The Portuguese Election Marks a Shift to the Right
In the decades after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, many considered the country immunized from the far right. This has been challenged by the rise of Chega, the anti-immigrant party that won almost a quarter of the vote in Sunday’s election.
Leader of far-right party Chega Andre Ventura celebrates results during the election night at the party’s headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, on May 19, 2025. (Andre Nias Nobre / AFP via Getty Images)
The Portuguese exception is over. In the elections held on May 18, the country experienced a clear shift to the Right: the conservative coalition Democratic Alliance (AD) emerged as the leading force (32 percent of the votes), while the Socialist Party (PS) barely edged out the far-right Chega (“Enough!”) for second place, each with around 23 percent. The radical left suffered a collapse: even added together, the Communist Party and the Left Bloc amounted to just 5 percent of the vote.
In November 2023, then prime minister António Costa, a Socialist, resigned after being accused of corruption. That marked the end of eight years of progressive governments that had made Portugal — alongside Spain — an inspiration for the European left, and the beginning of a period of rare political instability in the small Iberian country. After a year-and-a-half-long judicial inquiry, no proof has been found to sustain the accusations against Costa, which have raised suspicions of a lawfare case.
Since Costa’s resignation, there have been three elections in three years, during which the Left has steadily lost ground and Chega has risen rapidly. The far-right party, founded in 2019, made its national breakthrough in 2022 by winning 7 percent of the vote. Last Sunday’s election marked the culmination of this trend. In the words of Chega’s leader, André Ventura, “Today we can officially and confidently declare to the whole country that bipartisanship is over.” He’s right: the near-tied race between Chega and the Socialists marks a break with the electoral dynamic that has defined Portuguese politics since the restoration of democracy in the 1970s.
Last Sunday’s election was called early after conservative prime minister Luís Montenegro was accused of irregular dealings with a family-owned company and lost a parliamentary vote of confidence. Nevertheless, his conservative coalition has managed to consolidate its position. The accusations of misconduct have not punished the prime minister, but they have amplified Chega’s anti-corruption rhetoric, which the party has used to position itself as the only “clean” alternative to the traditional political establishment. Cases of child prostitution, suitcase theft, and drunk driving among Chega’s representatives have apparently not damaged the credibility of the party’s rhetoric about honesty.
Along with the anti-corruption narrative, the anti-immigration stance constitutes the core of Chega’s message. This has been reinforced by the conservative government itself, which has made xenophobic gestures. In December 2024, Lisbon saw a series of police raids based on racial profiling, widely seen as the government conceding to Chega’s rhetoric, which—without evidence—links immigration with insecurity. Though there were anti-racist protests in response, the raids marked an important step toward the normalization of the far right’s xenophobic discourse. AD’s turn against immigration did not stop Chega’s rise: the conservatives gained just 140,000 votes compared to 2024, while the far-right party added 236,000. Once again, the centrist adoption of far-right narratives has only fueled their growth.
The Collapse of the Left
The biggest loser in the Portuguese elections was the Left as a whole. The Socialist Party, led by former minister Pedro Nuno Santos, lost 350,000 votes compared to the 2024 elections, the third-worst performance for the Socialists since democracy was restored in Portugal five decades ago. Santos resigned after the disastrous result was confirmed. The party’s collapse is particularly symbolic given that the Socialist Party —which kept Marxism as its “predominant theoretical inspiration” until the 1980s — played a key role in building Portuguese democracy after the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
The situation is especially concerning for the Socialists because it’s likely that some of their voters defected to Chega, something that already occurred in 2024. Postelection surveys from that year showed a shift of former Socialist voters toward the far right, helping to explain how Chega grew without necessarily taking votes from the conservatives (the other main factor was their success in mobilizing previously abstentionist voters). This contrasts with Spain — another country where the far right emerged later than in the rest of Europe — where far-right Vox draws mainly from former voters of the conservative Popular Party.
Even worse has been the defeat of the far-left parties. The Portuguese Communist Party and the Left Bloc were central actors between 2015 and 2023, providing parliamentary support to Costa’s Socialist governments. Today they are nearly irrelevant in parliament, holding four seats and one seat, respectively. Combined, they received just 5 percent of the vote. Only Livre — ideologically placed between the Socialists and the previously mentioned parties — has slightly improved its result, obtaining 4.2 percent of the vote. But the main takeaway is that the conservative coalition AD now holds more seats than the entire broad left combined.
The geographic breakdown of the vote also bodes poorly for this side of the political spectrum. While the North and Center of the country are AD strongholds, the Socialists are now competing with the far right in the South. Chega outperformed the PS in 121 of the country’s 308 municipalities and won in four of the twenty districts, while the Socialists came first in only one district. This is bad news for the Socialists — and for Portuguese democracy — since local elections are scheduled for September or October, and Chega could turn its votes into institutional power.
Insofar as Portugal is a semi-presidential Republic, it comes to the president, the conservative Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, to appoint the new prime minister. The most likely outcome is another minority government led by Montenegro, as a coalition between the conservatives and the far right would not benefit any of them in the short term. Chega’s Ventura will undoubtedly try to present himself as an outsider to the next local elections, while an agreement with the far right would be risky for prime minister Montenegro, in a country whose democracy was built against António de Oliveira Salazar’s ultraconservative dictatorship.
With the May 18 results, after years of political instability, Portugal has now joined the broader European rightward shift, where elections increasingly become contests between traditional conservatives and the far right, with a weakened social democracy and the radical left out of the game. Spain, where the fragile PSOE–Sumar coalition clings to power without a parliamentary majority, and France, where La France Insoumise remains strong, are the main exceptions to the continent’s conservative turn.