His giant portrait had been skillfully plastered on the railings of the garden of São Bento, the park which adjoins the assembly of the Republic, in Lisbon. André Ventura has won his bet. His far-right party, Chega (“That’s enough”) made a historic breakthrough in the legislative elections on Sunday January 30.
A few days ago, pedestrians walked past the posters of the “Portuguese Zemmour” with indifference. However, voters were 7.2% to grant their votes to this former star of the small screen, who became famous by commenting for the private channel CMTV on the matches of Benfica, the football club of the capital, then the criminal news items, while writing a column in the Correio da Manhã, the local Figaro.
small political earthquake
Ventura managed to win twelve seats of deputies, against only one in the outgoing room, his. A small earthquake for Portugal, almost half a century after the Carnation Revolution and the end of the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.
This is the other big surprise of this early election, caused by the refusal of the far left, in October, to vote for the 2022 budget drawn up by the government of socialist Antonio Costa. Contradicting the polls which gave him neck and neck with the main centre-right party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the outgoing Prime Minister won an absolute majority (117 MPs) with 41.7% of the vote. The PSD did not reach 30% and the extreme left collapsed.
Not a surprise
“The result of these elections surprised by the impressive nature of the transfer from the radical left to the socialist party. But the emergence of Chega is not so surprising,” says political scientist António Costa Pinto, professor at the University of Lisbon. The latter recalls that André Ventura had obtained nearly 12% of the votes in the presidential election of January 2021, only one point behind the candidate of the socialist party who came in second position behind the head of state, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Although Chega achieved lower scores in the municipal elections last September, “he nevertheless demonstrated, here again, the capacity of the far right to mobilize strongly among the voters of the PSD and the Christian Democratic Party (CDS-PP), who has practically disappeared from the political scene”, analyzes Mr. Pinto.
Aged 39, André Ventura first entered politics under the colors of the PSD, to fight the Communists at the town hall of Loures, in the suburbs of Lisbon. He founded Chega in 2019, without relying on a very coherent ideology. On the eve of the legislative elections, the weekly Visão noted that its program was “in nine pages” in all and for all.
Anti-system
According to António Costa Pinto, “Ventura is the prototype of the leader of the radical right”. The president of Chega mobilizes on classic themes: the fight against corruption, against socialism and against the “system”. Like Eric Zemmour, notes this expert, he feeds “on the themes of law, order, the defense of the police against petty crime, the amalgam, too, between housing estates and violence”.
Like the founder of Reconquête, he “instrumentalizes history and the idea of national identity”, accusing the left of questioning Portugal’s glorious past, colonialism and the great discoveries. When the Frenchman revisits the Vichy regime, the Portuguese speaks nostalgically of Salazar, but without insisting too much, the dictatorship remaining associated, even in the ranks of the right, with underdevelopment and poverty.
Finally, like Zemmour, Ventura must regularly render accounts to justice. He has a habit of violently attacking Gypsies and immigrants, whom he describes as “bandits”. “The two men have in common to be more recent than Le Pen and to be able to mobilize discontent and disbelief towards the political class on a populist line”, summarizes Patricia Lisa, Portuguese political scientist at the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid.