Selling fear: André Ventura, Chega and the making of Portugal’s far-right

For decades, Portugal stood out in western Europe for a notable absence — unlike most of its neighbours, it had no significant party on the radical right capable of challenging the political establishment, long dominated by the alternation between centre-left and centre-right forces.

That ended on 18 January this year.

In an election that now closely resembles patterns seen across Europe, the political centre showed clear signs of erosion, while the far-right emerged as a formidable challenger.

António José Seguro of the Socialist Party (PS) won the first round with 31.11 percent of the vote, but he was followed closely by André Ventura, founder of the far-right Chega party, who secured 23.52 percent.

As in several other European countries, the candidate backed by the political centre failed to achieve an outright majority in the first round.

Seguro is likely to prevail in the second round on 8 February 2026 — provided the remaining parties rally behind him against Ventura.

If elected, he would succeed Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who has served two consecutive terms as president as a member of the Social Democratic Party. Notably, the governing social democrats have so far refrained from endorsing the socialist candidate, while their own preferred contender garnered only 11 percent of the vote.

Although the Portuguese presidency is largely ceremonial, the election underscores a broader European trend: the weakening of the political centre and the growing appeal of parties at the margins, particularly on the right.

This shift matters.

While executive power rests primarily with the prime minister, the president retains significant constitutional authority, including the power to dissolve parliament in times of crisis — an option that carries real weight in an era of political volatility and crisis.

Chega and Ventura - from nowhere in six years

The far-right founder of Chega (meaning “Enough”), André Ventura, represents a new type of political personality as well as a larger political phenomenon that wants to break with the establishment. As a former sports TV commentator, he comes from showbusiness and is not a long-time politician socialised in the establishment.

As such, he sells himself as a representative of the common people.

But while he portrays himself as an “economic liberal, nationalist and conservative,” his contenders cite his anti-Romani, anti-Muslim, racist and sexist positions in media.

Like his European far-right siblings, he taps into the white fragility of European populations, rallying against “excessive immigration” and an alleged exploitation of the welfare system by immigrants.

He ran a billboard with the slogan “This isn’t Bangladesh” and proclaiming that “Portugal is ours” in a nativist fashion.

Ventura also has a long history of Islamophobia warning of an “Islamic wave” that poses a “real danger” to Europe and calling for “the drastic reduction of the Islamic presence in the European Union.”

Racist statements against the 200,000 members-strong Roma community, whom he alleges to have a “chronic problem” of “delinquency and violence,” is central to his discourse.

And scholars such as Hélder Prior and Miguel Andrade have argued in their studies that in Ventura’s discourse, “Muslims and Islam are portrayed as the most significant external threat to culture, endangering the erasure of Portuguese and European identity, culture, and traditional way of life.”

Through this discourse, Ventura succeeded in building his party, Chega, from scratch.

Founded in 2019 with just a single representative in the national parliament, Chega went on to win a staggering 50 seats in the 2024 elections, securing 18.07 percent of the vote.

Although the party is a recent creation, Ventura has made explicit symbolic appeals to Portugal’s authoritarian past.

'God, Country, Family, and Work'

Most notably, he has echoed the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar by reworking the Estado Novo slogan “God, Country, Family,” adopting instead “God, Country, Family, and Work” in 2021.

But his success doesn’t lie in rebranding old fascism, but rather in riding the contemporary anti-Muslim wave.

Part of this success story was based on mobilising against Muslims, whose total number does not surpass 36,000 people, which represents a tiny 0.44 percent of the total population.

But similar to Eastern Europe, where Islamophobia exists without Muslims, anti-Muslim mobilisation was a winning ticket for Chega.

In Portugal, as in other European countries, the rise of the far-right has pushed government policy toward a more restrictive stance.

In an initial vote, the Portuguese parliament approved a bill to ban face veils.

Reflecting the normalisation of Islamophobia across Western Europe, legislators framed the measure not as an attack on Muslim visibility or religious practice, but as a necessary step to protect women from an imagined oppression.

That the bill was supported by centrist parties on both the right and the left underscores the influence Chega has exerted in shaping these debates.

At the time, Ventura declared: “We are today protecting female members of parliament, your daughters, our daughters, from having to use burqas in this country one day,” casting the legislation as a defence of “women’s rights.”

In that vote, only two of the ten parties represented in parliament abstained showing the hegemonial power of the far-right in shaping the discourse around Islam and Muslims.

While Ventura is unlikely to win the presidency in 2026, his success as the leader of a newly formed far-right party points to a broader shift in Europe’s political landscape — one increasingly shaped by the normalisation of Islamophobia.

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