What explains Chega's victory

From one moment to the next, and just one year after the last elections, the country woke up to a completely reconfigured party system, and it is still unclear what really happened. The radical and populist right, led by Chega, will predictably be the first alternative to the AD government, counting the votes of the emigrant constituencies. The PS, more than likely relegated to 3rd place in terms of number of mandates, will lose, after 50 years, its status as the main opposition party (when not governing). The next socialist secretary-general, be it José Luís Carneiro, Fernando Medina, Alexandra Leitão or someone else, will no longer be the leader of the opposition, giving up that position to André Ventura.

Political scientist António Costa Pinto speaks of a kind of “Europeanization of the Portuguese party system” with this “turn to the right”. For the university professor and political analyst, “caution is needed when considering structural change”, but he warns that “the 20% threshold is seen, in European democracies, as the level that can define the decline of a political party – and the PS, with its drop to 23%, is dangerously close to that mark – and it can also establish the penetration of another, previously smaller party into the government system – and Chega has now surpassed that threshold”.