Portugal is set to hold its third snap election in three years, after a no-confidence vote caused its centre-right coalition to collapse this week. The instability could leave an opening for the ultra-nationalist party Chega!, amid growing anti-establishment sentiment among voters.
Prime Minister Luís Montenegro's Democratic Alliance was in power for less than 11 months. He was dogged by allegations of profiting from his consulting firm, now run by his sons.
Montenegro has denied any improper behaviour, while parliamentary efforts by Chega! (“enough”) and the Portuguese Communist Party to censure him failed.
Still, damage has been done.
“Far-right parties or populist parties tend to capitalise on perceptions of corruption, that the elite are all the same,” Vicente Valentim, a political scientist at IE University in Madrid, told The Parliament. “During the parliamentary debate that eventually brought down the government, Chega! pushed this idea that the socialists and the social democrats were kind of all the same.”
Politics of perception
Chega! has its own share of problems. One of its MPs left the party earlier this year after he was alleged to have stolen luggage from an airport carousel. Still, the party has presented itself as standing up for anti-corruption reforms. It has seen some success, surging from 12 to 50 seats in the 2024 election, which followed the collapse of the Socialist Party government due to criticisms of financial mismanagement.
A recent poll suggests that Portuguese voters are united in their disdain for yet another trip to the voting booth. Regional elections are also set to take place this year, with presidential elections following in early 2026.
“This adds to this feeling that there's elections all the time and that there's no stable outcome,” Valentim said.
Voting attitudes may be largely unchanged since the last time elections were held. Montenegro’s Democratic Alliance could still come out on top, narrowly ahead of the Socialist Party. Support for Chega! has fallen slightly, but the party would likely remain the parliament’s third-largest political group — giving it the opportunity to stall the legislative process.
“What worries me is that this snap election will produce a similarly hung parliament with no clear majority government solution,” João Cotrim de Figueiredo, a liberal Portuguese MEP who sits with the Renew Group, told The Parliament. “That’s probably the worst of all outcomes.”
Montenegro’s government joins a growing incumbency problem across the European Union. Mainstream or establishment parties in countries such as France, Germany and Belgium have all felt the sting of voter discontent and are moving to the right as a result.
“To what extent can they influence the policies that the centre-right is putting forward? That has already happened in Portugal,” Valentim said, referring to a tightening of immigration policy.
Montenegro has faced internal pressure to move closer to Chega!, with former Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho suggesting at a book launch last year that his party would benefit from coming to “an understanding” with the far-right movement. He acknowledged that voter frustration has benefited Chega!.
“All of this generates distrust in institutions,” Valentim said. “We don't know if that's going to happen in the election in May, but it does generate this overall feeling of this disinvestment with democracy.”
The Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, announced the country will hold elections on 18 May.
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