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Portugal is in the news after the "success" of Chega, the Portuguese far-right party. A lot of friends are talking about this.

Now I'm not deeply embedded in Portuguese politics the way I was in the UK, but I do have some observations as someone "observing" (I can vote in local elections, but not national ones yet).

Chega is the personal vanity project of Andre Ventura, a former TV pundit who ragequit the centre right Social Democrat Party (ignore the name, there are historical reasons it's called that). His entire thing is that he is an adult man throwing a temper tantrum against "the system".

This may sound very familiar, but Ventura is not, to my mind, any kind of Trump. He's not Farage either. He is riding a wave of discontent about the state of the Portuguese economy, and a population that has real grievances about housing and wages, which he is blaming on the usual suspects (immigrants, but not the rich sort, ethnic minorities, LGBT people, etc).

He is portrayed as "far right", but frankly he's probably slightly to the left of the Tories in the UK right now, or would be if he were a serious politician, which he is not.

Chega just came third on 18%. This is disturbing, but it's in-line with what you would expect for a "protest party" after the fall of the previous government due to a corruption scandal (and the details of said corruption are such that, again, were the Tories doing it, it wouldn't even register as something they were supposed to cover up, but the previous prime minister resigned over it anyway), and I suspect most of the people voting for Chega don't actually want or expect them to be in government. They're angry and they want people to know that they're angry.

Now Brits know first hand how dangerous this can be, after our own little electoral temper tantrum in 2016 resulted in us imposing economic sanctions on ourselves, but as I sad above, I don't think Ventura is any kind of Trump, or Farage, or Johnson. I don't think he has some sort of long term plan. He's a man child throwing a tantrum who likes to see his face on big billboards proclaiming himself some sort of knight fighting "the man".

If he actually got into government (and PSD are saying they won't work with him, but I don't see how they could form a government otherwise and we may be seeing a new election sooner rather than later), I don't think he would know what to do with it. Unlike Trump, I don't think his personal "angry man throwing a tantrum" brand would survive the transition to power. He'd end up like the Liberal Democrats did who, after getting 22% of the vote in 2010 (4% more than Chega just got), entered coalition and promptly destroyed themselves because they could no longer be that idealised opposition party that people protesting against the system felt able to vote for.

Chega and Ventura (and let's be honest, Chega is Ventura) are repulsive stains on civil society, but they are not indicative of a collapse in Portuguese democracy and a slide into fascism, nor is Portugal about to go the Hungary route.

This is not to say that we should be complacent, but I don't think that the sky is falling.

Anyway, that's what I think. I could be wrong, and frequently am when it comes to my read on politics, so this analysis is probably worth what you paid for it 😉

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