March 11, 2024 - 11:15am
Yesterday Portugal held a general election which shouldn’t have happened. Just two years ago, the ruling Socialists won a famous victory with 42% of the vote and 120 seats. That was enough for a majority government — until, that is, a scandal led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and to fresh elections.
The Socialist Party was heavily punished by the voters, losing a third of its seats and demonstrating that it’s not just the British Conservative Party which is capable of blowing a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Yet what should have been an easy win for Portugal’s centre-right opposition fell short of expectations. The Democratic Alliance (AD) finished first, but by a painfully thin margin — less than 1% ahead of the Socialists and with just a couple more seats.
This underperformance has been blamed on a farcical mix-up between AD and ADN — the latter being the initials of a tiny fringe party that attracted a surprisingly high number of votes. However, a far bigger shock to the system is the surge in support for Chega — a Right-wing populist party whose name means “enough”.
In 2022, Chega won 7% of the vote and 12 seats — enough to come third but leaving it well behind the main parties of the centre-left and centre-right. This time, its vote share more than doubled to 18% and its seat tally quadrupled to 48. Portugal has three main parties now — and that presents a nightmare for the political establishment.
The “tri-polarisation” of Portuguese politics means that neither the centre-left nor the centre-right can command a majority on its own. Though the Democratic Alliance has the most seats (79), that’s still well short of what’s needed in the 230-seat parliament.
A deal with Chega would fix that, but there’s a catch. Luís Montenegro, the AD leader, has previously promised not to work with the populists. Like other European conservatives, he faces an excruciating dilemma: whether to break his promise and allow the Right-wingers a share of power, or to maintain the cordon sanitaire by doing a deal with the centre-left instead.
Elsewhere in Europe, the advance of populism has forced conservatives to work with their traditional social democrat opponents. For instance, in Germany a sequence of so-called “grand coalitions” kept Angela Merkel in power for most of her 16-year reign. Then there’s the European Parliament, which is controlled by a permanent power-sharing stitch-up between the centre-right, centre-left and liberal blocs.
However, constant compromise comes at a price. Whether it happens through formal deals or through an informal drift to the soggy centre, elections become less meaningful and governing establishments become calcified. Ongoing problems — such as uncontrolled immigration or Portugal’s truly appalling housing crisis — are left to fester and voter frustrations build up.
The irony is that the closed-shop centrism designed to exclude the populists can work to their advantage — as it has in Germany with the rise of the AfD and in the Netherlands with Geert Wilders’s recent election victory. Portugal is yet another warning to centrist politicians globally. Five years ago, Chega didn’t even exist — but today it has broken the national party system.
Of course, this isn’t the 1930s. Voters are not becoming more extreme. But they are losing patience with an establishment for whom chronic failure is no reason to relinquish power. Chega didn’t choose its name for nothing.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeI was interested in what exactly Chega was saying so wandered over to Wikipedia.
I would say the general thrust is right of centre and with a couple of caveats (chemical castration for example!!) would not class most of their ideas as extreme.
Eurosceptic, small state, lower tax, tough on illegal immigrants and tough(er) on crime than the centre left is in Portugal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chega_(political_party)
Yes, this news item would have definitely been improved by explaining Chega’s basic platform. Thank you for your precis of the wiki article.
where does chemical castration come into it?
Just after the puberty blockers.
For sex offenders. But the drug of choice ‘Lupron’ which was deemed too dangerous for the rapists is now happily prescribed to MTF transgender teenage boys.
Chemical castration for kiddy fiddlers is a policy I’d support. But then I’m to the right of Vlad the Impaler ;0)
You mean one more country has signaled its dissatisfaction with the status quo?
“Then there’s the European Parliament, which is controlled by a permanent power-sharing stitch-up between the centre-right, centre-left and liberal blocs”.
The European Parliament is a pseudo-legislative lower chamber, in the form of a largely impotent elected assembly that has no permanent home, no power of taxation, no control over EU expenditure (it is merely confined to voting yes/no on the EU budget as a whole), no power to make executive appointments, no right to initiate legislation merely the ability to express a non binding vote for amendment or rejection of it, and to make a non binding request that the Commission prepare legislation.
The European Parliament is the weakest of any of the EU institutions.
The vast majority of the decisions of the Council, Commission and Coreper* concern domestic issues that were traditionally debated in national legislatures. But in the EU system these become the object of the sort of secretive diplomatic negotiations traditionally reserved for foreign or military affairs. What the core system of the EU effectively does is to convert the open agenda and politics of parliaments into the closed world of diplomatic negotiation. The entire European projects from its beginnings in the ECSC (Coal and Steel) right through to the EU has acted as the mechanism for a vast expansion of diplomatic process and methods into, and replacing, traditional partisan democratic practices.
In fact as as one observer, Professor Alan Johnson wrote, “the only people who listen to European Members of Parliament are the interpreters”.
https://hurryupharry.net/2016/06/20/why-i-am-voting-leave-by-professor-alan-johnson/
“I am for Leave because the EU political project has four built-in and fatal flaws: it is undemocratic, neoliberal, corrupt and a bad foreign policy actor in a dangerous world.”
* COREPER, from French Comité des représentants permanents, is the Committee of Permanent Representatives in the European Union, made up of the head or deputy head of mission from the EU member states in Brussels. The secrecy, permanence and ubiquity of Coreper have led to its members being tagged, by those who know of them at all, as the “men who really run Europe”. Alan Clark, the late former British minister, recorded in his diaries the sour but flattering view that “it makes the slightest difference to the conclusions of a meeting what Ministers say at it. Everything is decided, horse-traded off by officials at Coreper The ministers arrive on the scene at the last minute, hot, tired, ill or drunk (sometimes all of these together), read out their piece and depart.”
I note that the Belgian Police have gone very quiet about their investigations into Qatargate and Morrocogate. Having nailed a couple of MEPs and staff, they were reported to be looking at corruption within the European Commission and more bribes from Qatar and Morocco. I must admit that I was surprised that they got as far as they did, and my expectations of further revelations are low.
Good summary. Thank you.
The press and TV media in Europe and the USA has become so conditioned by the ‘progressive left’ disguise of soft Marxism that even in a platform like UnHerd the writer meekly and obediently trots out text placing genuine political parties as on the ‘far right’, as ‘populist’, as some kind of bogeyman political ‘rubicon’.
Read what Chega and what Reform actually have to say in their manifestos and what you find is mainstream conservative thinking from the 1980s and 1990s.
Reform is what I as a 60 year old former Tory voter would regard as mainstream Tory from Thatcher’s term.
It is the mainstream of politics in Europe and the UK which has moved sharply and radically to the Left.
We are then gaslighted by journalists that somehow we are wrong and guilty of thought crime and ‘on the wrong side of history’.
No we are conditioned to accept the creep of marxist belief systems, of critical race theory, anti white attitudes, queer rights, of acceptance of mass immigration of the BAME hordes, of the collapse of family, of trans rubbish, of sky high taxation, and net zero taxation and control of our lives.
Any party like the Tories or the Portugese right of centre main party – who refuse to work with new right of centre parties must be eviscerated by the electorate as anti democratic and in league with the far left.
Well said! I’m with you.
Me too! Whenever the left wins an election, no one ever says the populists won. It is becoming more apparent in Portugal, and has been the case in the U.S., that the so called “populists” just want less government in general and don’t want one or two parties controlling things only for their own enrichment.
Besides, if “the people” vote in great numbers and disrupt the elitist’s view of how things should be run, is not that Democracy in action? And the suppression of that vote the opposite?
To be fair the article says right not far right. I really don’t know what “populism” means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism#:~:text=In%20this%20definition%2C%20the%20term,group%20against%20%22the%20elite%22.
“Populism is a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of “the people” and often juxtapose this group with “the elite“.[1] It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment.[2] The term developed in the late 19th century and has been applied to various politicians, parties and movements since that time, often as a pejorative. Within political science and other social sciences, several different definitions of populism have been employed, with some scholars proposing that the term be rejected altogether.[1][3]”
A party that puts common sense and proper science ahead of all the BS we have been fed ever since the Phoney Blair / Alastair Campbell days and speaks using unambiguous plain English would get my vote.
That’s about the size of it. Populism is not a defined political ideology but rather a rejection by the people of whatever political ideology is prevailing at the time. Populism is defined by what it isn’t, and right now that means populism is anti-globalist, anti-elite, anti-corporate, anti-immigration, and anti-government. A hundred years ago populism in America was against different things but had the same spirit of protest/reform/change spirit and criticized existing power structures as corrupt and against the peoples will and interest. The common thread is political anger and dissatisfaction. The people who first declared themselves ‘populist’ in America during the latter half of the 1800’s took the name and theme from one of the earliest known examples of partisan politics, Julius Caesar’s ‘populares’ faction which overthrew the aristocrat dominated ‘optimate’ faction in a combination of political persuasion and military victory. It is useful as a political term insofar as it recognizes the critical element, political anger, as crucial. Populism can’t exist if the government itself is widely perceived to be aligned with ‘the people’.
“Five years ago, Chega didn’t even exist — but today it has broken the national party system.”
Seems to me that the ones who broke the party system are the ones refusing the work with parties voted into power by the disgruntled populace.
Aye, what amazes me is that they think that these tactics will accomplish anything. They’ve entrenched their globalist policies and combined them with academic nonsense about race and environmental puritanism, then watched populist parties spring up basically everywhere and slowly gain power until they had enough votes to deny either of the parties a majority. They then face a choice of whether to ally with the populists or the other side and choose the latter. They do all of this seemingly thinking the people won’t notice or won’t care, despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. At what point do they realize their policies are failing and driving more and more people to vote for any opposition, no matter how radical or crazy they might seem. That would be a fairly simple conclusion given the established facts. I would expect even most twelve year olds could figure this one out. We’re past the point where they look incompetent or stubborn and approaching the point where they look desperate and in denial. The people see this and the people are not as stupid or gullible as they think.
These tactics ARE accomplishing a lot for the Elite. Giving them time to change the electorate by bringing in Outsiders who will be beholden to them.
They do have another choice I’m afraid, Steve. Repression. It’s already begun.
Why do people conflate Thatcher with conservatism? She didn’t conserve anything! She was a turbo charged economic liberal who saw the individual as king and would tear down anything that got in the way of that. Society and community were just things to be overcome
Thatcher, the mother of Blair. It took so long for the effects of her policies to work their way through British society that conservatives don’t realise she liquidated the world they’d like to have preserved.
I am your age and feel Reform is more like Thatcher’s Wets. That is how far left and anti-British the establishment has become.
Use your enemy’s vocabulary and you lose the war before you’ve begun to fight. He chooses the very terms that come from your mouth. ‘Far-right’ is a misnomer, UNLESS the term ‘far-left’ is used with equal frequency, which it isn’t.
‘Populism’ is simply a reaction to the parasitism of the suburban graduate class which helps itself to all the wealth via artificial house price inflation and mass immigration whilst intimidating it’s critics by shrieking ‘racist’ and this or that ‘phobe’ at them in the style of the idiot child Champagne Socialist on this forum.
I support the far right because they are the only ones taking Islamism seriously.
They aren’t ‘far-right’, they’re ‘damn right’!
This article puts its finger on a major problem for so-called conservative parties. There used to be a time when conservative parties followed a policy of no-one to their right. In other words, they accepted that they were a wide coalition, and they didn’t shun voters because they were deemed smelly. Now they do. The best example are the Tories: their model is T.May. Everybody T.May dislikes she labels smelly, and blackballs them. Lee Anderson is smelly. He’s left for Reform. T.May Tories are now toast with working class voters.
Another country dissatisfied with politicians moving to the left, contrary to what voters tell them. They then seem surprised at the outcome when they are punished in the polls.
So…..in short, the voters are turning against various uniparties all over the west because they are feckless, incompetent and make the people poorer and unhappy.
Ok.
Where is the issue?
No it’s not the 1930s. But there’s this. Chega, ’til now has successfully hoovered up the votes of poor working class and young Portuguese who have been stiffed by the powers to be in ways very familiar; priced out of housing, wages held down, immigrants (still a trickle, but wait) welcomed. Last night Chega was strongest in Faro district (Algarve) where years ago the Communist Party had their fortress.
So far the middle classes and the ‘professionals’ disdain Chega. They disdained H”tl#r to begin with. H. got lucky when depression and hyperinflation smashed the German middle class. Some of them became his most rabid supporters. Yes, teachers (Himmler), architects (Speer), lawyers galore, doctors (Mengele).
Hyperinflation is not coming to Europe this time. But two other middle class professional killers are advancing fast – AI and Net Zero.
When those two really hit home Chega and others will enjoy a stampede of recruits.
Elsewhere in Europe, the advance of populism has forced conservatives to work with their traditional social democrat opponents
This fact proves that the elites hate their people, and the press serve the elite.
Politics is one of the few jobs where failure is rewarded with promotion. Showing up is rewarded with promotion or job retention at the very least. Ditto for tenured professors and other public servants who leech off of the public and their money.
Soon the Antichrist will appear. All the signs are out there. He rules for the 7 years between the rapture of the church and the return of Jesus. Read the bible for all the political news for the next 10 years. The biggest sign of the times is the revival of the valley of dried bones. The revival of Israel in 1948. Jesus said that this generation will not pass away until all has come to pass. A 12-year-old Bar Mitza Jew in 1948 is scheduled to die at age 90 in 2026 which is 7 years prior to the 2000 anniversary of Christ’s assentation into Heaven. This assumes that the generation referred to goes by the Biblical standard 90-year lifespan and not by someone who lives to 114.
Where does the “Biblical standard 90-year lifespan” come from?
For the days of man are three score years and ten or, if he be of great strength, four score.
I’m hoping and praying we can rid ourselves of the two party system in the United States.