Portugal’s governing Socialist Party appears set to lose power following a snap election that saw the populist Chega party surge into third place.
While some votes from Portuguese overseas remain to be counted, the Socialists and the establishment right Democratic Alliance (DA) are both at around 29 percent, with the DA appearing to have just eked out the incumbents and party leader Luis Montenegro declaring victory.
Chega, an anti-mass migration party whose name means ‘Enough’ in Portuguese, may prove to be the kingmakers when it comes to forming a new government, with their 18 percent set to earn them around 48 seats in the legislature. Its rise has been meteoric, with the party earning only 7.2 percent of the vote and 12 seats in 2022 and just 1.3 percent as recently as 2019.
Montenegro has signaled he is reluctant to work with the populist party to form a coalition government, however, branding its leader André Ventura “often xenophobic, racist, populist, and excessively demagogic,” so piecing together a right-wing government of any description could prove difficult.
Many “center-right” parties in Europe, such as the Conservatives in Great Britain or the Christian Democratic Union, formerly led by Angela Merkel in Germany, have more in common with the Democrats than the Republicans in the U.S. and are hostile to populist parties like Chega.
This attitude has seen the Netherlands unable to form a government for months, with center-right parties unwilling to agree on a coalition deal with populist leader Geert Wilders despite his party placing first in national elections.