Tempting as the tables of savoury pastries were, and strong as the voice of the shaven-headed singer belting out Phil Collins was, they were not the lure that had drawn 200 people to a remote wedding venue in northern Portugal on a cold and ink-black Wednesday evening.
Despite the sign at the opposite end of the hall reading “Let’s get this party started”, the audience’s attention was more focused on a huge campaign poster behind the singer that offered a less hedonistic exhortation: “Portugal needs a CLEAN-UP.”
At the side of the stage, ringed by colleagues, admirers and a skittish security team that counts a former Olympic shot-putter among its muscle, was the man wielding the political mop.
For many disgruntled Portuguese voters, André Ventura, the former football pundit who founded the far-right Chega party five years ago, is the obvious choice as the country prepares to head to the polls in Sunday’s snap general election.
While his political opponents warn that Ventura and his populism will drag Portugal back to the past, his supporters see him as the champion of an electorate that is weary of the business-as-usual bipartisan system, as the scourge of corruption and as the only politician willing to call things as he sees them and shout “Chega!” (“Enough!”).
Polls suggest that although Chega is set to finish third behind the centre-right Democratic Socialist party (PSD) and the ruling Socialist party (PS) in the election, it could take 15% to 20% of the vote, making it a potential kingmaker for a new rightwing administration.
If the atmosphere in the large function room was not quite that of a stadium rock concert – it felt more like an odd collision of family wedding, open-mic night, barn dance and political lecture – the welcome extended to the Chega leader was full-throated.
As soon as he arrived in a dark suit, striped shirt, pink tie and customary stubble, Ventura, 41, was greeted with chants of “Por-tu-gal! Por-tu-gal!” and “Che-ga! Che-ga!”. By the time he took his seat, fans were jabbing the air with their fingers splayed in victory signs and chorusing “Ven-tu-ra! Ven-tu-ra!”.
Diamantino de Sá Alves, 73, a retired member of Portugal’s gendarmes, the National Republican Guard, had been waiting for Ventura’s arrival, a Chega scarf around his neck and a party banner in his hand.
“The reason I’m here tonight is very simple,” he said. “I’ve voted for every party out there but I think that currently Chega is the one that offers the best option for change.” He said Ventura was the only politician in parliament “whose words the Portuguese people can truly understand”.
The Chega leader is certainly frank when it comes to his bugbears. Over the course of his 20-minute speech in Mouçós, he railed against road tolls, rapists, paedophiles, political cronyism, called the rightwing electoral platform the Democratic Alliance a “Spanish brothel”, and told the audience they were the country’s “last hope”.
Ventura said Sunday’s election was about challenging “50 years of corruption” since Portugal’s return to democracy, “50 years of taxes that were used to support parasites” and a stale political status quo that had destroyed the country’s self-esteem.
Notably absent from Ventura’s jeremiad were any new attacks on Portugal’s Roma population, a community he has previously attempted to demonise as having “a chronic problem of dependence on benefits, delinquency and violence”. Nor was immigration – a big issue for many Chega voters – on his mind that night.
He chose instead to focus on his party’s possible breakthrough. “Never in the history of Portugal has there been a greater possibility of overthrowing the bipartisan system that has been killing us for the past 50 years,” he said. “We have never been this close.”
Ventura’s leveraging of political disenchantment and fears over corruption is hardly surprising. Dissatisfaction with the PS, which has run the country for the past eight years, has been exacerbated by Portugal’s housing crisis, stressed public services, low wages and a series of corruption scandals.
The early election was triggered by the collapse of the socialist government of António Costa, who stepped down as prime minister last November amid an investigation into alleged illegalities in his administration’s handling of large green investment projects.
Costa, who has not been accused of any crime and maintains he has a clear conscience, said he felt he had to step down because “the duties of prime minister are not compatible with any suspicion of my integrity”.
Although Ventura was once a rising star in the conservative PSD before leaving the party to form Chega, he now seeks to portray his former colleagues as part of an old problem that only he can solve.
André Azevedo Alves, a political scientist at the Catholic University of Portugal and St Mary’s University, London, attributes Chega’s continuing ascent – it took 1.3% of the vote in the 2019 elections and 7.2% in 2022 – to its adept harnessing of the prevailing mood.
“It’s Ventura sensing that there is a political opportunity because of this widespread discontent with the political class, left and right,” he said. “I think that’s one of the main things that Chega feeds on.”
While immigration may be a concern “for a significant chunk of the voters who would align with Chega”, he added, housing, public services and wages remain the key issues in the election – hence Ventura’s efforts to hammer the two biggest parties for their failure to improve things for the average Portuguese person.
The other important factor in Chega’s rise, said Azevedo Alves, was Ventura himself. “I think part of the reason why you have had this Portuguese exception of not having a successful radical-right party is because until 2019, when Ventura first got into parliament, there wasn’t a skilled enough political entrepreneur who was able to capitalise on this,” he said.
“You have had radical-right and far-right parties in Portugal in the past 50 years, but they’ve always failed to get into parliament. To be frank, it’s because they’ve been really odd.”
Ventura, in contrast, is slick, plausible – and pragmatic rather than deeply ideological. “He knows how to shift his pitch to appeal to different groups of voters,” Azevedo Alves said. “Personally, I don’t think he’s very ideological at all – and I think that’s also an important difference when you compare Ventura with other radical-right leaders in Europe.”
That flexibility may be one of the drivers of Chega’s growth. While the typical Chega voter at the last election was disproportionately male and in their mid-30s to mid-50s, things are moving, especially among younger people.
The party’s most recognisable face after Ventura is a 25-year-old MP and self-declared anti-feminist called Rita Matias, who was also rapturously received in Mouçós. Surveys suggest Chega’s social media push and campus events are paying off: according to polls, it is now the most popular party among Portuguese people aged 18-34.
Among those attending the Mouçós event was Cátia Baptista, a 21-year-old law student who said she felt her post-graduation future would probably lie elsewhere. “Portugal is a country where it seems that only the PS and the PSD exist but Portugal is also not a very good country to live in,” she said. “The people who can afford it go abroad to work.”
Although the PSD’s leader, Luís Montenegro, has categorically ruled out any deal with the far-right party, dismissing Ventura’s views as “often xenophobic, racist, populist and excessively demagogic”, Chega is quietly confident that it has the momentum it needs to play a major role in ushering Portugal’s next government into office.
Azevedo Alves said: “If there’s a clear majority on the right, I don’t think Montenegro will go back on his word and reach out to Ventura for a deal. But I do think that there will be huge pressure on the right not to allow the defeated socialist party to continue in power because the parties on the right can’t find any form of agreement.”
Prematurely or not, the mood in the banqueting hall in Mouçós was jubilant and the event included a post-dinner dance. One of the last songs played – and heartily sung along to – was not a Phil Collins number but Da Vinci’s Conquistador. Portugal’s catchy 1989 Eurovision entry, the song speaks of “raising proud flags”, lists Portugal’s colonial conquests, from Brazil to Angola and from Goa to Macau, and reminds the listener “I was once a conqueror”.
Earlier in the evening, while waiting for the guest of honour to appear, one of the attenders said he was sick of hearing Chega described as a bunch of far-right extremists.
“We all have the right to have a voice, and when people criticise us and write us off, they’re discriminating against us,” said Luís Teixeira, 32, a salesperson. “We’re not the ones who are backing away from the PSD, it’s the PSD that has backed away from us. We’ve given them a lot of chances but they don’t represent us. What André Ventura wants is to bring that party towards our ideas and into our fold.”
