Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Portugal’s far-right Chega party, which cemented its place as the third force in national politics in Sunday’s general election, has decried an effort by the country’s two mainstream parties to keep it out of power.
The centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) narrowly won but failed to secure sufficient seats to govern alone. Chega leader André Ventura, who has long criticised the country’s two-party system, said on Monday that a minority AD government enabled by the centre-left Socialists risked depriving voters of their legitimate representation.
“The Portuguese people today sent a powerful message to the heart of democracy and that is that they do not want the past,” Ventura said. “The Portuguese want the future.”
AD leader Luís Montenegro said on Monday that he would stick to his campaign pledge of not forming a pact with Chega. Changing his mind now, he said, would be “evil to myself, my party and my country”.
The likely result, however, will be a fragile AD minority government whose power is limited.
There is no love lost between the AD and the Socialists. The prospect of a grand coalition between them is zero. But they are ready to do enough to keep Chega — branded by both as racist and xenophobic — at bay.
Pedro Nuno Santos, leader of the Socialist party, which came in second with 28.7 per cent of the vote, said he would not become a permanent “crutch” for the AD. But he indicated that he would allow a minority government to form without Chega. By simply abstaining from key parliamentary votes on government formation, the Socialists would let the AD in.
Marina Costa Lobo, director of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences, said the two main parties had a shared interest in avoiding repeat elections given the risk that Chega could perform even better.
“So they do have an incentive to co-operate,” she said. “But it won’t be very explicit because there is a left-right logic that has been reinforced in the past few years and there’s quite a bit of polarisation.” Santos, she noted, was more leftwing than the outgoing Socialist prime minister, António Costa, whose resignation over a corruption scandal triggered the election.
Ventura, 41, a former trainee priest and football pundit, called on other politicians to respect the will of his voters. “Chega asked to become the centrepiece of the political system and it achieved that result. So now is the time for responsibility,” he said.
Chega’s success was powered by support from former Socialist voters, former centre-right voters and young first-time voters, whose concerns ranged from low wages, soaring housing costs and corruption to immigration and Portugal’s small Roma community. After the results came in, Ventura continued to position the party as both scourge and victim of the establishment.
Francisco Seixas da Costa, a former Portuguese deputy foreign minister, said a key test for the AD would be the 2025 budget, due to be put to a vote towards the end of the year. Santos’s Socialists, he said, were likely to oppose it.
Chega, meanwhile, would be a powerful force, and one that won more than 1mn votes, Seixas da Costa said. “We need to realise one thing. These are not fascists. They are not the extreme right. They are angry voters [who] are convinced the country is in chaos.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela in Madrid
Read the full article here
