Portuguese Politics Explained with Ricardo Silvestre [PODCAST]

Why has the Portuguese politics become volatile and fragmented? What should we know about the Portuguese politicians and their conflicts of interest? How to address the problem of the Chega party and the rise of populism in Portugal? And what is the current status of the relations between Portugal and the EU? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Ricardo Silvestre, an author and a political scientist who is an Associate Fellow at the European Liberal Forum (ELF).

Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): Before we go into the current politics, what are the undercurrents driving the Portuguese politics in general? How would you describe the evolution of society and politics in the last 20 years? Can you give us a glimpse of the Portuguese politics?

Ricardo Silvestre (RS): The 2008 crisis hit Portugal really hard in such a bad way that we had to be bailed out by the European Commission, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. There was severe austerity that was led by the social democrats and the Christian democrats at the time. The Portuguese people very quickly understood that we had to put our accounting in order and to become more responsible with our money and the policies that relate to governance.

Then, the socialists with Antonio Costa took over. That was a decade of the socialists doing a good job – also with the help of the European Commission and the European Union. They did the exact kind of correction that was needed and ensured that the country would be better run and more in line with the EU criteria for success. This included, for example, financial stability and growth, among others.

Nevertheless, there is this terrible thing in Portugal, which I would call being ‘Portuguese smart’, namely trying to be a smart ass who is trying to trick people and evade the system every now and then. This was also the case with Antonio Costa, whose chief of staff actually stashed corrupt money in his office, which was right next door to the wine cases. It sounds too absurd to even be real, but it was. This and other scandals led to the government’s fall in the elections, the government’s rise, another government’s fall in the election, and yet another government’s rise. Something that Portugal is very good at is going over the cycles over and over again.

LJ: To what do you ascribe the socialists falling out of favor? Was it mainly the fact that the most popular politician was involved in the scandals?  Or do you think that the people were unhappy with the cost of living or immigration, which seems to be a big concern tied to the rise of the populist right-wing Chega party? What is the reason behind the party no longer being the dominating power in the Portuguese politics?

RS: It is crucial to analyze the results of the election, which led to the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats being in power. Therefore, we cannot say that there was some kind of deterioration or fatigue with the Socialists, because not only was the center-right in the government, but also they were actually not governing as well as they should.

The Socialist Party has had all the conditions to have that kind of cycle of governing where we had the Social Democrats, and now we are going to have the Socialists. However, the Socialists have a very bad leader – he is not charismatic, nor telegenic or a good communicator. He is also a little more to the left than what the majority of Socialist voters prefer. What happened was that some part of the electorate moved from the Socialists to the Social Democrats, because they did not like the leader of the Socialist party at the time.

On the other hand, running on a parallel track, there is now a kind of institutionalized discontent that comes from the people thinking that they are living very poor lives and their kids having no opportunities. They believe that in Portugal you have no future, so you have to go abroad.

Then, there is the question of the minorities in Portugal. There is an undercurrent that comes all the way from fascism in Portugal, from the Salazar regime. This undercurrent has always been there, but now it has a face. Now, there is a political party that people identify with and vote for, but not because they offer any solutions, but because they are anti-systemic. We have been seeing this trend all over Europe, which offers some explanation of the results that we saw, namely the Socialists scoring very poorly. They received 23% of votes, whereas normally they get around 30%. At the same time, we observed the rise of Chega, which now has 60 MPs, with around 22.7% of votes.

All of this shows that the Socialists and Chega are now neck-and-neck. Because of that, some part of the electorate has been moving from the center-left to the center-right.

LJ: Why is the Chega party so popular? Is the nostalgia for the times of the autocratic rule in Portugal coming back?

RS: There are two phenomena happening at the same time in this regard. One is an electorate that thinks that during the time of Salazar things were better, which is something that I have heard all my life. Some people still look at the time of fascism in Portugal and think that it was a time when people knew how to behave and had values. This kind of nostalgia is still strong among the elderly electorate. Those people are still very enamored with the idea of Portugal at its best (which was not the case), but that is the perception.

The other thing is far more worrisome. It is the young generation, which is voting for Chega, because they think they are cool or rad and they go against the system. We may observe similar attitudes in Poland, Germany, or Austria, where young people are actually voting against their own interests. In Portugal, the Chega party stands for many policies that you see in the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, which is actually trying to take rights away from the people – and from the youth in particular.

This is the problem of a lack of political knowledge, curiosity, and education among the younger electorate. Young people are now voting for Chega not fully knowing what they are voting for, and they are doing so either because they saw something on TikTok or because they think that an event they attended or a politician they saw were fun. There is a lot of work to be done to try to address the nostalgia for the problematic past, which is popular among the elderly, while at the same time try to make the young voter understand that Chega is not a good option – and that it is not a viable option for the Portuguese governance.

LJ: Over the last five years, the population of migrants doubled in Portugal. How is the immigration working for Portugal? And how does the housing crisis relate to – also in light of the right-wing narratives on migration?

RS: Interestingly, during the election campaign, there was a discussion about perception that was permeating not only the media but also people’s conversations. What the Chega party is very good at is creating a momentum of political will based purely on perceptions.

Indeed, there are many immigrants in Portugal. They come from Brazil, our former colonies in Africa, and now from the subcontinent (from places like Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, among others). This means that there are some very clear ethnic differences between those people and the Portuguese people. There are also the Ukrainian people who came in after the revolutions happened in Ukraine. Clearly, it is a big mix, but the crime rate is not higher because of those communities, because those communities are not disruptive –  they are here, in Portugal, to try to make a better life for themselves. The Portuguese people did the same thing. We emigrated everywhere, particularly in Europe –  from Germany to England, to France – trying to have a better life.

What Chega is doing is trying to pit the Portuguese society against this non-real threat. On the other hand, they refuse to enter a discussion about the need for immigrants in certain professions that the Portuguese people do not want to go into, or because we need money for our social security system or from taxes, or because they are entrepreneurs. Therefore, we are in a very unfair position, as this perception takes over the debate and voting intentions. At the same time, we are not going into the details, and it is the details that show that migration is very important for Portugal.

Furthermore, it was also the fault of the Portuguese government not to have taken care of migration processes in a better way. There is an organization that deals with migration, but it is terrible – it is poorly managed, it makes one mistake after another, and things take forever to get solved. If you are an immigrant and you just apply for any kind of permit to live in Portugal, you have to wait many years, at which point everything changes, and so you have to do it all over again. The problem is that we do not know how to solve those problems for ourselves by having good policies and good governance.

LJ: The Portuguese have always been very pro-European. How has this sentiment evolved in the recent years? How does Portugal perceive its role in the European Union? And how do you think that the fact that you had this, that Portuguese statesmen, politicians are popular among other European leaders to be in charge, how does it influence the perception of the European Union in Portugal?

RS: Fortunately, the level of satisfaction of being in the European Union is very high in Portugal. The Portuguese people like the European Union, they like to be in the European Union, to be a part of this project. Of course, this has to do mostly with money that is made available to us. But also, there is the European side to us. We get very easily turned inwards the continent, even if you have good transatlantic relationships, and then we have Brazil and Africa, but we are Europeans at heart.

Now, coming back to politics, what is really depressing is that this satisfaction is not reflected in people’s political awareness. At least 22% of our neighbors vote for Chega or for the left, particularly the communists and the new communists, which are anti-EU projects. The same thing happened in Poland, which is one of the countries that have a higher level of participation in EU projects, and the voters still elected the president who is against that European project as such.

What makes me really dumbfounded is when I talk to people about why are they voting for a political party that wants to go to the European Parliament and profoundly reshape the European Union project? This is also the case of Chega in Patriots for Europe.

The Chega party got two MPs in the outside of the Portugal’s circles. These are the people who migrated from Portugal to other countries for a better life. And they are voting for a political party that is trying to reject other people coming to Portugal to have a good life. This paradox reflects a certain incongruence, this antithesis in the relationship between Portugal and the rest of the world, and in particular with Europe.

All of this makes me want to work even harder. We need to change that. Let us try to make things different.

This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.