In today's "EU's Dance with Far-Right"
Portugal, land of port and ocean beaches and a funny way of speaking Spanish. And, home of the fastest growing far-right party in Europe and aside from a couple of countries in the east, fastest growing immigrant population. Don't know anyone from Portugal, never been there. To my bubble, Portugal is mostly a less popular holiday destination as an alternative to Spain and France. So this is just what I get from the news and the algorithm.
Elections in 5 weeks, on March 10, for the unicameral parliament. Early because their PM resigned after his chief of staff was arrested:
"The corruption probe is focused on allegations of improper behaviour around the development of lithium mining and hydrogen projects in the country, and Costa’s chief of staff, Vitor Escaria, was arrested on Tuesday as police conducted raids on several public buildings and additional properties."
Chega (meaning Enough!), established in 2019 by André Ventura. 1 seat in 2019, 12 seats (7.1% of votes) in 2022. Atm polling at 21%
Portugal's far-right Chega party jumped to 21% of voting intentions in a new opinion poll ahead of a March 10 snap election, closing in on the mainstream centre-left and centre-right parties, whose support has stagnated.
www.reuters.com
Chega's points:
- EU aside from a few basic principles, bad. Especially addressing climate change, bad.
- abortion bad
- LGBTQ+ bad
- immigrants very bad, here to repopulate
- islam very bad
- established parties bad, elite and corrupt (looks to be true to an extend),
- Portugal best nation ever
- Romani people: uneducated criminal subhuman trailer trash. Roma are gypsies originally from India. See
ceramic frog story.
- Pedophiles should be chemically castrated or get the death penalty (hey, all far-right parties in EU have one or two good points...)
Pretty much the hallmarks of EU populist rhetoric.
No chance they'll get a majority on their own, but while it was already assumed they could 'help' the right to a majority, causing Portugal to switch from to the right, they are heading to a point where it's going to be hard to exclude them.
"
However, the PSD leader Luis Montenegro has previously ruled out an agreement with Chega,"
Ok, center-right liberal conservatives who call themselves social democratic, basically the party that holds the key to the gates. Show me one example of modern far-right parties in EU entering majority coalitions and cabinets while
not previously having been ruled out. The cooperation is always unprecedented. No left or right party ever was like yeah that sounds like people we can work with. Same trend as elsewhere in EU, if center-right/right doesn't work with far-right they will have to continue working with the left, and with that become more left and with that lose more to the far-right.
In NL it's liberal conservatives + (former) christian democrats holding those keys, currently still discussing if they should form a government with far-right. The situation is eerily similar. In Sweden, it's Moderates, Christian Democrats and Liberals who formed a government with Sweden Democrats (far-right with neo-nazi roots). More examples of this trend and dilemma in future episodes.
In 2019 Chega, waiting for approval still, created a coalition for Europeans election, Basta!, with the People's Monarchist Party and, there they are again, "Christian Democrats".
Oversimplified, take labor vs torries. Split labor in various levels of left/progressive, torries in varies levels of right/conservatives. And what you end up with is politics in Europe.
Portugal takes a special position in EU when it comes to immigration. Their economy relies on cheap labor, while many educated people go for higher paying wages up north. To facilitate that, they offer work permits and residency and indirectly the quickest route to an EU citizenship. That in turns leads to even lower wages, employers abusing people who will work for near to nothing, for 5 years, as long as they get to access to that route. Previous decade they had a similar problem as Japan, a declining population. Last year the number of citizenship requests increased 37% and the number of immigrants in Portugal rose with 70% in just 5 years. It's easier there to convince dumb xenophobes of repopulation theories.
Are they fascists... well, experts say they work within a democratic framework. I say all the far-right in EU that puts so much effort in polarization and lumping anything from right to left together into corrupt left elite establishment and are unreasonably anti-immigration (putting it mildly) have the ambition to change things to a less democractic situation (again putting it mildly).
Let's not forget, it's only been 50 years, and thus not underestimate the potential impact:
simple.wikipedia.org
"[PM and dictator of Portugal] started and led the
Estado Novo (New State), the authoritarian, right-wing government that ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1974. "