In the year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Portuguese revolution, the populist far right is the big winner of the elections which took place on March 10. Chega, the party led by André Ventura and inspired by Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, and the president of Vox, Santiago Abascal (who was in Portugal to take part in the campaign), won over one million votes and established itself as the third force on the Portuguese political map.

On the day of the election, Portugal went back to the polls just two years after the elections that gave the Socialist Party (PS) an absolute majority through the support of the left-wing parties, the Left Bloc (BE) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). The corruption scandal that led to the resignation of the previous prime minister, António Costa, has yet to be investigated and explained, but the truth is that, after eight years of governance, which included the post-austerity era, the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the inflation crisis and various smaller scandals within the government itself, the party’s image was worn out making it impossible for it endure yet another scandal, this time allegedly involving the prime minister himself. On November 7, 2023, the government fell and snap elections were called.

The task was difficult for the new PS secretary-general, Pedro Nuno Santos, a politician associated with the left wing of the party for many years, who was elected just two months before the elections. For its part, the center right, represented in these elections by the Democratic Alliance (AD) coalition, made up of the Social Democratic Party (PSD), the People’s Party (CDS-PP), and the Monarchist People’s Party (PPM), had room to assert itself as an alternative to the PS.