Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security adviser to the Conservative Party.
One way of looking Portugal’s election was that Lisbon had finally joined the European mainstream. Just under 20 per cent for a nationalist right-wing party is fairly normal these days, as the old centre-left versus centre-right division declines along with the industrial society that created it. Culture matters more, and your relation to the means of production less, than it once did.
But democratic Portugal’s first brush with a government relying on the extremes dates to 2015, when the Socialist party relied on the Left Bloc and the Communists in an arrangement known as the Geringonça (the contraption).
Now it is the right-wing Chega, led by political adventurer Andre Ventura, eating away at the centre-right (yes, really, just like the Jamaica Labour Party) Social Democrats. It’s a right-wing party by identity: it has raised immigration and violence in the Roma community as issues; but its most potent pledge was to increase the state pension from around €350 to €1000 a month.
Crowd-pleasing, in an ageing society? Certainly. It probably helped win over former Communist voters, who’d spent their working lives in the tourism or agricultural industries in Alentejo and the Algarve. Fiscally responsible, however, it is not.
The question for Ventura is how far this coalition of cultural right-wing populist voters and people who just want handouts from the state together. Spain’s Vox, which only managed to win working-class support thanks to the backlash against Catalan nationalism, was unable to make inroads into the left’s core vote, and has returned to its natural size as the expression of Spain’s red-trouser brigade. Poland’s Law and Justice lost mainly because it went too far on abortion.
Chega benefited too from the protest vote (the Socialists had been hit by corruption scandals). Retaining it will be key to maintaining their influence.
The parliamentary arithmetic makes forming a new “contraption” difficult. Social Democrat (centre-right) leader Luis Montenegro, the new prime minister, has refused a coalition with Chega. But he has a margin of two seats over the socialists, so will be able to be appointed Prime Minister, safe in the knowledge that the Socialists won’t remove him while they’re weak and would be blamed for another election in conditions that Chega could exploit.
It’s important not to overdo the extent to which Chega’s (or rather, Andre Ventura’s) rise represents an ideological shift. Ventura’s own biography is eclectic: he’s been a lawyer, a quixotic presidential candidate, wrote a novel about Yasser Arafat, and even denounced populism when writing his thesis at university in Cork.
It’s really a change in the sociology of politics. When they were mass-membership institutions, parties used to be able to integrate their populist extremes into their internal coalition. Jeremy Corbyn even stayed in the Labour party long enough to facilitate an entryist campaign to lead it. Political figures needed the party machine to deliver the votes.
Now, through a more diverse mass media, as well as the social media revolution, the parties aren’t nearly so good as gatekeepers. They can be bypassed – whether from the centre, like Emanuel Macron, the left, like Syriza, or the right, like Chega (or Geert Wilders) – by new insurgent forces. These are usually parties answerable to one man, and they rely on his fame to win votes.
But unless they can draw in other supporters, they struggle to govern. If they make the compromises needed to share power, they risk offending their more hard-line members; the “True Finns” party was damaged by the compromises it had to make in office. If they don’t, they risk scaring moderate voters away, as Vox found out in Spain last summer.
Meanwhile, centre-left and centre-right parties need to beware: alliances with parties voters perceive as extreme are unpopular.
Personality-based campaigns are good for drawing in the first round of votes, but in countries with proportional voting systems, they find assembling majorities difficult, unless they can draw on something like separatism, or the unsuitability of their opponents (something that both Boris Johnson and Giorgia Meloni have taken advantage of) to persuade voters to overlook practical matters for a while.
In Portugal, Chega will now try and make further inroads into the ex-communist pensioner vote. The Socialists will fight to win them back. Neither need take responsibility for the budget; Montenegro will carry the can for explaining why there’s no money left.
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Author: Garvan Walshe
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