

Racism and misogyny in Portugal

In recent weeks, we’ve had conversations with people we thought were following along with what’s happening in Portugal. We were surprised to learn that they were unaware that racism and misogyny are things here. They are. Quite so.

Let’s be utterly clear about this: Portugal is not an exception. That wave of … whatever you want to call it … populism? Far-right extremism? Nationalism? Racism? … that has engulfed the United States and many countries in Europe and elsewhere? It’s here as well. To believe otherwise would be a mistake.

To believe it’s just a minor issue that doesn’t extend to the highest levels of government would also be a mistake. Police have killed brown people here, protests have followed. Women in parliament have been mocked and told “go back to your country” during legislative sessions by other lawmakers. A front-runner for the office of President of the Republic is basing his campaign around billboards that read “This is not Bangladesh” and “Gypsies must obey the law.”

We’ll cover all of that below in more detail but wanted to put this out there now in plain terms before we rewind the clock a bit.

The sudden fall of the government

As we mentioned briefly above, the center-left PS party led by popular Prime Minister António Costa held a majority in the Portuguese parliament after the snap elections on January 30, 2022. That put them in the somewhat unexpected position to dramatically shape the country, which is where things stood when we arrived in June of that year. PS squandered that opportunity and on Tuesday, November 7, 2023, Costa abruptly resigned his position.

The move came hours after Portuguese police searched dozens of offices including Costa’s official residence and detained five people including Costa’s chief of staff as part of a corruption probe involving lithium mines and a hydrogen production project and data center. Costa was named as as a target of a related investigation.1 In his resignation announcement, Costa said he had a “clear conscience” but “the duties of prime minister are not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity.”

The resignation left Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa with a decision to make. His options were:

dissolve the parliament and call a snap election, Portugal’s second in two years
allow the majority PS party to choose a new Prime Minister and form a new government

The timing was tricky because the budget for 2024 had just been proposed to the Assembly which was scheduled to vote on it November 30th.

Rebelo de Sousa opted for a middle ground. Because the law requires that an election be held within 60 days of the dissolution of parliament, he chose to hold off on the publishing of the presidential decree formalizing that dissolution until well after the vote on the budget and set March 10, 2024 as the date of the next elections. Costa would serve as a caretaker Prime Minister until then. This solution gave everyone as much time as possible to gear up for another contest, time that all parties but PS had requested.

Where things stood at the end of 2023

Since Costa’s resignation came abruptly and without warning, everyone was scrambling. PS needed to find a new leader. PPD/PSD needed to organize opposition. Other parties were angling for leverage. There were very few household names in the mix to be the next Prime Minister, fewer still without some questions surrounding them.

Less than a week after Costa stepped down, Pedro Nuno Santos announced his intention to run for head of the PS. Remember him? He was one of the three high-ranking government officials who’d resigned within 24 hours less than a year prior due to the TAP scandal. Before he left his post as Minister of Infrastructure and Housing he’d been considered a favorite to succeed Costa. Now, just ten months after leaving the government under a swirl of questions, he was back in the picture to lead his party. PS held an election in mid-December and Santos was chosen Secretary-General of the party, claiming nearly 61% of the votes in a three-way race which saw close to 70% of eligible voters cast their ballots.

Luís Montenegro was elected President of PPD/PSD in May 2022. That election was held because the previous PSD president stepped down after the party lost badly to the PS in the January 2022 snap election.2 Montenegro won 72.5% of the vote in his two-way race with a relatively low turnout of 60%.

We told you in our first post in this series that there are nine different political parties represented in the Assembly of the Republic and that’s true. It’s also true that since 1991, no party other than PS or PPD/PSD had held more than 24 of the 230 seats in that body.3

Given the general public frustration at both the center-right PPD/PSD, which was ousted in part due to the austerity measures it oversaw, and the PS, which couldn’t get a majority government to function properly, other parties had an opportunity to break through. There was room for a viable third option.

Perhaps in part because Portugal had been under a dictatorship as recently as 1974, the country had been an outlier regarding the populism movement making inroads throughout Europe. Many outside observers were surprised, then, to see that third option emerge from the far right.

The rapid rise of Chega

Chega (Portuguese for “enough”), the party founded in 2019, made anti-corruption a signature platform plank shortly after the TAP scandal blew up and well before Costa’s resignation triggered new elections.

In January 2023, billboards like this one started appearing throughout Lisbon:

“Portugal needs a cleaning.” Photo taken by Scott on April 8, 2024. Yes, the billboards had at that point been up for more than a year. The hashtag in the upper left (#vergonha) translates to “shame” or “shame on you.”

The message translates to “Portugal needs a cleaning.” Party founder André Ventura’s is the large face on the right and the crossed out images are (from L to R) Ricardo Salgado, a banker involved in corruption scandals, the then-current and former PS Prime Ministers António Costa and José Socrates4, and the then-current Finance Minister Fernando Medina (also PS) .

Chega may have begun to emphasize their anti-corruption messages in an effort to change the narrative around the party. In 2020, when he was the only elected member of his fledgling party, Ventura was fined for discriminatory remarks against the Roma people and, separately, condemned for a social media post in which he called for a black fellow MP with dual Portuguese-Guinean citizenship to be “returned to her own country”.

This type of rhetoric led the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) in 2023 to include Chega on its list of hate groups in Portugal. Right up there with the Proud Boys Portugal and the neo-Nazi skinhead group Portugal Hammerskins, among others.

Chega, like many similar groups, cloaks its racism in policy issues. Policy issues that focus on keeping Black and Brown people out of the country. But, of course, they’re not racist. I mean, they even say so themselves. In fact, they held a rally a few years back just to make the point that Portugal isn’t racist. So it must be true, right?5

That, of course, is old news. Perhaps they’ve changed their tune now that they have more power. Oh wait:

This just in! This [Portugal] isn’t Bangladesh, reads the text. And these billboards that are now appearing everywhere aren’t racist, says Ventura. And neither are the ones that read “Gypsies must obey the law.”

Chega? I’ve already seen this movie in black and white. Graffiti near our home.

Anyway, weren’t we talking about an election a few paragraphs back? One that was about to happen in March 2024? Right … onward.

The 2024 snap elections

The March 2024 elections were the closest since the overthrow of the dictatorship, with the center-right PPD/PSD & CDS-PP alliance (AD, as the coalition is known) finishing a scant two seats ahead of the center-left PS, which had won an outright majority just two years earlier.

That election also marked the first time since 1991 that a party other than PS or PPD/PSD held more than 24 seats in the Assembly as far-right Chega won 50 seats, more than quadrupling their total from the previous election.

The Assembly of the Republic after elections in January, 2022 (L) and March, 2024 (R). Pay particular attention to the seats held by Chega (CH).

The problem facing the AD and its leader Montenegro was forming a viable government. With only 80 seats under his direct control, Montenegro needed the support of at least 36 other legislators to accomplish anything. Since PS and Chega held all but 22 of the remaining seats in the assembly, his government had to work effectively with either or both of those two parties. Montenegro consistently refused to enter into a formal alliance with Chega due to what he said were Ventura’s “often xenophobic, racist, populist and excessively demagogic” views.

What happened next

With a host of important issues to address, the newly-elected government used its first edict to … change its logo. The move made good on a Montenegro campaign promise widely viewed as an attempt to win over the far right.6

Whether it worked or not, Montenegro managed to navigate the first major hurdle to his new government: the presentation of the budget. The budget is an early, frequently the first, obstacle that new governments must surmount in order to remain viable.

Somewhat predictably, Montenegro became embroiled in a scandal shortly thereafter. There were accusations that he was profiting from his political position as Spinumviva, a company that he had founded and turned over to his wife and children when he became head of PSP, fell under investigation. The short-term result of this was that Montenegro called for a confidence vote in the Assembly of the Republic in March 2025. A vote his government lost, triggering the third set of snap parliamentary elections in Portugal in as many years this past May.

The 2025 snap elections

The real winner of the 2025 snap elections, everyone agreed, was Chega. Yes, Montenegro’s alliance managed to grab a few more seats but it doesn’t change the need to work with other parties to get things done. And Chega is now the second-largest party in the Assembly of the Republic, with PS losing 20 seats, which were divided evenly between the AD coalition and Chega.

Looking ahead: presidential elections in January

While a government has been seated, its stability is far from ensured. Given the need for 116 votes to pass legislation, at least two of the “big three” parties will need to support any proposed law for it to have a chance. A budget was passed over the opposition of every party other than PPD/PSD due to the abstention of the PS. Secretary-general José Luís Carneiro, leader of the PS, defended the party’s decisive abstention as an act of responsibility that prevented Portugal from “entering a new political crisis”.

While they may have avoided another parliamentary election for the time being, there will be another national election in Portugal in a few weeks. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s time in office is coming to a constitutionally-mandated close and there will be an election on January 18 to replace him.

The current front-runners are André Ventura - he of the (not) racist billboards - and former Navy Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo, who, running as an independent, has declined the endorsement of any traditional party. While Gouveia e Melo’s political views are not crystal clear, he did write in February 2025 an article for Expresso titled “Honouring Democracy”, in which, according to Wikipedia, he outlined his political profile, without commenting on a potential presidential bid. He situated himself as “between socialism and social-democracy” (referring to the centre-left and centre-right major parties in Portugal) and defended liberal democracy.

There are at least a dozen other candidates for President of the Republic but only one, Luís Marques Mendes of PSD, is currently polling with Ventura and Gouveia e Melo while 22% of the electorate remains undecided.

If none of the candidates garners more than 50% of the popular vote on January 18, there will be a runoff election on February 8 between the top two vote-getters. This seems the most likely scenario as of this writing with conventional wisdom coming down on the side of opposition to Ventura coalescing around Gouveia e Melo in February.

Still, should Ventura reach the runoff it would continue a meteoric rise: a party founded a mere six years ago with a single seat in parliament has seen its influence grow annually in election after election to the position it now holds as the unquestioned leader of the opposition.

So this is Portugal

If you still need convincing that Portugal is not a utopia, read this article about André Ventura.

Photo and caption taken from *Portugal Decoded*, which, if you’re not already subscribed to and you care about any of this, you need to support.

Or read about how members of Chega have openly engaged in misogynistic acts during parliamentary sessions.

Or how a Chega MP is publicly naming immigrant children attending a Portuguese preschool.

Or how Ventura is under investigation for remarks he made made just a few months ago about Roma.

Or hear how a friend of ours who has done nothing but build community here in Lisbon was told recently, to her face, to “watch out because we are taking our country back and we’ll expel all of you foreigners soon.”

André Ventura is the leader of the Portuguese political opposition. He is likely to finish second in the race for President next month. His political party - the second-largest party in the Portuguese legislature - has been named a hate group.

One significant difference between Portugal and the US is violence. We have not had the opportunity to see what happens if Ventura believes an election has been stolen from him. He has done nothing but gain power and influence since 2019 and his rhetoric has grown more and more brazen in recent months.

Does anyone expect violence in February? No.

Will things magically resolve after the election? Of course not.

What happens then? Your guess is as good as ours.

That’s all for now.

Love from Lisbon,

Scott & Amy