Meet Portugal’s new hard-right kingmakers

Portugal goes to the polls this weekend for parliamentary elections and it looks likely to become the latest European country in which a populist hard right party shakes up politics.

Chega – which means ‘enough’ – was only founded in 2019, yet it is forecast to more than double the 12 seats it won at the 2022 election. This would make the party, led by Andre Ventura, a charismatic former football pundit, potential kingmakers in a new conservative coalition government. Ventura is no stranger to controversy, not least over comments he made about Romani people (he has said the Portuguese government needs to ‘resolve the issue’). Yet the party’s right-wing position on a range of key issues has won over many Portuguese. 

Ventura’s Chega share the same slate of policies and attitudes that have brought the populist right to the gates of power across Europe: opposition to mass immigration, a crackdown on Islamist extremism, euroscepticism, and resistance to ‘woke’ culture. They