Voting for Illiberalism

On 8 February 2026, Portuguese voters will resolve a presidential runoff between António José Seguro, backed by the Socialist Occasion, and André Ventura, chief of the far-right Chega. The argument I advance right here, nonetheless, is analytical fairly than electoral: that this election crystallizes a confrontation between two fashions of democracy – one liberal, rooted within the constitutional settlement that emerged from the 1974 revolution, and one intolerant, that treats constitutional constraints as obstacles to the expression of standard will fairly than as safeguards of it.

The powers of the president

The Portuguese presidency isn’t a ceremonial function within the German or Italian sense. Portugal’s semi-presidential system grants the pinnacle of state important powers, probably the most consequential of which is the power to dissolve the parliament and name early elections. The outgoing president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a outstanding constitutional regulation scholar, exercised this energy thrice. Since 2022, Portugal has held three legislative elections – a scenario of political instability which has actually performed its function within the development of the far-right. In a fragmented parliament the place no get together holds a majority – which is Portugal’s present scenario – the president’s function as moderator, arbiter and, in extremis, decision-maker concerning the survival of governments is of decisive constitutional significance. The president additionally wields a suspensive political veto over laws and holds the unique energy to set off the Constitutional Court docket’s a priori evaluate – successfully changing the presidency right into a de facto adverse legislator.

It’s this institutional context that makes Ventura’s candidacy constitutionally alarming. His political venture isn’t merely about occupying the presidency; it’s about redefining the principles of the sport. His get together manifesto consists of life imprisonment and chemical castration for intercourse offenders, and his slogan intentionally echoes the motto of Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship, beforehand appropriated by Bolsonaro. In December 2025, a Lisbon courtroom ordered the removing of discriminatory marketing campaign posters concentrating on Roma individuals. Chega, based solely in 2019, now holds 60 parliamentary seats and constitutes the principle opposition pressure.

The drivers of Chega

Essentially the most highly effective driver of Chega’s rise has been immigration – particularly, the sharp and visual enhance in migration from South Asia, a current phenomenon in a rustic traditionally accustomed solely to immigration from Portuguese-speaking and Jap European nations. The second has been corruption – or, extra exactly, the notion that the political institution is structurally corrupt. The resignation of Prime Minister António Costa in November 2023 amid a felony investigation was adopted by one more parliamentary dissolution in 2025, this time triggered by conflict-of-interest allegations towards Prime Minister Luís Montenegro. Collectively, these occasions supplied Ventura with a story of systemic failure that reinforces the nativist one. Because the political scientist António Costa Pinto has argued, Chega isn’t a neoliberal protest get together however a welfare-chauvinist one: it calls for a robust state, solely for nationals, and frames immigrants as parasites on the welfare system. This mix of exclusionary nationalism and social statism offers Ventura’s political venture its electoral base.

Portugal’s trajectory differs from nations with steady post-war organizational legacies – Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia descends from the neo-fascist MSI; France’s Entrance Nationwide (later Rassemblement Nationwide) was based in 1972 by figures with Vichy-era backgrounds. Chega has no such lineage. The 1974 revolution didn’t merely finish the dictatorship – it produced a rupture. The revolutionary interval radicalized the transition, the 1976 Structure enshrined antifascism as a foundational precept, and the political system that emerged excluded the far proper from legitimacy for many years. But the absence of organizational continuity doesn’t imply the absence of ideological inheritance. Ventura’s slogan echoes Estado Novo rhetoric: Salazar is selectively rehabilitated as a determine of order and probity; colonial nostalgia runs by the get together’s nationalist imagery. That Chega emerged from the mainstream conservative get together – very like Spain’s Vox emerged from throughout the Partido Common – could say much less about novelty than concerning the limits of democratic consolidation: the sympathy for authoritarian rule that each transitions have been presupposed to have buried by no means totally disappeared and has now discovered autonomous political expression.

In direction of a Southern Hungary

The broader mannequin isn’t tough to establish. As Costa Pinto places it plainly, Orbán’s Hungary is the template. The aggressive authoritarian regime that Orbán has constructed – utilizing democratic elections to realize energy, then systematically hollowing out the constitutional constraints that forestall majorities from concentrating authority and marginalizing minorities – is exactly the sort of political order that Ventura would search to consolidate, tailored to Portugal’s semi-presidential framework. Ventura’s Chega sits within the Patriots for Europe group within the European Parliament alongside Orbán’s Fidesz. The excellence between liberal and intolerant democracy – first articulated by Fareed Zakaria in 1997, and since then examined in apply from Budapest to Warsaw – maps exactly what’s now being contested in Lisbon: whether or not democracy is reducible to successful elections, or whether or not it essentially entails the constitutional safety of rights, the separation of powers, and the rule of regulation.

What can be the approaching dangers of a far-right victory? Even when Ventura gained – the polls level unanimously to Seguro’s victory – Portugal wouldn’t change into Hungary in a single day (neither did Hungary change into Orbán’s Hungary in a single day, for that matter). The president doesn’t maintain govt energy – though he not directly influences public insurance policies by his veto and moderation powers. However the dangers can be actual and particular. A President Ventura would management the dissolution energy, in addition to the ability to dismiss the federal government, turning the everlasting risk of early elections into an instrument of political strain – successfully presidentializing a system designed to withstand exactly that, particularly after the constitutional revision of 1982, which lowered the powers of the pinnacle of state. The 1976 Structure, drafted within the aftermath of the revolutionary interval, had created a robust presidency the place the president may dismiss governments with out invoking any grounds. The 1982 revision curtailed this energy, conditioning dismissal on the necessity to safeguard the common functioning of democratic establishments, meant to forestall a immediately elected president from claiming a mandate superior to parliament’s. However the energy to dissolve parliament, conceived as an escape valve for parliamentary impasse, remained much less constrained – a rigidity within the system’s anti-plebiscitary design {that a} President Ventura may exploit. He would command probably the most highly effective bully pulpit in Portuguese politics, lending the legitimacy of the very best workplace to a discourse that frames constitutional limits as elite impositions on the sovereign individuals.

A Malicious program in parliament for nationalists and neonazis?

The confrontation between Chega and constitutional constraints is already underway. The get together has been in a situation of de jure inner illegality since 2021, after successive courtroom rulings blocked its conventions and statute amendments for violating inner democratic necessities. Extra just lately, Chega members have attacked the Constitutional Court docket for putting down restrictions on immigrants’ rights negotiated with the governing PSD, qualifying the rulings as “a betrayal of Portugal”. The porosity between Chega and arranged extremism isn’t hypothetical. In January 2026, the Judiciary Police dismantled the neo-Nazi group 1143 within the largest operation towards organized hate crime in Portuguese historical past. Among the many 37 arrested have been lively Chega members and former get together candidates; the group’s chief, at present serving a jail sentence, had reportedly described Chega in 2019 as a “Malicious program” for the far proper in parliament, encouraging nationalists to affix the get together, in response to journalist Miguel Carvalho’s investigation Por Dentro do Chega. The get together’s vice-president spoke at a November congress alongside the founding father of American Renaissance and the organizer of the 2026 Remigration Summit, the pan-European gathering of identitarian activists scheduled for Porto in Might.

The breadth of cross-partisan help for Seguro – spanning from former conservative presidents to the liberal centre and the left – alerts the perceived magnitude of the constitutional risk. Notably, Portugal is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its Structure at this vital juncture.

Portugal was the final Western European nation with no important far-right pressure in its political system. That exceptionalism is over. The query now dealing with Portuguese voters is similar one dealing with democrats throughout Europe: whether or not democracy means merely successful elections, or one thing extra.

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