The sun-drenched Algarve region on Portugal’s southern coast is a spot where guitar-playing backpackers gather near fragrant orange trees and digital nomads hunt for a laid-back atmosphere. This is not exactly what involves mind once we imagine a bastion of far-right political sentiment.
But it was in the Algarve region that the anti-establishment Chega party got here first in national elections this month, upsetting Portuguese politics and raising latest concerns amongst the European establishment. Nationwide, Chega received 18 percent of the vote.
“This is a strong signal to Europe and the world,” said João Paulo da Silva Graça, the newly elected MP from Chega, sitting at the party’s latest headquarters in the Algarve as tourists asked for vegan custard tarts at the bakery downstairs. “Our values must prevail.”
Chega, which implies “enough” in Portuguese, is the first far-right party to achieve popularity on the Portuguese political scene since 1974 and the end of the nationalist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Its recipe for success combined guarantees of greater law and order with stricter immigration measures and appeals to economic resentment.
Chega’s breakthrough showed Portugal to be the latest version of a well-recognized dilemma across Europe, wherein the onslaught of far-right parties makes it increasingly difficult for mainstream rivals to avoid them.
The leader of Portugal’s center-right coalition that won the election has refused to ally with Chega, but experts say the result will likely be an unstable minority government that will not last long.
Chega has once more shown that the taboos that kept far-right parties out of power, and above all the long shadow of the right-wing dictatorship of the last century, are falling. Today, the far right has gained, amongst others: in Italy, Spain and Germany.
Portugal was considered an exception. It emerged from the Salazar dictatorship as a progressive society that supported liberal drug laws and showed little appetite for the far right. In recent years, it has grow to be a dynamically developing tourist destination, filled with foreign investments, emigrants and a developing economy.
Still, greater than 1,000,000 Portuguese voted this month in what many saw as a protest vote against Chega.
The mainstream socialist and conservative social democratic parties have presided over a painful financial crisis and difficult period of austerity in recent a long time. Yet even with the country’s recent economic recovery, many individuals have felt abandoned, anxious and forgotten.
An enormous variety of young Portuguese are leaving the country. Many of those that remain work for low wages which have not kept pace with inflation and have made their prices unaffordable in an unaffordable housing market. Public services are under pressure.
Chega campaigned on guarantees of upper wages and higher conditions to employees who the party believed had been impoverished by a greedy elite. She fought against men’s and girls’s bathrooms in schools and restitution for former colonies.
The investigation into corruption in clean energy projects that brought down the socialist government last 12 months has given Chega one other talking point with which to attack the ruling class.
The party’s message appealed to many Portuguese who had not previously voted and attracted young voters due to its wide reach on social media. This also had an impact on voters in the Algarve, who had reliably voted for the Socialist Party in the past.
“Here we have to work, work, work and we get nothing,” said Pedro Bonanca, a Chega voter who ferries tourists by boat to the fishing island of Culatra off the Algarve coast.
“When I ask older people why they vote for the Socialist Party, all they can say is that they led us out of dictatorship,” said 25-year-old Bonanca. “But I don’t know anything about it. It was a long time ago.”
At the top of Instagram’s search bar was André Ventura, a charismatic former soccer commentator who trained as a priest before founding Chega in 2019.
In earlier campaigns, Chega used the slogan “God, Fatherland, Family, Work”, similar to the “God, Fatherland, Family” slogan of the Salazar dictatorship. Before the last election, Chega promised a mix of social policies that experts called unrealistic, including plans to increase the minimum wage and pensions while cutting taxes.
“Chega has become a kind of collection of all the anxieties,” said António Costa Pinto, a political scientist at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon.
In the Algarve region, Chega turned to underpaid waiters with unstable jobs, whose prices are lower than in their hometowns or who are forced to emigrate. The party’s message resonated with aging fishermen who had to continue working to earn a living. He spoke to farmers who said they felt abandoned and that the government had prioritized watering golf courses despite looming drought.
“If we die, it will be because of them,” farmer Pedro Cabrita said of the government. “My vote for Chega is a vote of protest,” he said, looking anxiously at his orange grove, which he feared might dry up this summer.
In Olhão, an impoverished tourist town where Chega won almost 30 percent of the vote, fishmonger José Manuel Fernandes wondered why, despite Portugal being in the European Union, he could not aspire to the lifestyle of the German or French tourists around him.
“In the summer, I see couples here having fun, living in campers,” said Mr. Fernandes, who voted for Chega, as he cleaned a giant cuttlefish. “I’ve desired to go on holiday abroad for 30 years,” he added, “but the moment never got here.”
Economists say Portugal, which started from a worse economic position when it joined the European Union in 1986, has made progress but has not achieved the productivity gains needed to catch up with wealthier European partners. Instead, it remains a relative bargain for European tourists and retirees, while many Portuguese feel increasingly robbed.
In the seaside town of Albufeira, as British girls wearing winking bunny ears roamed the streets, Tiago Capela Rito, a 30-year-old waiter, closed the cocktail bar where he worked. Even though he has been working since he was 15, he still lives with his mother because he cannot afford his own apartment, he added.
He had never voted before, but he voted for Chega. “Ventura tells us that we don’t have to leave the country to survive,” said Mr. Rito, who combines construction and kitchen work in the off-season, “that we can stay here and have a life.”
Nearby, Luís Araújo, 61, a waiter who also voted for Chega, said his 25-year-old son earned more than three times his salary at a Dublin restaurant.
“Our youth are leaving and these guys are staying here,” he said of the influx of workers from Nepal and India who have arrived to fill low-wage jobs.
Although the number of immigrants coming to Portugal is smaller than to Italy or Spain, Ventura saw the recent influx of immigrants from South Asia as a threat.
“The European Union is being replaced demographically by the children of immigrants,” he said in Parliament in 2022, recalling the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. “No one wants Europe to consist mainly of individuals from other continents in 20 years.”
For some, Chega’s rise has revived old concerns, especially among members of the Roma community, which was one of Ventura’s early targets.
Some older Portuguese also found the specter of the resurgence of the far right wing disturbing.
While cleaning the nets of small crabs and cuttlefish, 67-year-old Vitór Silvestre, a fisherman from Culatra, said he still remembers how, during the dictatorship years, he was afraid to talk to a shoemaker or even to his friends because he never knew who might be an informant.
“And now we are voting for the far right again?” he asked.
Tiago Carrasco reported from Faro, Portugal.
