Love him or hate him, Ventura has done more in six years than anyone thought possible
With international focus being on the ‘rise of the extreme right’ in Portugal, and lack of absolute majority still for Luís Montenegro’s centre-right government, the reality is that these elections were ‘all about André Ventura’: Portugal’s marmite politician; a kind of Latin Nigel Farage (some might say better looking) but every bit as groundbreaking.
André Ventura has taken CHEGA to heights that no-one would have thought possible less than six years ago when he won his sole seat in parliament, with less than 68,000 votes.
Those votes today stand at 1,345,575 – and this in spite of some truly abysmal ‘scandals within the party’, one of them involving a Lisbon councillor paying an underage youth for oral sex after publicly recommending chemical castration for pedophiles. No matter the embarrassments within the ranks, CHEGA just keeps on attracting converts, and has clinched 22.56% of the country’s votes, taking 58 MPs into parliament (eight more than last year).
Only AD secured more new MPs, bringing nine new faces to the Republican Assembly – and there are still the emigré votes to count later this week. It could be that CHEGA ends up with even more MPs than PS Socialists – but there are absolutely no doubts anymore: CHEGA’s message is resonating with the country – and those that vote for the party cannot be dismissed as racist misfits.
“The system is trembling”, Ventura’s right-hand man in parliament, MP Pedro Pinto enthused last night. “CHEGA has definitively broken the two-party system, showing itself to be a great alternative to government”.
A delighted Ventura, showing no signs of the acid reflux/ high blood pressure that saw him collapse twice in the final days of the campaign, held his arms up high in jubilation last night, declaring that his party had “defeated the party of Soares (…) and swept away Bloco de Esquerda…”
The man who once toyed with the idea of becoming a priest did not get his ‘dream’ of winning the elections outright, but one is left with the distinct feeling that there is still a lot more that Mr Ventura could achieve – and this is before considering the Patriots for Europe movement (of which CHEGA is part) with its message not so long ago, “we are the future”.
In the perspective of today’s Financial Times, CHEGA’s result means “Portugal joins a list of western European countries where far-right parties are either the second-biggest political force or close to it, including Germany, Sweden, Finland and Belgium. In the Netherlands and Austria, far-right parties have won the largest share of the vote in elections in the past two years”.
Like other international news sources, the FT sees CHEGA’s success as having been “fuelled by public unease over immigration in a country of 10 million where the foreign-born population has jumped to 15%, from 4% in 2017”.
The reality may be more nuanced: citizens resonate with CHEGA’s desire to ‘change the system’ in a country where very few benefit from it. This is going to be the greatest challenge as the country moves forwards – how to keep citizens’ trust in political decision-makers so that Portugal can grow sustainably.
