Until the rise of Chega, Portugal’s rapidly growing, national conservative party, the Western establishment might have been excused for seeing the country as a solitary beacon of liberal hope. Even as Germany, long regarded as a lost cause for conservatives, trembled at the AfD’s transformative climb in the polls, Portugal appeared to remain undisturbed. The Right has since capitalised on a favourable alignment of factors: the political winds coming from Europe, of course, were simply too strong to be resisted; Portugal’s chronically underperforming economy bred a growing frustration among a people who increasingly felt left behind by their peers further north; the constant stream of scandal and corruption, a central feature of Portugal’s failed third Republic, made the electorate angrier still and eager to take revenge against their political class.
More is sure to come. After all, as in the rest of the continent, the question of immigration is bound to fuel this process of political metamorphosis even further. Over the last eight years, the now demissionary Socialist Prime Minister António Costa has presided over a process of demographic transformation unseen since the early days of the Reconquista. The political reaction, however, has so far been muted—particularly by European standards.
According to official statistics, France, a country with seven times Portugal’s population, welcomed over 316,000 new immigrants in 2022. This corresponds to less than 0.5% of the country’s citizenry and is, indeed, immense. The French have been reacting to these plainly unsustainable rates of migration with growing impatience. Back in August, the country’s liberal, globalist president Emmanuel Macron complained that “France must significantly reduce immigration.” A recent bill pushing in that direction was recently approved by the country’s parliament following extensive debate. Latent concerns over what right-wing presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, following the French writer Renaud Camus, has called the ‘Great Replacement’ have now permeated into almost every segment of public life. Marine Le Pen, France’s foremost anti-globalist figurehead, has been topping virtually every poll. Be it France, Germany, Italy, Wilders’ stunning election victory in the Netherlands, or the shocking recent riots in Ireland, the backlash is as real as it is widespread.
But, even as some express fear that the situation might one day become as difficult for Lisbon as it is for Paris, the fact of the matter is that it already is much worse. While media-induced collective obnubilation might so far be successfully preventing a real national conversation from gathering full steam, numbers speak louder than words. In 2022, Portugal issued 143,000 new residency permits or almost 1.5% of the nation’s entire official population. That is almost three times France’s panic-inducing, politically explosive figure, and comparable to few countries in Europe, with only Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany having higher entry rates.
But, of course, official numbers can only be taken with the proverbial grain of salt: reforms passed by the Socialists in the last decade, tied with the recent extinction of Portugal’s famously competent border service, have transferred the responsibility of issuing visas to tiny, understaffed, and under-equipped civil parishes. This, in turn, has led to a veritable avalanche of corruption and abuse: some parishes have been revealed to issue as many as one thousand visas a month. There are reports of apartments with up to 900 official residents, and small streets with as many as 10,000 registered inhabitants. The full scale of the ongoing mass fraud will only become known after extensive inquiries, but no one can pretend that it is not prevalent.
It should no longer be denied that Portugal is being transformed—in all likelihood, irreversibly. Yet the Left was not alone in creating this crisis. The ‘centre-right,’ globalist and liberal ‘conservative’ Social Democrats, like the pro-market Iniciativa Liberal, were complicit—not least by claiming that replacement levels of migration are necessary for economic growth—in the same irresponsible policy of effective border abolition. The consequences are sure to be severe and long-lasting.
A rising portion of the newcomers are not even Portuguese-speaking or Christian, as previous generations of immigrants used to be, but unskilled, Muslim labourers from as far afield as Bangladesh. These are populations that cannot and will not be culturally assimilated into the mainstream of Portuguese society, and whose limited qualifications will, in an era when automation and the rise of AI seem sure to threaten more manual and repetitive jobs, determine their long-term poverty and exclusion. Instead, they seem fated to become seeds of anomie, dissension, and chaos: ever more disenfranchised, hostile bastions of resistance to that spirit of participation and community that is the bedrock of a national life.
As the political mainstream stubbornly goes down the road of mass, limitless migration, a popular reaction seems inevitable. On both Right and Left, the short-term, egotistical logic of those who placed GDP expansion ahead of national identity and internal stability should, as elsewhere in Europe, eventually be defeated by a strong dose of reality. Few matters will be more important to Portugal’s survival, let alone its politics, in the coming decades.
Portugal’s Very Own Great Replacement
Until the rise of Chega, Portugal’s rapidly growing, national conservative party, the Western establishment might have been excused for seeing the country as a solitary beacon of liberal hope. Even as Germany, long regarded as a lost cause for conservatives, trembled at the AfD’s transformative climb in the polls, Portugal appeared to remain undisturbed. The Right has since capitalised on a favourable alignment of factors: the political winds coming from Europe, of course, were simply too strong to be resisted; Portugal’s chronically underperforming economy bred a growing frustration among a people who increasingly felt left behind by their peers further north; the constant stream of scandal and corruption, a central feature of Portugal’s failed third Republic, made the electorate angrier still and eager to take revenge against their political class.
More is sure to come. After all, as in the rest of the continent, the question of immigration is bound to fuel this process of political metamorphosis even further. Over the last eight years, the now demissionary Socialist Prime Minister António Costa has presided over a process of demographic transformation unseen since the early days of the Reconquista. The political reaction, however, has so far been muted—particularly by European standards.
According to official statistics, France, a country with seven times Portugal’s population, welcomed over 316,000 new immigrants in 2022. This corresponds to less than 0.5% of the country’s citizenry and is, indeed, immense. The French have been reacting to these plainly unsustainable rates of migration with growing impatience. Back in August, the country’s liberal, globalist president Emmanuel Macron complained that “France must significantly reduce immigration.” A recent bill pushing in that direction was recently approved by the country’s parliament following extensive debate. Latent concerns over what right-wing presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, following the French writer Renaud Camus, has called the ‘Great Replacement’ have now permeated into almost every segment of public life. Marine Le Pen, France’s foremost anti-globalist figurehead, has been topping virtually every poll. Be it France, Germany, Italy, Wilders’ stunning election victory in the Netherlands, or the shocking recent riots in Ireland, the backlash is as real as it is widespread.
But, even as some express fear that the situation might one day become as difficult for Lisbon as it is for Paris, the fact of the matter is that it already is much worse. While media-induced collective obnubilation might so far be successfully preventing a real national conversation from gathering full steam, numbers speak louder than words. In 2022, Portugal issued 143,000 new residency permits or almost 1.5% of the nation’s entire official population. That is almost three times France’s panic-inducing, politically explosive figure, and comparable to few countries in Europe, with only Britain, the Netherlands, and Germany having higher entry rates.
But, of course, official numbers can only be taken with the proverbial grain of salt: reforms passed by the Socialists in the last decade, tied with the recent extinction of Portugal’s famously competent border service, have transferred the responsibility of issuing visas to tiny, understaffed, and under-equipped civil parishes. This, in turn, has led to a veritable avalanche of corruption and abuse: some parishes have been revealed to issue as many as one thousand visas a month. There are reports of apartments with up to 900 official residents, and small streets with as many as 10,000 registered inhabitants. The full scale of the ongoing mass fraud will only become known after extensive inquiries, but no one can pretend that it is not prevalent.
It should no longer be denied that Portugal is being transformed—in all likelihood, irreversibly. Yet the Left was not alone in creating this crisis. The ‘centre-right,’ globalist and liberal ‘conservative’ Social Democrats, like the pro-market Iniciativa Liberal, were complicit—not least by claiming that replacement levels of migration are necessary for economic growth—in the same irresponsible policy of effective border abolition. The consequences are sure to be severe and long-lasting.
A rising portion of the newcomers are not even Portuguese-speaking or Christian, as previous generations of immigrants used to be, but unskilled, Muslim labourers from as far afield as Bangladesh. These are populations that cannot and will not be culturally assimilated into the mainstream of Portuguese society, and whose limited qualifications will, in an era when automation and the rise of AI seem sure to threaten more manual and repetitive jobs, determine their long-term poverty and exclusion. Instead, they seem fated to become seeds of anomie, dissension, and chaos: ever more disenfranchised, hostile bastions of resistance to that spirit of participation and community that is the bedrock of a national life.
As the political mainstream stubbornly goes down the road of mass, limitless migration, a popular reaction seems inevitable. On both Right and Left, the short-term, egotistical logic of those who placed GDP expansion ahead of national identity and internal stability should, as elsewhere in Europe, eventually be defeated by a strong dose of reality. Few matters will be more important to Portugal’s survival, let alone its politics, in the coming decades.
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