As the Portuguese election campaign got under way earlier this month there were acrimonious scenes in the picturesque northern city of Aveiro, where André Ventura, the candidate for the far-right Chega party, was seeking to win support.
Members of the Roma community had gathered to protest against the politician, chanting “fascist” and “racist” at him as he strolled the streets and stopped to speak to the media.
“Chega must not take control of our country, that would be a disgrace,” Belarmina Fernandes, one of the protesters, told journalists, as she called for “hate to stop being fuelled by André Ventura.”
“We encourage our children to study, to work,” she continued. “I work, every one of us who is here is trained, has studied, to make something of themselves.”
Ventura, a 42-year-old former lawyer and football commentator, responded by saying: “There are some who work, there is a big majority who do not – they make women get married at 13, live separately from the rest of the community.”
He added: “I’m not the fascist, they are the ones who want separate rules for themselves in Portugal, and I cannot accept that.”
The protest was small, but similar scenes were repeated over the following days in the towns of Braga and Viana do Castelo. They have drawn attention to Chega’s attempts to cast the Portuguese Roma community, believed to be around 50,000-strong, as work-shy and lawless. As Sunday’s election looms the accusations of racism against Ventura and his party’s polling success have also placed the spotlight on his attitude to immigrants.
In 2017 the former Portuguese prime minister António Guterres said: “Portugal is a country where populism isn’t a vote-winner.” Chega only won one seat in the general election two years after the UN secretary general’s sweeping statement, suggesting that Portugal was indeed an outlier, immune to the right-wing populism and anti-immigrant feeling that was spreading across much of Europe.
But since then the far right’s fortunes have improved dramatically just as Portugal’s reputation for political stability has taken a nose-dive. In the 2022 election Chega secured 12 seats, before its major breakthrough in 2024, becoming the third parliamentary force with 50 seats.
Chega’s rise has been driven by its calls for a clampdown on immigration, which has increased substantially in recent years.
The migrant population has nearly quadrupled since 2017 and is now about 1.6 million, according to the Integration, Migration and Asylum Agency (AIMA), making up about 15 per cent of the population. In the wake of the country’s 1974 transition from dictatorship to democracy, Portugal’s immigrants came mainly from former colonies such as Angola, Cape Verde and Brazil. Now many migrants come from the Indian subcontinent and eastern Europe.
António Costa Pinto, of the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, says that until recently values of inclusion and tolerance were embraced across the political spectrum.
“There was the idea, even on the old radical right, that Portugal is not a racist society, that Portuguese colonialism was different, that the Portuguese were different, a society with the vocation to mix with others,” he says.
“But the attitudes of the Portuguese are changing when it comes to immigration. Chega is introducing a more xenophobic kind of discourse – and it’s working. Chega has broken that political culture on the right.”
A key part of that rhetoric has been to link immigration to crime, and Ventura has described Portugal as “a paradise for banditry, which can enter our territory with impunity”.
A global peace index rates Portugal the seventh safest country in the world, although migrants face increasing hostility. A study published by the Casa Brasil in February found that 80 per cent of immigrants interviewed had suffered hate crime due to their nationality.
With Chega polling strongly as the election approaches, it appears to have influenced the government. Earlier this month the centre-right administration of Luís Montenegro announced the imminent deportation of 18,000 undocumented migrants, whose residency applications had been rejected by the AIMA, with another 110,000 cases due to be processed. This follows the decision last year to end a policy introduced by the previous Socialist administration allowing non-EU migrants without employment contracts to request residency after a year of contributing to the social security system.
Montenegro‘s Democratic Alliance (AD) conservative coalition is leading polls, with the Socialist Party in second place. Ahead of his victory in last year’s election Montenegro ruled out governing with Chega, describing Ventura as “xenophobic, racist, populist”, meaning he had to form a fragile minority administration which fell apart in March.
Yet as the migration issue has become increasingly dominant, the Socialist Party candidate, Pedro Nuno Santos, has warned of the “Trumpification” of Montenegro, and he accused the conservative coalition of trying “to fight it out with Chega, move closer to Chega, because in reality there is no difference in political point of view or ideas”.
The government has sought to bat away the Trump comparison and insists it is correcting years of erroneous immigration policies implemented by the Socialist Party. “The government has shown it is not radical,” said António Leitão Amaro, spokesman for the administration. “Neither doors wide open nor doors all shut.”
