Election of the Weekend III: Portugal

Today Portugal holds its first presidential run-off election in 40 years, and second post-Carnation revolution, to select their next president. This is a largely ceremonial position in this parliamentary government, so I might have skipped it, but it’s notable for who made the runoff. The first round election saw Socialist party candidate Antonio Jose Seguro secure first place, but with only 31% of the vote. He’ll face Andre Ventura, who represents Chega, Portugal’s populist right nationalist party. Ventura roughly doubled the 12% he got in 2021 and made the second round. Chega was a non-entity until pretty recently, I believe somewhere in the archives of this blog I have a post puzzling about how the rise of an illiberal far right is sweeping across nearly every country in Europe but skipping Portugal; the apparent Lusophone exception is no longer a puzzle to be solved. Chega rose to be the main opposition in the 2024 parliamentary election.

Coverage seems to point to a high degree of unity and commitment among the left, center, and parts of the center right to ensure Chega is defeated. Seguro appears to be an easy enough person to rally around. The Chega candidate seems like an odd guy; in parliament he proposed a lot of unserious but attention-grabbing bills (reducing parliamentary salaries, shrinking parliament from 230 to 100 seats). During the COVID pandemic he proposed serious restrictions on freedom of movement to control the spread of hte disease, but only for the Romani communities in Portugal, who he blamed for accelerating the spread of the disease. And while most news coverage doesn’t mention it, I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t fill my readers in a bit, thanks to wikipedia, on Ventura’s literary career:

He published two novels, Montenegro in 2008, and A Última Madrugada do Islão (“The Last Dawn of Islam”) in 2009, both with significant elements of female submission and homoeroticism. Notably, in Montenegro, the Arabic word for uprising (intifada) is used four times: three times as a metaphor for strength and courage, and once when describing the act of sexual penetration. The publication of A Última Madrugada do Islão, a novel about the death of Yasser Arafat, was suspended by the publishers, Chiado Editora, for its “incendiary potential”, for its gratuitous references to Muhammad and the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Yikes. He’s widely expected to lose, but the margin will be closely watched. I’d feel a lot better with a nice big loss for Ventura than a close one. In the limited second round polling, Seguro is defeating Ventura by a 2:1 ratio.

…..I thought I’d add this here, rather than give it its own post. For those tracking the current state of far-right politics in Iberia, there’s a second election today to watch. Aragon is electing its regional parliament. The mainstream center right party, The People’s Party, generally does well here (Aragon is the main inland northern region, between Basque country and Catalonia, around half the population is in the Zaragosa metro area). They’re on pace to win again, and the center-left PSOE is on track for second place. The thing to watch is Vox’s vote share. They got 11% in 2023, they’re polling at around 17-18% and rising in the runup to the election. The early election was called in the hopes of getting the obstructionist Vox out of the People’s Party government; this may backfire.