Mass immigration is a factor all over Europe, drawing more and more voters away from big old center-left and center-right parties.
There was an illustration last weekend in Portugal, which held a parliamentary election March 10th, an election to populate the nation’s legislature.
Chega is Portugal’s third biggest party after it quadrupled its seats in parliament
By Elena Salvoni and AFP, Daily Mail, March 11, 2024
Eight parties won seats in the parliament. Five of them, however, were tiny fringe parties winning single-digit numbers of seats. By far the biggest shares of the seats went to three parties: a center-left party, a center-right party, and a new party founded just five years ago.
This new party has the name Chega. According to Wikipedia this translates literally as ”enough!” When I checked with Google Translate, though—I don’t own a Portuguese dictionary—it translated chega as ”he arrives.”
Make of that what you will: Chega is described in all the news reports as ”populist,” ”far right,” or ”national conservative.”
The founder of the party and current party leader is a fellow named André Ventura. He can fairly be described as ”colorful.”
The populist football pundit who gatecrashed Portuguese politics: How anti-immigration ex trainee priest who called for chemical castration of child rapists led Chega party to 'historic' gains in election edged by centre-right | Daily Mail Online https://t.co/BNx0T8meUU
— BobELee (@BobELee7) March 11, 2024
Mr. Ventura started out in life training to be a priest at a seminary in Lisbon; but he fell in love—with a female, I guess I should point out—and decided to become a lawyer instead. He actually studied law in Ireland.
Mr. Ventura’s subsequent career was as a lawyer, a novelist (one of his novels is about Yasser Arafat), a college teacher, a tax inspector, a newspaper opinion journalist, and a TV soccer commentator. So, yes: colorful.
With some qualifications you can put André Ventura in your files with other European populist insurgents like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen of France, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, Jimmie Åkesson of Sweden, and whoever it is currently heading up the AfD party in Germany.
Outside Europe, Donald Trump is the obvious comparison, and news reports on the election have not hesitated to make that comparison. There’s nothing unfair about that; but the parliamentary systems of European countries, with numerous parties all getting small slices of the pie, don’t map well into our still solidly two-party regime.
But yes: Europe’s nations, and nations like ours of European ancestry, are going through some big slow political change, with concerns over mass immigration a key driver of that change.
It’ll take a while. In this Portuguese election the main vote broke as 79 seats in the legislature for the center-right, 77 for the center-left, 48 for Chega. So to get anything done legislatively, Chega will have to cooperate with the center-right.
That can go all sorts of ways, even into the betrayal of the National Conservative ideals Chega got elected on. Think of the sad backsliding of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni this past year and a half.
So let’s not get our hopes up too high for Europe. Change is under way, though, and it’s change in the direction of National Conservatism.
