Despite having suffered a harsh defeat to socialist António José Seguro in the second round of Portugal’s presidential election, held on Sunday (8) and in which he lost by more than 30 percentage points, André Ventura, leader of the right-wing nationalist Chega party, expressed optimism about the party’s future.
“We didn’t win. We didn’t win and that must mean, as it has always been, recognizing that we have to do more and that we have to work harder to convince everyone that change [que o Chega propõe] is needed. But even though we didn’t win, this movement, this party, this force, had its best result ever in our history”, said Ventura in Lisbon, in a speech after the vote.
In this sense, the leader of Chega mentioned the first two reasons for his optimism about the party’s future: the party had 33% of the votes on Sunday, more than the 32% that the alliance of conservative prime minister Luís Montenegro achieved to win last year’s legislative election; and totaled almost 300,000 more votes than in the election held in 2025.
In the first round, held on January 18, Montenegro’s candidate, Luís Marques Mendes, only achieved a poor fifth place, with 11% of the votes.
Both the performance in the first round, when he obtained 23% of the votes, and Sunday’s 33% represented a big leap for Ventura compared to the previous presidential election, held in 2021, when the Chega leader had obtained just 12% of the votes.
The party had already achieved significant growth in the 2025 legislative election, when it won 60 seats in the Assembly of the Republic, ten more than in the previous election and two more than the Socialist Party (PS) of Seguro.
If it maintains this growth in Portugal’s next legislative election, in 2029, Chega will have a significant obstacle to overcome: the so-called “cordon sanitaire”, as other parties’ policy of not forming governments with the nationalist right is called.
This happened last year, when Montenegro, whose alliance obtained 91 of the seats in the Assembly of the Republic (116 were needed for a simple majority), preferred to form a minority government rather than administer alongside Chega.
In this year’s presidential election, the “cordon sanitaire” manifested itself again, when, after the first round, Marques Mendes and other center-right politicians preferred to support Seguro.
“He is the only candidate who comes close to the values I have always defended: defense of democracy, guaranteeing space for moderation, respect for the purpose of representing all Portuguese”, explained Marques Mendes to the newspaper Expresso.
However, just as the conservative Partido Popular (PP) is forming coalitions with the right-wing nationalist Vox party in Spain, Chega is slowly breaking the “cordon sanitaire” in Portugal.
In November last year, after the local elections in the country, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of Montenegro made alliances with Chega in Sintra and Tomar to guarantee local governability. The reasoning is that, with Chega gaining more and more electoral weight, it can no longer be ignored when forming governments.
“I think the message from the Portuguese was clear: we lead the right in Portugal, we lead the steps of the right in Portugal and we will soon govern this country,” said Ventura on Sunday.
“We managed, with a large part of the country, Europe and the world against us, with Brussels [sede da União Europeia] against us, with everyone against us, we still achieved the best result ever. We didn’t win, but we are on the path to victory”, he added.
