On Sunday 16th, Portugal’s third largest party CHEGA! [PfE]—currently at around 20% in the polls— announced that it would present a vote of no confidence against the ‘centre-right’ government of PM Luís Montenegro, who narrowly won a slight plurality in last year’s national election.
In 2024, Montenegro’s party PSD—now running under the label of the Democratic Alliance (AD)— managed to win the election criticising the Socialist Party (PS) [S&D] governance but equally promising a red line against CHEGA! (CH).The goal was to blackmail right-wing conservatives into pragmatically voting AD for fear of allowing the socialists to perpetuate themselves in power. While the AD won the election, CH secured its biggest parliamentary group since its foundation in 2019, with 18% of the vote.
CHEGA! leader André Ventura offered a coalition deal to Montenegro’s AD but was outright rebuffed, with Montenegro preferring a shaky government to a long term stable majority. AD elites have long believed that should any AD minority government be brought down by CH and PS, the electorate will punish the culprits and deliver AD the absolute majority it requires to govern, either alone, or together with the Liberal Initiative (IL)—the fourth largest party.
Since the elections a year ago, AD has not risen in the polls. It has sought to ingratiate itself both with the woke Left and the conservative Right, by respectively celebrating LGBT topics and adopting a more stern tone towards immigration.
Unlike its European counterparts that capitalise mostly on anti-immigration sentiments, CH has made the fight against corruption one of its chief causes and it is this platform that is now propelling CH in the polls and justifying its motion of a vote of no confidence.
As with the issue of immigration, corruption is a cause most establishment parties have left largely unaddressed. When the Socialist government of PM António Costa collapsed, CH was perfectly positioned to capitalize on the corruption suspicions that had caused Costa to resign. After the election, with its control of one fifth of parliament, CH made the most of its new-found power by initiating a number of parliamentary inquiry commissions. One of them focuses on the ‘Twins Affair’: a scandal involving two Brazilian twin babies who benefited from a €4 million medical treatment, having jumped the waiting list at a Portuguese public hospital, after an accelerated naturalisation process. The press and the inquiry have revealed that all of it was seemingly done at the will of Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, as per the request of the President’s son—at one point in charge of the Portuguese-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce—on behalf of the twins’ parents, whose father is reputed as one of Brazil’s top money launderers.
For the past year, the incident has taken its toll on the president’s popularity, Marcelo repeatedly refusing to testify at the hearings. The affair has also been a headache for PM Montenegro,given that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa is affiliated with the AD. As if that were not enough, one of Montenegro’s deputy ministers was recently forced to resign pending the results of a corruption investigation.
What may seem to be retaliation for exposing corruption, in the past weeks CHEGA! too has been hit with a number of media scandals surrounding its own MPs and party members, with accusations ranging from paedophilia to theft. The accusations looked very much like an orchestrated campaign to divert attention away from the AD government’s own ethical troubles, until PM Montenegro found himself at the epicentre of yet additional corruption allegations, this past week. The PM owned several companies prior to rising to the premiership and chose to resign from them in order to avoid legal conflicts of interest. The problem lies in the fact that one company was passed to the control of Montenegro’s relatives and it has now been found to have benefited from legislative changes made by the AD government, while a second company was directly awarded a government contract without a public tender by an AD Deputy Minister.
CH has demanded clarifications from Montenegro but the PM has so far refused to comment. This finally led CH leader André Ventura to move to a motion of no confidence against the AD government, whose fate is now in the hands of the socialists.
The past year of AD rule has not been particularly positive: several high profile violent crimes have significantly undermined the AD narrative that immigration does not represent a risk to public safety, and have in turn vindicated CH’s anti-immigration views and calls for a referendum on the issue. The election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the presumably imminent settlement of the Russo-Ukrainian war have further hurt the AD’s international standing, coupled with the humiliation that André Ventura was invited to the inauguration of the U.S. president, and Montenegro was not.
As opposed to countries such as Germany, one senses that the AD leadership is very wary of entering into a coalition with the left-wing parties, for fear of delivering the centrist vote to CH. At the same time, the AD has kowtowed to the leftist media narrative that CH is a dangerous far-right party for so long that it is now entrapped and unable to build a functioning governing coalition with the party of Ventura.
The future promises further CHEGA! gains, further ‘centrist’ losses and continued political instability in Portugal.
