Portugal elects a president, with leftist beating a surging far right
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
By JASON HOROWITZ
Portugal on Sunday elected António José Seguro, a former leader of Portugal’s Socialist Party with wide establishment support, in a landslide victory over his nationalist opponent, André Ventura.
The government’s election returns website reported that Seguro had won more than 65% of the vote to Ventura’s 34%, with more than 90% of districts reporting.
“The Portuguese people are the best people in the world,” Seguro told reporters as he left his home in Caldas da Rainha, central Portugal, on Sunday evening. He added they had showed “enormous civic responsibility” and “attachment to the values of democracy.”
The convincing victory was embraced by the establishment, in Portugal and beyond, as a reprieve from a rising far-right tide across the continent. But the far right’s presence in the runoff nevertheless again put Europe on notice. Near-final results showed Ventura likely to win more than 33% of the vote, meaning his party will have outperformed the result of the governing conservatives in the last parliamentary election.
That suggested that Portugal, once considered one of the continent’s last holdouts against hard-line nationalism, was no longer immune to the populist wave. Ventura on Sunday night told reporters that he would keep making his case to the Portuguese that “change is necessary.”
Seguro’s victory was due in part, analysts said, to mainstream conservative backing of his candidacy in order to beat back Ventura and his surging Chega party. (Chega means “enough” in Portuguese.) Ventura won nearly a quarter of the vote during the crowded first round of voting in January, putting him into Sunday’s runoff against Seguro, who topped the first round with nearly one-third of the votes.
“Portugal’s old reputation as an exception to the far-right surge in Europe is clearly over,” said João Cancela, a professor of political science at NOVA University in Lisbon. Even though Ventura lost, and badly, Cancela said, his strong showing illustrated that Chega now had geographic reach across a country that in recent years has become a booming tourist destination, flush with foreign investment, expatriates and a growing economy.
But with those benefits came drawbacks and grievances, including concerns about housing and the cost of living, that have fed Ventura’s rise. “This election confirms a structural shift rather than a temporary blip,” Cancela said.
Despite Seguro’s resounding victory, Portugal is now feeling the same nationalist current moving much of Europe. Italy is governed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose career was forged in post-fascist parties. The National Rally, France’s main far-right party, has gone from an outcast to the front-runner in next year’s presidential elections. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is neck-and-neck in the polls with the country’s center-right. Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party is now a serious contender in Britain.
In the days before the election, deadly storms and floods disrupted the campaign and postponed voting in a small minority of regions, though not to an extent likely to influence the outcome.
As the Portuguese voted Sunday, Ventura said the bad weather should have led to the postponement of the entire election.
“Perhaps there are many areas and parts of the country that feel disrespected and like second-class Portuguese citizens,” Ventura told reporters. “I don’t think that is right.” Ventura did not return a request for comment on Sunday evening.
The presidency is traditionally a ceremonial role, though it can veto laws and is imbued with special powers during political crises, such as dissolving parliament. In the campaign to succeed the departing president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Seguro said he wouldn’t overstep into the territory of “shadow prime minister,” while Ventura had a more expansionist view, promising an “interventionist presidency.”
Nationalists and their opponents across the continent looked to Sunday’s election as yet another bellwether for populism’s strength. Chega is the first hard-right party to surge so strongly in Portugal since the end of the nationalist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar.
Just six years ago, in 2019, Ventura, a former soccer commentator, became Chega’s first member of parliament. Since then, the party has grown on the oxygen of social media outrage and anti-immigrant, anti-Roma and anti-corruption sentiment to become the country’s leading opposition force.
Chega’s support has increased especially among young Portuguese and those who are suffering financially. Its message has made inroads into formerly left-wing strongholds where working class voters, frustrated with housing prices and shortages, scarce jobs and increased immigration, have sought a candidate who directly speaks to their concerns.
Chega’s political posters during the first round of the election declared “Isto não é o Bangladesh!” or “This is not Bangladesh.” For many Chega voters, Bangladeshis have become a shorthand for the doubling of the migrant population in Portugal in the past decade.
Like in France in recent elections, the Portuguese establishment has tried to build a firewall against the far right by banding together across ideological lines to appeal to moderate voters.
Self-declared “nonsocialist” figures, including leading center-right conservatives, signed an open letter backing Seguro, arguing that the election amounted to a fork in the road between liberal and illiberal forces, and that Ventura’s candidacy was beyond the democratic pale. The country’s leading conservatives, including the former president and prime minister, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, spoke out against Ventura.
“The country is sending a message that Portugal is a moderate country and that we value democracy,” said Carlos Moedas, the center-right mayor of Lisbon, and former European Union official, who said Sunday that he voted for Seguro.
Ventura has complained about being “canceled” by the Portuguese establishment, and said in a debate before the election that people with entrenched interests were more motivated to vote against him than to vote for Seguro. It was a critique that echoed Vice President JD Vance’s broadside against the European establishment last year in Germany, when he urged Europe to stop blocking populist, and once taboo, parties from entering the mainstream.
But on Sunday, Portugal showed it was not ready to bring the firewall down just yet.
Margarida Garcia, a 40-year-old lawyer from Lisbon, said her mission was to stop Chega. “I would almost certainly vote for anyone running against Ventura,” she said.