Report attitudes towards collective memory of resistance against far-right regimes, groups or practices and specific narratives in collective memory in the target countries
BRUNO MADEIRA, CITCEM, UNIVERSITY OF PORTO
Introduction
During the first two decades of the 21st century, Portugal represented an exception to European rule. Contrary to the post-fascist wave that swept the continent and achieved significant electoral results, the Portuguese extreme right – despite leading violent actions1 – did not seem capable of conquering significant social and electoral popularity. Like Spain, where post-fascism virus took a long time to establish itself politically, Portugal thought it was immune to the most significant and threatening political phenomenon of the 21st century.
The legislative elections of October 2019 would mark the end of Portuguese exceptionalism. With around 68.000 votes (1.29%)2, the newly created Chega3 won; for the first time since the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which ended 48 years of fascist dictatorship; a parliamentary seat for the Portuguese ultraright. The only elected deputy, party leader André Ventura, would also run in the presidential elections in January 2021. In that election, Ventura came in third place, obtaining around 497.000 votes (11.9%)4 – an exponential growth compared to the results of the 2019 elections.
The rupture of the parliamentary incidence agreement concluded between the Socialist Party (PS), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the Left Bloc (BE), and the Ecologist Party ‘The Greens’ (PEV)5, in October 2021, forced early legislative elections to be held in January 2022. In the 2022 elections, the losing parties were PCP, BE and PEV, with the majority going to PS. The other winning parties, which made up the ne Portuguese right, were the Liberal Iniative6(a neo-liberal party7) and Chega. The latter, led again by its leader, André Ventura, collected around 400,000 votes (7.18%)8, electing 12 deputies and becoming the third-largest parliamentary seat in the Portuguese parliament.
About a year after these elections, Chega received 11% of voting intentions in the 2023 January and February 2023 polls9. In March, a survey carried out for SIC/Expresso showed the sustained growth of the party, now with 13% of voting intentions. This trajectory of winning electorates, elected representatives, militants and supporters; the nature of Chega’s political intervention targeting the gipsy community, immigrants, and the Muslim community; its opposition to the democratic regime inaugurated with the 1974 Revolution; combined with its intention to tear up the current Constitution and draft a new one to form the Fourth Republic, make the party and Portuguese post-fascism something of the utmost political and public centrality.
Towards an archaeology of the extreme right in Portugal: from absolutism to integralism
To do the archaeology of the Portuguese far right takes us back to the political and cultural project of Miguelismo, “the main expression of the counter-revolution in Portugal” (Lousada, 2014: 81). It is in the struggle against liberalism in the first half of the 19th century, that the Portuguese rightist tradition and genealogy begins to be delineated. In this context, that the anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-revolutionary thought that would characterise the successive projects of the radical right for the country was formulated for the first time.
Miguelismo was, therefore, the first anti-liberal nationalism, chronologically followed by, according to Ernesto Castro Leal, the integralist reaction of the 1910s and 1920s – embodied in organizations such as Lusitanian Integralism10 (Quintas, 2004; Quintas, 2014; Desvignes, 2007) and the Portuguese Royalist Action11; that of an eminently fascist nature, still in the 1920s, represented by the Lusitanian Nationalism Centre12; that of the fascism of the 1930s – expressed by the National-Syndicalist Movement 13 of the Rolão Preto blue shirts (Pinto, 1994); and that of the “syncretic nationalism of the decades of 1910 and 1920 of the 20th century, which manifested itself in the National League14 (1915-1918), in the Portuguese Catholic Centre15 (1917-1932) and in the National Crusade D. Nun’Álvares Pereira16 (1918-1938), which will converge in the anti-liberal nationalist ideology of the ‘Estado Novo’ Dictatorship” (Leal, 2015: 115-116).
Of all these groups and movements, Integralism was the one that would gain the most influence among the generations of rightists that succeeded it. Embracing the Miguelite heritage, after the Republican Revolution of 5th of October 1910, it defended the restoration of an “organic, anti-parliamentary, decentralising and traditionalist” monarchy (Quintas, 2014: 171). The doctrine defended by the IL was of an organicist, anti-democratic, elitist, corporative, municipalism and nationalist nature. Furthermore, it defended the natural union between sovereign and suzerains and the absolute power of the former.
The IL will also be necessary for having, according to António Sardinha in O Valor da Raça17, “a racial nationalism, […] detecting in the imaginary of the ‘Homo Atlanticus’ the basis of the Portuguese race” (Pinto, 1998: 28). To shape this racial nationalism, Integralism also proceeded to the election and consecration of the national golden ages and the mythification of its main heroes and episodes, denouncing the decadence that would have followed them and that would be killing the homeland organism. This permanent meditation on national decadence – associated first with a constitutional monarchy and liberalism, then with the Republic, and finally with democracy, socialism and political pluralism – would become a constant of all rightist discourse throughout the 20th century and in the first decades of the 21st century. It is precisely with IL that a tradition begins formulating projects for the regeneration of national greatness and conscience and cleaning up and eliminating the elements that prevented the re-edition of this former greatness.
The extreme right under Salazar and Caetano
For Costa Pinto, National Syndicalism corresponded to “the process of fascistisation of Lusitanian Integralism” (Pinto, 1998: 102). This process transformed the laconic nationalism of IL into a strongly imperialist ideology, whose main motto was centred on the mythification of the secular Portuguese colonial domain and the ideological inculcation of the awareness of this vocation, of the imperial dimension and power of the country in the identity conceptions of its national elites and its people.
As far as the national-revolutionary right-wing parties that emerged in Portugal during and after World War II are concerned, Riccardo Marchi most dedicated himself to their study and analysis. Marchi has published two major works that cover the periods 1939-1950 and 1959-1974 (Marchi, 2009a; Marchi, 2009b), as well as, among others, an article in which he maps out the nationalist right in the University of Coimbra between 1945 and 1974 (Marchi, 2008). This is a Germanophile, neo-fascist and far right-wing – whose actual capacity of influence or opposition to the political orientation of the Estado Novo is difficult to evaluate – that intended, in the first phase, to lead Salazar to a more active and declared collaboration with Germany and the Axis forces during the Second World War.
In the post war period, the neo-fascist and ultra-right were more concerned with ideological and cultural discussion – with the attempt to politically and ideologically influence the regime and its cadres – than with the actual exercise of power. Despite the differences they constantly affirmed concerning Salazar’s conservatism and weak national-revolutionary leanings, the truth is that the dictator retained an aura among the various right-wingers of the regime that made any coup attempt from this side of the political spectrum a manoeuvre doomed to failure. Thus, although in its publications – Távola Redonda (1950-1954), Cidade Nova (1946-1960) and Tempo Presente (1959- 1961) – it presented itself as independent, alternative and critical, the truth is that it was entirely legal to the Estado Novo and was, in fact, part of a system that it did not intend to overthrow, but only to rehabilitate or fascistise more vigorously.
These rightists had as core values “God, Fatherland, Empire, Justice, Authority, Order, Spirituality and Immanence, Tradition and Renewal, Thought and Action” (Marchi, 2009b: 25). The emergence of this new generation of right-wingers in the late 1950s/early 1960s and their attempts at cultural, moral and ideological revitalisation of the regime’s right-wingers was mainly due to the beginning of the wars of liberation in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa and the almost total international isolation to which the international community condemned the country.
As Marchi stresses, “the war in Africa […] provides this generation with that feeling of a threatened homeland, which had mobilised the previous nationalist generations in the troubled years of the First Republic and the military coup. The feeling of the motherland under threat allows these young people to dream of their own national revolution finally” (Marchi, 2008: 335). In this way, the African wars of liberation provided the motto for the recovery, deepening or presenting new arguments and myths about the country’s imperial vocation. The threat to the “one and indivisible Portugal” also served as a stimulus to closing ranks around Salazar and his colonial policy.
Besides the central role of colonialism and imperialism in their political project, this last generation of rightists of the Estado Novo also had as their political-ideological principles hatred of democracy, the nation as a total value, anti-individualism, anti liberalism, authoritarianism, organicism, anti-communism, and anti-pluralism. The divorce between this political camp and the regime only occurred during the short consulate of Marcelo Caetano (1968-1974), whom they accused of Europeanism and lack of commitment to the defence and conservation of the Portuguese colonial empire. His timid, limited and erratic policies of openness and liberalisation of the Estado Novo were also a constant source of criticism from the national-revolutionary right.
In contrast to the lukewarmness of Caetano, the figure of Salazar and the historical experience of his regime began to be recovered, acclaimed and mythicized by the Portuguese radical right. Indeed, Salazar’s fascist dictatorship will become for the generations that will live through the final years of the Estado Novo, the trials of the revolutionary biennium 1974-1975 and the long electoral and political irrelevance in Portuguese democracy (1976-2019), the horizon of opposition to the democratic order.
The loyalty to the memory, action and worldview of Salazar was fully demonstrated in the programme that RTP – the Portuguese public television channel – broadcast between the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007: “The Great Portuguese”. There, starting from a list of 100 notable figures from national history, culture and politics, the public was asked to proceed to a first vote in which they should elect their “great Portuguese” and, in this way, choose the 10 finalists of the programme. Revealing the recognition that a significant part of the Portuguese population still felt towards the legacy of the Salazar dictatorship, the dictator was elected for this batch of finalists. Each one of the 10 candidates for “Great Portuguese” had a personality that served as an advocate for its cause.
The sponsor of Salazar’s candidacy was Jaime Nogueira Pinto – a reference to the Portuguese radical right since the 1960s. At the end of March 2007, about a month before commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, the greatest Portuguese person of all time was finally revealed. The person elected was António de Oliveira Salazar18. The podium was completed by his arch-enemy, Álvaro Cunhal – historical leader of the Portuguese Communist Party from the 1940s until the 1990s – in second place, and by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese diplomat who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews who came to the Portuguese Consulate in Bordeaux in search of an entry visa to Portugal that would allow them to escape the Nazi death machine and flee to the Americas.
It is essential, therefore, to characterise the regime, the principles and the political practices created by Salazar that the post-fascist right and, according to the results of the aforementioned television programme, and a significant part of the Portuguese recognise as a golden period of national history and as a historical experience to be rehabilitated and moulded to the circumstances of the present time, re-edited. The history of the radical right since its defeat in the Civil War of 1832-1834 at the hands of the troops and liberal ideas was that of a growing and constant fractionation that prevented them from forming a platform of power capable of rivalling first the liberals and later the republicans. The division and inability to coordinate were particularly evident in the context of the First Republic. Despite the brief dictatorial experiences of Pimenta de Castro (1915) and Sidónio Pais (1917-1918), who gained the support of various political movements and parties from the republican and monarchist right wing, the truth is that even after the counter-revolutionary coup of 28 May 1926, which instituted the Military Dictatorship, the radical right was still incapable of coming to an understanding and finding a stable model of governance for the country. Salazar began to assert himself in the Portuguese political universe of the political and military instability of the Military Dictatorship and its poor economic and financial performance. From the moment he is, for the second time, called by the military to occupy the Finance Ministry in 1928, the Coimbra academic begins a “skilful […] process of eliminations, integrations and compromises […] in the more or less chaotic and pulverised framework of what were the Portuguese right-wing parties” (Rosas, 1998: 142). Thus, Salazar’s first great achievement was to succeed in transforming the plurality, the enmity and the incapacity to formulate a pragmatic project of power with the conditions to triumph into an aligned and relatively homogenous political block, which managed to co-opt not only the extreme right of his time – Lusitanian Integralism, the Nun’Álvares Crusade and the May 28 League – but also the monarchic and republican right, overcoming (at least until after the Second World War) the dispute over the question of the regime.
The different political factions and class fractions that gathered – voluntarily or coerced – around Salazar were united by the rejection of liberal democracy, of liberal, democratic, pluralist and parliamentarian principles. They denounced the chaos, corruption and degeneration of the national organism to which the dictatorship of the parties, the particracy, was leading; they rejected individualism and the abstract idea of individual rights, liberties and guarantees; they aspired to the emergence of a charismatic and providential leader who, armed with dictatorial power, would put “order” in the country enabling the return to its former greatness. They were inspired by a corporative and organicist nationalism, with different features depending on the more specific worldview of each of the political-ideological groups; they defended the affirmation of a strong and authoritarian state and government, immune to the volatility and fickleness of circumstantial political majorities and the cyclical crises of parliamentarianism. Colonial imperialism is another identifying feature of these various right-wing parties. Moreover, the Colonial Act (1930) – drawn up, proposed and approved when Salazar held the Colonies Ministry – was “the first stone of the future constitutional edifice to raise the dictatorship” (Rosas, 1998: 183). Not only did the Colonial Act precede by three years the Constitution, which institutionalised the Estado Novo, but it was also incorporated into the constitutional text.
Involved in all this work of federating the radical right-wingers of the 1920s and 1930s and building the Estado Novo is “the myth of the new beginning, of rebirth from the ashes or rubble of decadent and rotten liberalism, a kind of regenerating fantasy” (Rosas, 2019: 160). It is a palingenetic myth designed to commit and mobilise the country’s political, economic, social and cultural elites and the population with a political project that lulled and attuned to the fascism triumphant in Europe between the 1920s and 1940s. The process of “fascistisation” is coordinated, in ideological, political and disciplinary terms, from the National Propaganda Secretariat, from a multiple set of mass framing organisations directed by the regime19, the creation and instrumentalization of the single party – the National Union –, the restoration of the legitimacy and temporal power of the Catholic Church, national education, censorship, the corporative system20 and the careful management of the economy of preventive and punitive violence (Rosas, 2013: 196).
Thus, as Rosas states, violence, potentially unrestricted violence, is the common essence of the set of regimes of the fascist type as a form of negation and overcoming of the liberal state and of radicalisation of political and social domination by the different coalitions of dominant sectors which they express. The degree and extent of the use of this violence varied according to the distinct characteristics these regimes assumed in each concrete social formation and by the historical circumstances and the specific culture that conditioned their evolution. In any case, this violence, tendentially linked to national regeneration and, for that very reason, tendentially without actual mechanisms of hetero-limitation, […] such violence is not what differentiates, but what, fundamentally, identifies the regimes of fascist type. (Rosas, 2013: 194).
For Salazar, in what concerns preventive violence and the action of the organisations of ideological inculcation and framing of the masses, it was a matter, as a priority, of carrying out a revolution of the souls that would cure the people – and each one of the individuals that composed it – of the degenerating effects of the foreign and anti-national ideas and doctrines. This revolution corresponded to the re-foundation of national identity and social and political life according to Portugal’s golden period’s historical and traditional matrix.
Portuguese corporatism – in the image of Italian corporatism – had, according to Rosas, three central objectives: i) “to outlaw and liquidate the existing free labour and trade union movement”, framing “the world of labour in a straitjacket of simultaneously intimidating, demobilising, alienating and repressing forces that would allow the imposition of living and working conditions enabling the reposition of the rates of profit and accumulation of the possessing classes” (Rosas, 2019: 165); ii) create a powerful “state instrument of economic regulation” (Rosas, 2019: 166) – economically anaemic, technologically backward and industrially incipient, the national bourgeoisie was still torn by the divergences between rentier or parasitic capital and industrial or developmental capital; iii) control ideologically and provide a “totalitarian framework of the world of labour” (Rosas, 2019: 168).
Finally, regarding punitive violence, the network composed of the Police of Surveillance and Defence of the State (PVDE) (1933-1945)/International Police and Defence of the State (PIDE) (1945-1969)/Directorate-General for Security (DGS) (1969- 1974) (Pimentel, 2011; Pimentel, 2017; Pimentel, 2019; Torgal, 2022), by the Plenary Courts, the political prisons and the concentration camp of Tarrafal, Cape Verde, inaugurated in 1936 and also known as “Camp of Slow Death” (Tavares, 2007), as well as the action of the National Republican Guard, the Public Security Police and the Army in the repression of demonstrations, strikes and other forms of popular protest, was highly efficient in silencing oppositions.
The Portuguese colonial empire and the liberation wars
The dimension of the Salazarist legacy that, without doubt, was always more recognised and celebrated by subsequent rightist generations was, as we have seen, the intransigent defence of the Portuguese colonial empire. In 1961, a few years later than had occurred in the English, French and Belgian colonial empires, a series of colonial wars began that would oppose the old Portuguese empire to the African liberation movements, which proposed to construct a new historical experience for their territories. The war was divided into three fronts – Angola (1961-1974), Guinea-Bissau (1963-1974) and Mozambique (1964-1974) – and mobilised hundreds of thousands of young Portuguese and African men.
In order to understand the effort that Salazar was willing to make to prevent the emancipation of the colonised peoples and the independence of their territories, during the colonial war, in proportional terms to its total population, only Israel had more men in arms than Portugal (Cardina & Martins, 2018: 11). There was also a policy of increasing recruitment of Africans to the ranks of the Portuguese troops and for them to perform the most dangerous and difficult tasks. The Africanisation of the colonial military contingent is evident if we take into account that “in the 1970s, and taking the three theatres of operations together, local recruitment was already above 40 per cent of the total regular troops, and in Mozambique, it came to represent, from 1971 onwards, more than half of the contingent” (Cardina & Martins, 2018: 11). In total, the colonial war that the Portuguese Empire kept in Africa mobilised about 800 thousand Portuguese and 500 thousand Africans, having caused, only among the Portuguese troops, 10 thousand dead and 30 thousand wounded21. According to Pedro Marquês de Sousa, between the African civilian population and the fighters of the liberation movements, there were more than 45 thousand deaths22. These figures clearly express the degree of violence and destruction caused by the final throes of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, but also among their own youth.
The reorganisation of the post-fascist right after 25 April 1974
The liberation struggles of the African peoples colonised by the Portuguese empire were decisive not only for the definition of the independence processes and the post-independence political life of Portugal’s five former African colonies but also for the creation of the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA)23 and, by extension, for the democratisation of the country. The 25th of April 1974 was, without doubt, the beginning of a “prolonged crisis of the Portuguese right-wing”, in which its members “had to build entirely new organisations and find new leaders, at the same time reformulating ideologies and programmes and trying to recover dispersed clienteles”, so that “the recovery of the right wing was bound to take time” (Lucena, 2002: 25-26).
As a result of their opposition to Marcelism (Rosas & Oliveira, 2004) and their self-imposed and hetero-imposed distancing from the structures of political and police power, the right-wing radicals were “free from the first measures of sanitation and exile, given that they had not held important political functions in the previous regime, [so] it was the young neo-fascists who most rapidly outlined the constitution of resistance parties, taking advantage of the new legality” (Pinto, 1999: 44-45). More or less surprised by the military coup and the political orientation that the Revolution would rapidly take, the post-fascist right was quick to organise itself into parties. It was able to take advantage of the conditions and potentialities that the opening up of national political life and the democratisation process could provide for its intervention. Until a certain moment, it seemed that in the new circumstances it could act with fewer constraints and more freedom than during the Estado Novo.
This right remained profoundly anti-democratic, anti-liberal and anti-pluralist. However, it showed itself willing to accept the liberal democracy that the MFA claimed to want to implement in Portugal to try to save the main Salazarist legacy: the defence of the colonial empire. Imperialist nationalism and profound anti-communism led this political camp to abandon, renege on or postpone, temporarily and pragmatically, values and principles that had always existed. Thus, as one of the cadres of the Portuguese radical right stated, in the collective “‘save yourself if you can’ of 74-75, the most that was achieved was to maintain a certain style of fidelity, combativeness and solidarity of groups and, in prisons, exiles and resistance, in Europe and Africa, to bear witness, if not by the results, at least by attitudes and their cost” (Pinto, 1996: 187).
In the first phase of the post-fascist right wing reorganisation, the following parties emerged in the first months after 25 April 1974: Portuguese Federalist Movement-Progress Party24, Liberal Party (PL)25, Portuguese Popular Movement (MPP)26, Portuguese Action Movement (MAP)27, Christian Democratic Party (PDC)28, Portuguese Labour and Democratic Party (PTDP)29 and Portuguese Nationalist Party (PNP) 30 (Marchi, 2020a; Madeira, 2020). Except for the Christian Democratic Party, all the others would be outlawed following the attempted counter-revolutionary coup led on 28 September 1974 by the then President of the Republic, António de Spínola.
While obliged to make a necessarily brief analysis of these parties, it is worth highlighting the distance their names – except for those of MAP and PNP – seek to establish concerning the historical experience of the Estado Novo. It is also remarkably revealing that none of these parties wished to bear “right” in their name. Furthermore, the effort to associate them with the ideals of “progress”, “liberty”, “popular”, “democracy”, “labourism” and “Christianity” is evident. Despite the different nomenclature adopted and some programmatic variations, these parties corresponded to the various ideological families and traditions on the right. They demonstrated a remarkable capacity to respond and adapt to the new political paradigm with a view to their own survival. They also revealed a marked organisational, discursive and ideological plasticity. Despite their short duration, these movements and parties, apart from slight nuances in the way they formulated and transmitted their worldview and proposals for the country, demonstrated: i) a solid nationalist agenda; ii) a profound anti-communist sentiment; iii) a clear intention of making decolonisation unviable or, in the worst possible scenario, of delaying it; iv) the umbilical link to Catholic traditionalism (Madeira, 2020: 589-590).
From January 1975, the post-fascist right entered a second phase in Portuguese democracy, which would have ramifications at least until 1977: anti-communist terrorism and violence. In the first half of 1975 the Portuguese Liberation Army (ELP)31 and the Democratic Movement for the Liberation of Portugal (MDLP)32 were founded, which, articulated by the Maria da Fonte Plan, would mark the centre and north of the country with iron and fire between 1975 and 197733 (Carvalho, 2017; Dâmaso, 1997; Madeira, 2020; Tíscar, 2014). At the time, and in the immediately subsequent years, the cadres, publications and parties of the radical right tended not to pronounce on the attacks or to value – without referring to the violence employed, the victims caused, and the property damage caused – “a pretended national resistance to communism or, in an ingenious mirror game, they blamed the revolutionary left for the bombs” (Madeira, 2020: 268).
Behind the clandestine network that, coordinated from the Francoist Madrid, carried out around 575 violent actions (Madeira, 2020: 275) in Portugal, there are hidden connections – identifiable in the bibliography that we present – to the high hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the bases and local and county directorates of the Socialist Party and, above all, of the Popular Democratic Party/Social Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Centre. The attacks mainly targeted the local headquarters of the Portuguese Communist Party, as well as the premises of other parties of the socialist left, the premises of trade unions linked to the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers and individuals associated with the revolutionary left. These attacks occurred mainly in the country’s regions where the Portuguese Communist Party and the revolutionary parties and movements had less territorial implantation and political influence – the north and centre of the country. Around half of the attacks occurred between May and November 1975 (289) – the month in which, on the 25th, the socialist phase of the Portuguese revolution was definitively closed, and the communists were definitively removed from the sphere of power. It is enlightening, however, that, even after this victory of the anti-communist block, there have still been, between December 1975 and April 1977, 286 attacks by terrorist groups of the extreme right, almost the same as those which occurred during the so-called Hot Summer.
Reorganisation, growth and exhaustion of the post fascist right in 1976-1980 cycle
The political conditions opened up by the coup of November 25th 1975, and the exhaustion of the revolutionary cycle were rapidly seized upon and exploited by the post-fascist right. Already in 1976, this political camp encouraged the creation or the re edition of a set of periodicals that became authentic references for the Portuguese radical right. In terms of the periodic press, the weekly newspapers O Diabo and A Rua stand out, as well as pre-existing magazines – and before the Revolution – such as Jornal Português de Economia & Finanças and Resistência. On the partisan level, the post fascist right wing sought to recover the Christian Democratic Party and impose a more radical political-ideological orientation on it, and to create new right-wing parties and electoral fronts, such as the Independent Movement for National Reconstruction/Party of the Portuguese Right (MIRN)34, the Party of the National Alliance (PAP), the Front of National Resurgence (FRATERNA) and the National Front (FN). In the cycle of reorganisation of the Portuguese extreme right, the National Revolutionary Front (FNR)35, New Order (ON)36 and Nationalist Movement (MN)37 also emerged. On the associative level, there was also a proliferation of organisations and acronyms, often only present in one or two statements, but which, in general terms, sought to organise and politically mobilise the anti-communist camp, the returnees from the former colonies, entrepreneurs and shareholders whose properties were nationalised (Marchi, 2017; Madeira, 2020).
However, rather than revealing the vitality of the rightist field, this splitting up of the post-fascist right into dozens of sectorial collectives seems more like an attempt to capture for its political camp all Portuguese people who, in one way or another, might feel harmed or defrauded by the Revolution and to launch, in a supra and extra-party framework, circles of reflection that would allow a metapolitical intervention with the centre-right political parties, and launch, in a supra and extra-party framework, circles of reflection that would allow a metapolitical intervention” with the political parties of the centre-right, journalists and columnists of the press and, through the first two, public opinion. The multiplication of publications, publishing houses, parties and associations also demonstrates the nature and the group-based tendency of the post-fascist right, orphaned of a natural leader who, in the image of Salazar in the 1920s and 1930s, would be able to unite it.
This right-wing field felt that the conditions were in place to grow and begin to formulate a power project. In the 1979 legislative elections, it abandoned the strategic support they had given to the CDS in the elections of April 25, 1976, and – although the MIRN/PDP and the group gathered around the Jornal Português de Economia & Finanças stood aside from the candidacy –stood for the first time in the popular vote. Under the banner of the Christian Democratic Party/Right-wing Independents, obtained 72,514 votes (1.21%)38. Although the result did not allow the election of a deputy and occurred in the context of the conquest of the absolute majority by the coalition of the democratic right – the Democratic Alliance (AD)39, composed of the PSD, the CDS and the Monarchic Popular Party40 – it raised the expectation among some sectors of the radical right that, very soon, they would have a guaranteed entry into Parliament41.
For constitutional reasons, legislative elections were held again in 1980. This time the PDC ran in a coalition that included the MIRN/PDP and the recently created FN. The campaign and the statements made by the coalition leaders testified to their enthusiasm and conviction that the electoral weight of this political camp would grow significantly. However, the pragmatism that tends to characterise the right-wing electorate meant that a significant part of the vote obtained in 1979 went directly to the lists of the AD, which saw its majority reinforced. The coalition of radical right-wingers only received 23,819 votes (0.4%)42, and disillusionment, frustration and despair swept through the right-wing ranks. In effect, the electoral hecatomb of 1980 would lead to the disappearance or relative inactivity of a significant part of the parties, associations, publications and editors born in the 1976-1980 cycle.
From the MAN neo-Nazi experience to the National Assembly with Chega, passing through the PNR (1985- 2022)
There follows a long crossing of the desert and a period of transformation in the political field. Suppose part of the cadres of the radical right abdicate their party and concentrate only on opposition to the democratic regime. In that case, others will launch themselves into metapolitical intervention – through publications such as Futuro Presente and Terceiro Milénio (Madeira, 2020). Finally, among the ranks of the national revolutionary youth skinhead and neo-Nazi groups would begin to emerge. The first, the National Action Movement (MAN)43, was created in 1985 and, on the verge of being declared illegal by the Constitutional Court, self-dissolved by its leaders in 1992. MAN and the constellation of groups and movements that would result from its extinction renounced participation in elections. They were violent towards ethnic minorities and political opponents – communists of the most diverse ideological orientations – their main instrument of political combat. Contrary to the previous generation, they privileged the publication and diffusion of fanzines and openly racist bulletins clandestinely and only among the group members.
In 2000, a group of members of the 1976-1980 and 1980-1990 generations once again took the party route. By storming a dying party, the Democratic Renewal Party (PRD)44, they managed to change its name, symbol and statutes – the National Renewal Party (PNR)45 was thus born. This device allowed the post-fascist right to avoid the need to collect the 7,500 signatures that the Constitutional Court requires of any new party for it to be able to formally constitute itself and participate in elections. The tensions between the old and the new generation will be felt immediately undermining internal unity (Costa, 2011). The generation forged in the myth of multiracialism of the Portuguese colonial empire and, in defence of the former colonies, did not want the young racialists coming from MAN to gain too much power. As Marchi (2019) shows, the racialist faction would eventually win at the I National Convention of the PNR in 2002. At the II National Convention in 2005, José Pinto-Coelho was elected president of the party – a position in which he remains. José Pinto-Coelho embodied a synthesis between the two factions of the PNR – he had been linked to the MIRN, was a traditionalist Catholic, had served in the Nationalist Movement and was willing to integrate boneheads and hammerskins into the party leadership.
Despite having a bet on an openly racist, xenophobic, misogynist, anti immigration, anti-democracy, anti-party and securitarian discourse and propaganda, confident that the potential electorate for that type of programme and narrative was just waiting for a political vehicle through which to express itself electorally to emerge, the truth is that the PNR never obtained a significant result. In the first elections in which it participated, it obtained 4,712 votes (0.09%); in the last, in 2022 and already under the name Ergue-te!46, 5,017 votes (0.09%). The party’s best result was obtained in 2015, winning 27,269 votes (0.5%) in that year’s legislative elections. Even in the European elections, which usually favour post-fascist parties, the best result obtained by the PNR was 16.014 votes (0,49%)47. Since it was prevented from running in its own name because it was not yet legally constituted as a party, Chega won 49,496 votes (1.49%) in those elections under the acronym Basta!, demonstrating a potential for growth and affirmation that was confirmed in the legislative elections of that year and that it has continued to strengthen in all elections since then. Moreover, the poor electoral performance of Ergue-te! in 2022 is symptomatic of the absorption of its electorate by Chega.
Chega is also the arrival point for radical organisations, created mainly in the 2010s, such as Identitarian Cause48, Portuguese First Association49, New Portugality50 and Identitarian Shield51. Downstream, André Ventura’s party is linked to Movimento Zero and other extreme right-wing groups that have recently organised themselves in the Portuguese police and military forces52, as well as the trade union federation Solidariedade53. In its discourse, tone, themes and strategy, Chega is clearly aligned with the post-fascist right-wing and ultra-right-wing groups that have marked European, North American and Brazilian political life in the second decade of the 21st century. It took up themes that had already marked the political and media agenda of the Social Democratic Centre-Popular Party, namely a markedly xenophobic discourse concerning the gipsy community54 and the division between the good Portuguese – those who work and pay their taxes – and those who are not, those who “live” off social benefits and state subsidies55.
Besides xenophobia, racism – which has already earned the president of Chega a court sentence56 – and the stigmatisation or criminalisation of poverty, Chega also relies on a security discourse, which represents Portugal as having an extremely high and growing level of criminality – it is the politics of fear that characterises all contemporary Portuguese parties and movements.
The party also presents itself as the champion of the fight against corruption – even though its leader worked for several years for a legal consultancy firm whose speciality was finding legal loopholes that allowed its clients to evade paying taxes. Finally, the narrative constantly repeated by André Ventura claims a role of exteriority about the system – indeed, Chega is recurrently presented as an anti-system party (Marchi, 2020b) – and of total absence of commitment to, or deference towards, the political, economic and social elites of the country. Despite having co-opted prominent neo-Nazis57, having taken in former militants of the PNR58 and New Democracy59, and having absorbed the Pro-Life Party/Citizenship and Christian Democracy60, the truth is that it also integrated a tendency of the CDS61, and its leader had an entire career in the Young Social Democrats62 and the PSD. It was as a candidate of this party for Loures City Council – a candidacy sponsored by the former Prime Minister and still president of the PSD, Pedro Passos Coelho – that Ventura tested the receptivity of the electorate to the xenophobic, racist, security-oriented and poverty-criminalising discourse that he has been perfecting ever since. If there is something anti-system about Chega it is that it is against the democratic system founded in April 1974. For the rest, how its leaders, deputies and its press describe Portugal’s decline over the last 50 years is not innocent. Without wishing to pay Salazar a straightforward compliment, they do not fail to say that during the time of the Estado Novo people lived better, there was more respect for authority and less criminality, the moral and traditional values of the Portuguese population – Catholic and conservative – were respected, and corruption was unknown.
Regarding rights, liberties and guarantees, Chega has been committed to fighting against the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, same-sex adoption, gender self determination and the rights of transgender persons. Ventura has also distinguished himself by mimicking the fight against “gender ideology” Bolsonaro undertook in Brazil, which brought him so many votes. In the economic field, Chega initially presented itself with a profoundly neoliberal programme, in which, for example, education and health should be privately assured. As they were opposed in this field by the Liberal Initiative – with more credits and neo-liberal convictions – and as they found that their electorate did not welcome this type of economic agenda, they have gradually adopted an economic discourse in which the State appears more and more as a critical and intervening agent.
In a political scenario in which seems impossible for the right to govern without the consent and participation of Chega the question today is how far the party can grow, how important it can become in the running of the country and what relationship the (still) largest party of the right, the PSD, will establish with André Ventura’s party if it needs it to govern. In statements made at the 5th National Convention of Chega in January 2023, Ventura once again demanded participation in the government – in December 2020 he wanted four ministries63; in February 2022 he was already clamouring for six64 – as a condition for the viability of an executive led by the PSD65. It remains to be seen whether he will maintain his level of demand when and if circumstances are favourable to forming a right-wing government and if the PSD – a founding party of Portuguese democracy – will accept leading the country in alliance with a xenophobic and racist party.
Notes
1 https://www.dn.pt/pais/alcindo-monteiro-morreu-ha-25-anos-uma-vitima-do-racismo-12299263.html; https://www.tsf.pt/sociedade/praca-do-martim-moniz-palco-de-manifestacoes-a-favor-e-contra-a imigracao-5495645.html; https://www.rtp.pt/noticias/politica/pnr-passeou-pelo-martim-moniz-com protestos-de-jovens-que-gritaram-fascismo-nunca-mais_n769916; https://www.dn.pt/edicao-do-dia/18- mai-2020/comunista-vitima-de-skinheads-fiquei-desconfigurado-so-o-julgamento-vai-trazer-me-paz 12205047.html.
2 https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/legislativas2019/
3 Enough.
4 https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/presidenciais2021/resultados/globais
5 Partido Socialista, Partido Comunista Português, Bloco de Esquerda e Partido Ecologista ‘Os Verdes’. 6Iniciativa Liberal.
7https://www.publico.pt/2022/01/23/opiniao/opiniao/neoliberalismo-portuguesa-i-1992710; https://www.publico.pt/2022/01/24/opiniao/opiniao/neoliberalismo-portuguesa-ii-1992745. 8 https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/legislativas2022/resultados/globais.
9 https://cnnportugal.iol.pt/barometro-tvi-cnn-portugal/chega/barometro-tvi-cnn-se-as-eleicoes-fossem hoje-o-psd-seria-o-partido-mais-votado/20230125/63d188af0cf2c84d7fc4ec30;
https://www.rtp.pt/noticias/politica/sondagem-da-catolica-tombo-do-ps-deixa-direita-a espreita_n1468897.
10 Integralismo Lusitano (onwards IL).
11 Acção Realista Portuguesa.
12 Centro do Nacionalismo Lusitano.
13 Movimento Nacional-Sindicalista.
14 Liga Nacional.
15 Centro Católico Português.
16 Cruzada Nacional D. Nun’Álvares Pereira.
17 The Value of the Race.
18 https://www.publico.pt/2007/03/26/portugal/noticia/salazar-eleito-o-maior-portugues-de-sempre-em programa-da-rtp-1289390.
19 Mocidade Portuguesa (1936), Legião Portuguesa (1936), Obra das Mães para a Educação Nacional (1936), Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina (1937).
20 Instituto Nacional do Trabalho e Previdência (1933), Sindicatos Nacionais (1933), Casas do Povo (1933), Fundação Nacional para a Alegria no Trabalho (1935), Casas dos Pescadores (1937).
21 https://www.tsf.pt/portugal/sociedade/esta-muito-viva-ainda-hoje-em-portugal-ha-60-anos-comecava-a guerra-colonial-13314117.html.
22 https://www.dw.com/pt-002/baixas-na-guerra-colonial-são-maiores-do-que-se-pensava/a-59132358.
23 Armed Forces Movement.
24 Movimento Federalista Português-Partido do Progresso (MFP-PP)
25 Partido Liberal.
26 Movimento Popular Português.
27 Movimento de Acção Portuguesa.
28 Partido da Democracia Cristã.
29 Partido Trabalhista e Democrático Português.
30 Partido Nacionalista Português.
31 Exército de Libertação de Portugal.
32 Movimento Democrático de Libertação de Portugal.
33 In 1975 and 1976, other extreme-right terrorist groups would also emerge – splits of the two main movements – such as the Operational Commands for the Defence of Western Civilisation (CODECO), the Portuguese Anti-Communist Movement, the Crusade Reborn Anti-Communist (CRAC) and the Viriatos.
34 Movimento Independente para a Reconstrução Nacional/Partido da Direita Portuguesa 35 Frente Nacional Revolucionária.
36 Ordem Nova.
37 Movimento Nacionalista.
38 https://www.cne.pt/sites/default/files/dl/resultados_ar_1979.pdf.
39 Aliança Democrática.
40 Partido Popular Monárquico.
41 To give us an idea of the weight of the extreme right’s electoral result in 1979, we should bear in mind that in 2019, when it managed to enter the National Assembly for the first time, it did so with 67,826 votes (1.29%).
42 https://www.cne.pt/sites/default/files/dl/resultados_ar_1980.pdf.
43 Movimento de Acção Nacional.
44 Partido Renovador Democrático.
45 Partido Nacional Renovador.
46 Rise up!
47 https://www.setentaequatro.pt/wiki/partido-nacional-renovador-ergue-te; https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/europeias2019/resultados-globais.html.
48 Causa Identitária.
49 Associação Portugueses Primeiro.
50 Nova Portugalidade.
51 Escudo Identitário.
52 https://www.setentaequatro.pt/investigacao-74/policias-sem-lei-zero-direita.
53 https://rr.sapo.pt/noticia/politica/2022/10/17/solidariedade-chega-quer-criar-federacao-sindical-para trabalhadores-que-nao-se-reveem-na-esquerda/304062/.
54 During the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, André Ventura – at the time the only MP for Chega in the National Assembly – even proposed a specific and toughest confinement of the Roma community. 55 https://www.sabado.pt/portugal/detalhe/empresa-de-andre-ventura-foi-investigada-no-caso-monte branco.
56 https://www.tsf.pt/portugal/politica/andre-ventura-condenado-por-ofender-familia-do-bairro-da jamaica-13760553.html#error=login_required&state=c6920f6b-d050-4cfe-8ee9-df38bf91aed6.
57 https://www.sabado.pt/portugal/detalhe/ex-membros-de-grupos-neonazis-sao-dirigentes-do-chega. 58 https://expresso.pt/politica/2019-11-29-Do-PNR-ao-PSD.-As-sensibilidades-politicas-dos-dirigentes do-Chega-1.
59 National-populist party founded by the former president of the CDS-Populist Party, Manuel Monteiro, in 2003.
60 https://expresso.pt/politica/2020-08-27-Partido-Pro-Vida-vai-fundir-se-com-o-Chega. 61 https://observador.pt/2021/02/27/fundadores-da-tendencia-esperanca-e-movimento-desfiliam-se-do cds-pp/.
62 Juventude Social Democrata.
63 https://expresso.pt/politica/2020-12-08-Ventura-quer-4-ministerios-num-Governo-de-direita-Justica Administracao-Interna-Seguranca-Social-e-Agricultura.
64 https://expresso.pt/politica/2021-02-20-Ventura-sobe-bitola-e-ja-exige-seis-ministerios-em-Governo com-o-PSD.
65 https://www.dn.pt/politica/ventura-diz-que-chega-e-a-unica-cura-contra-virus-mortal-do-socialismo– 15739236.html.
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