For years, Evalina Dias has diligently worked to combat racism in Portugal. But just how much remains to be done was brought into sharp relief earlier this month, she says, as the far-right Chega party – led by a politician whose views have been described by one opponent as “often xenophobic, racist” – catapulted into the country’s top echelons of power.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Dias, a board member with Djass, Portugal’s Association of African Descendants. “We had no idea that there were so many racists in Portugal. It’s like they were hidden.”
The country’s election yielded a deeply fractured parliament, in which the far-right appears poised to play a prominent role. The centre-right Democratic Alliance, made up of the Social Democratic party (PSD) and two smaller parties, claimed victory with 79 seats in the country’s 230-seat assembly.
The Socialist party, which has governed the country for the past eight years, was beaten into second place. But it was the third place finisher, Chega – whose seat count quadrupled from 12 to 48 – that raised eyebrows across the continent.
“It’s a really big threat for us,” says Dias. “It’s a threat for all people who are non-white in Portugal and it’s a threat for democracy.”
Few can say what will come next. The leader of the PSD, Luís Montenegro, has repeatedly ruled out any deals with Chega, over what he has described as the “often xenophobic, racist, populist and excessively demagogic” as views of its leader, André Ventura.
But the leader of the Socialists, Pedro Nuno Santos, cautioned his party against ignoring the message that had been sent by the more than a million people who voted for Chega. On Sunday, he said: “It is not the case that 18% of Portuguese are racists, but there are many angry Portuguese.”
Dias disagrees. “For our association, it’s like the 1 million votes he got, is 1 million votes of racists,” she says.
Her assessment is backed by the constant stream of rhetoric that Ventura has uttered since founding Chega five years ago. In 2020, he called for Joacine Katar Moreira, at the time one of three black MPs in parliament, to be “returned to her own country”, in a social media post Ventura later described as “obviously ironic”.
Dias chalked up Chega’s success to the country’s failure to properly address racism. “We don’t talk about it, we don’t discuss it, the Portuguese say: ‘Oh, we are not racist,’” she says.
This void has made it easier for Chega to scapegoat the country’s diverse communities for the country’s ills, despite data showing that migrants contribute nearly seven times more to the country’s public coffers than they receive.
Ventura initially carved out a national name for himself through a series of sustained attacks on the Roma community, accusing them of exploiting welfare benefits and alleging there is a “chronic problem” of “delinquency and violence” in the community.
“This is a huge lie,” says Bruno Gonçalves of Letras Nómadas, a grassroots organisation that supports the Roma community. But Ventura has long capitalised on the country’s animosity towards Roma for political gain, he says. “He knows that the Roma are the first flag to wave in order to climb the ladder of hate.”
About a third of the country’s 50,000-person Roma community lives in inadequate housing and their life expectancy is more than a decade less than other Portuguese, he says. “We feel racism on a daily basis,” Gonçalves adds. “We’ve been here five centuries and there are many asymmetries that continue to provoke situations of inequality.”
Despite all this, things had started to improve in recent years: municipalities had begun to include Roma in their policies, education initiatives had been launched and a national strategy for Roma integration was tabled.
But as Chega stepped up its attacks, these efforts ground to a halt. Gonçalves believes politicians started to become nervous about working with the community. “They’re afraid of losing votes,” he says. “There were things that were really good that were being developed, but with Chega, things got much, much worse..”
Another community that has come under attack from Ventura is the tens of thousands of Muslims who live in the country, with the Chega leader describing immigration from Muslim-majority countries as a “danger to our women and our cities” and calling for a drastic reduction of Muslim presence in the EU.
Chega’s quadrupling of votes was seen “with concern,” says Mahomed Iqbal, who heads the Islamic Community of Lisbon (CIL). “They’ve got over a million voters. And that came a little bit as a surprise.”
He attributed part of the surge in support to voter fatigue with the two parties that have dominated the country’s politics since its return to democracy. “Some of it – if not quite a lot of it – came from protest voters,” he says.
The community has long done its best to build bridges with Chega, with the board unanimously agreeing to a 2022 request by Chega to visit the city’s central mosque, echoing the kind of tours regularly provided to the public, other political parties and students across Portugal.
A delegation of seven people from Chega turned up, spending 90 minutes touring a sports complex used by various teams in the area and learning about the mosque’s outreach programmes, including one that, at the time, was providing hundreds of free meals every fortnight to anyone who came.
Though Ventura was not among the visitors from Chega, Iqbal describes it as an opportunity to showcase the community’s pride in being European, Portuguese and Muslim. “By visiting the mosque, they at least had an opportunity to see with their own eyes exactly what it is about, who we are, how we behave.”
The party’s members were seemingly a “little bit surprised” by what they saw, he says. “In fact, that’s what they said.”
The visit hinted at one way in which the Muslim community in Lisbon is looking to tackle the surge of the far right. Gonçalves says: “For centuries we’ve carried another name within ours and that is resistance.
“My ancestors had resistance flowing through their veins and so do we. We’re not going to ever allow a Chega, or an André Ventura, to annihilate us.”
