In Portugal’s Election, Ventura Owns the Present

Like most of the West today, Portugal is undergoing a veritable political revolution.

For five decades, the Iberian nation’s culture and institutions have been under the undisputed control of the Left. Unlike neighbouring Spain, where democracy came not through revolution but as a voluntary concession of the Francoist government, Portugal’s own experience was traumatic. Whereas in Spain the Right, having taken control of the state by force of arms, then magnanimously allowed the Left to return from the cold and back into the institutions, in Portugal, ‘democracy’ came as a result of the annihilation of the Right—narratively and sociologically. Having purged anything and anyone remotely ‘right-wing,’ the Left then imposed its worldview and political grammar on a despondent country.

Indeed, Portugal’s post-1974 Third Republic was defined by an artificial, boring, and solidly left-leaning equilibrium. The hegemonic Left, culturally progressive and economically clientelist, alternated power with a timid, technocratic centre-right whose primary ambition was to administer the same consensus with marginally better accounting. Presidential elections reflected this depressing stasis: grey, uninspiring, reassuring figures, designed to offend no one and to change nothing. In theory, the presidency acted as a moderating power. In reality, instead, it remained a ceremonial extension of the regime’s intellectual inertia and utter absence of ambition.

That era is now in the past, over and done with. Thank God for that. The rise of André Ventura—and of Chega—got the wheel moving again.

One of the leading candidates ahead of Sunday, Ventura doesn’t just represent a party or a programme but a rupture in discourse, a rejection of taboos, and, above all, the return of politics as a conflict of ideas rather than consensus management. His presence alone has shifted the axis of debate to the point that even his fiercest opponents now speak in a language he helped impose. On immigration, Ventura now speaks for the people—other political actors have no choice but to offer their own imitation of Ventura, however crude or untrustworthy.

With André Ventura’s nationalist, anti-immigration platform poised to make it to the second round, the greatest proof of his success is how hegemonic the Right now appears to be. Other than the Socialist António José Seguro, no other left-of-centre candidate is polling over 2%. Instead, the field is dominated entirely by more or less coherent—and serious—right-wingers. These include former Navy Admiral and chief of Portugal’s COVID-19 vaccination programme Henrique Gouveia e Melo, market-liberal João Cotrim de Figueiredo, and Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s own candidate, Luís Marques Mendes.

While only Ventura openly presents himself as a candidate of the Right, all these other contenders for the presidency are disputing the same political camp. Gouveia e Melo, who appears to be by instinct a man of the centre-right and who earned the respect of significant numbers of conservatives by appealing to his military credentials, foolishly tried to distance himself from this image during the campaign in the hope of seducing left-wing voters. This was a profoundly unintelligent move and will stand as a testament to his political inexperience. Had the admiral stuck to his guns and presented himself as a conservative, he would have captured the imagination of a Portuguese Right, which has always admired the charisma of the uniform. Portugal has a strong tradition of right-wing caudilhismo; the almost monarchical image of a political soldier has been part of its imagination since the days of Sidónio Pais, the Army officer who, in 1918, attempted to overthrow the revolutionary republic and replace it with a conservative authoritarian state. Gouveia e Melo’s political illiteracy has almost assuredly cost him his lofty ambitions.

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…There’s only one candidate saying those words in Portugal—and that’s Ventura.