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The first round of the Portuguese presidential elections was held on 18 January. They mark the fifth election since November 2023, when a corruption scandal brought down António Costa’s government — one of the few in Europe in which Socialists still held an absolute majority. Since then, Portugal has entered such a spiral of political instability that it would hardly be an exaggeration to describe as a genuine crisis in the post-Carnation Revolution democratic system, the latest of which was this first round of presidential elections.
Miguel Urbán is a co-founder of Podemos, former Member of the European Parliament for The Left, and a member of Anticapitalistas.
Portuguese presidential elections have not seen such an open field since 1976. Up until now, in at least half of the cases, the outcome of the presidential elections was usually clear in advance. In fact, Portugal has not had a presidential runoff in the previous 40 years. The last time was in 1986, when the first civilian president elected since the restoration of democracy, Mario Soares, won. That was the only second round to date. Thus, when Portugal’s last bastion of stability — the presidential elections — were blown apart, the fallout was a mass of bombshell headlines.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this is the historic second round on 8 February, which will decide between the winner of the first round, Socialist António José Seguro, who took 30 percent of the vote, and the candidate of the far-right Chega, André Ventura, who took 25 percent. The Socialists have managed to regain a modicum of momentum with this partial victory, after a string of poor results since the Costa government crisis in 2023.
That said, José Seguro is one of the most centrist figures among Portuguese Socialist leaders, so his victory does not signal a shift to the left. Further, the poor results of the Left — the three left-wing candidates running for the Portuguese Communist Party, Bloco de Esquerda, and Livre did not manage to get more than 4 percent of the combined votes — lays the ground for an even greater shift to the right from José Seguro to try and capture support from a fragmented conservative electorate.
In contrast, Ventura’s result is a political earthquake: for the first time, the far right has made it to the second round of the presidential elections, maintaining its upward trend. This has already allowed the far right to become the second-largest parliamentary force in May. This is a “Le Pen moment” for the Portuguese far right, who will face a second round with little chance of victory, but aim to undermine the two-party system in Portugal, as Le Pen did. On the Sunday before last, on leaving mass at the church of São Nicolau in Lisbon, Ventura stated his goal to “unite all of the Right in Portugal and beat socialism”. The second round will test the resilience of a conservative base without its own candidate against the far right’s tactical attempts to draw support away.
While the European establishment celebrates the victory of moderate socialist José Seguro, the Portuguese radical centre is bleeding out as traditional political-electoral alliances fragment.
In France, in the second round of the 2002 presidential elections, as the centre-right Gaullist party candidate Jacques Chirac faced off against Jean-Marie Le Pen, a kind of cordon sanitaire strategy against the far right known as the “Republican Front” was introduced. The aim was to concentrate the vote so that the far right would not gain greater institutional power.
For such strategies to be effective in the short term, however, there needs to be commitment from all democratic and anti-fascist parties. The main responsibility for maintaining the cordon sanitaire lies precisely with the party that has the least incentive to sign up to it: electoral tactics have caused many of them to fail in a large number of countries. In fact, in Spain it has proved impossible to apply a cordon sanitaire to the far-right Vox party given that the Spanish Right has never committed to it, instead co-governing with them in numerous town councils and a number of autonomous communities.
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro chose not to wait while speculation grew. On election night itself, he ruled out a cordon sanitaire against the far right: the Social Democratic Party (PSD) will not support any candidate in the second round of the presidential elections: “The PSD will not be involved in the presidential campaign.” This is yet another sign of the collapse of the Portuguese centre and the deep crisis, not only in regard to the Socialists, but also to an increasingly Trumpist right wing in response to competition from Chega. Hence, last July saw the conservative government create a new unit within the National Police, responsible for combating irregular migration and coordinating deportations. Last October they reached an agreement with Chega to amend the Nationality Law, tightening the requirements and waiting times for obtaining a Portuguese passport.
Once again, buying into the far right’s agenda achieves nothing more than legitimizing and normalizing it. A recent study by academic Lie Philip Santoso, From collaboration to convergence: Nativist attitudes among non-radical right supporters, highlights that when a traditional party does a deal with the far right, it leads its voters to adopt the far right’s agenda. Thus, although the Portuguese Right seemed to have all in their favour electorally since regaining the government in 2024, they have now shown their weakness against Chega’s strength: paying for their electoral fragmentation by having three candidates with very similar ideological positions, and preventing them from retaining the presidency after Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s last two terms.
Indeed, much of Chega’s election campaign has consisted of intensifying anti-immigration rhetoric, directed in particular against people from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Their campaign posters proclaimed “This is not Bangladesh”. This was a way of channelling popular outrage, tapping into feelings of scarcity and insecurity generated by neoliberal policies. It resorted to solutions typical of influencer coaching discourse and combined them with the tried-and-tested method of mobilizing fascist passions: God, country and family. These are presented as “communities of belonging” as opposed to “the Other” (immigrants, globalists, woke), who are depicted as a threat to our existence.
The Portuguese presidency had been the last bastion of institutional stability in Portugal’s turbulent political landscape. Rebelo de Sousa, a Portuguese Macron-type leader of the radical centre, has presided over the country for the last ten years with popularity ratings that seemed immune to the political discredit which has shaken the major Portuguese parties and found a vehicle for expression in the far-right Chega party.
In fact, aside from Chega, retired admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo — who came into the picture on announcing his candidacy last May and became a frontrunner for the presidency — represented a challenge to the Portuguese status quo of two-party politics in an authoritarian vein. Gouveia e Melo’s candidacy is based on his popularity, acquired as coordinator of the operation responsible for organizing vaccination during the pandemic in February 2021, and on his supposed political independence: he is not affiliated with any of the major parties. Presenting himself as a leader capable of uniting the country, his campaign slogan, “Unite Portugal”, leaves no room for doubt. This is a bid to connect with the anti-political sentiment that is becoming increasingly important in Portuguese society by offering a figure of authority and order. The question now is how many of Gouveia e Melo’s 12 percent of first round votes will Ventura be able to secure.
Portugal is increasingly a microcosm of a Europe ravaged by the collapse of traditional political forces, and the emergence of a wave of reactionary authoritarianism.
The current uncertainty has serious consequences, given the role the President of the Republic plays in the Portuguese system. Far from being purely parliamentary, it is a semi-presidential system: although the president does not govern or appoint ministers, he does have the power to dissolve Parliament, veto laws passed by it, challenge them before the Constitutional Court, and call referendums. In fact, the outgoing president, Rebelo de Sousa, has pushed these powers to the limit, skilfully combining extensive use of the subtleties offered by the Constitution — such as dissolution — with unrestrained use of social media. As such, it is crucial to understand this election, not merely as symbolic, but one that will have numerous repercussions in the turbulent Portuguese political landscape.
While the European establishment celebrates the victory of moderate socialist José Seguro, the Portuguese radical centre is bleeding out as traditional political-electoral alliances fragment. This is a full-blown crisis that the far right is exploiting as a protest vote, and they continue to grow and gain new ground in Portugal: from leading the opposition last May to this Sunday’s historic result of a place in the second round of the presidential elections.
In the final days of last October, Ventura stood at the podium in Portugal’s National Assembly and called for “one, two, or even three Salazars” to “bring Portugal back into line” in a display of dictatorial sensibilities and challenge to the democratic tradition of the Carnation Revolution which would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and which shows how deep the democratic crisis is in Portugal.
These presidential elections, as they open the European electoral year, are no longer a mere formality on the traditional political landscape. They have become a test, both for Portugal and for Europe, of the new historical era we are entering. In this era, Portugal is increasingly a microcosm of a Europe ravaged by the collapse of traditional political forces, and the emergence of a wave of reactionary authoritarianism.
This article originally appeared in El Salto Diario. Translated by Jennie Grant and Maggie Schmitt for Zenobia Traducciones.
