Southern Europe, the lower end of the Iberian Peninsula, has become ripe territory for the far right, especially in Portugal. In the set of the five southern constituencies, the Algarve and the four that correspond totally or partially with the Alentejo, the ultra André Ventura came second last Sunday, ahead of the conservative Luís Montenegro and only behind the socialist Pedro Nuno Santos.
On a different scale, since the Portuguese ultras of Chega have reached a level well above the maximum of Vox, this Portuguese geography of the ultra suffrage presents striking similarities with the Spanish one. In the 2023 general elections, Santiago Abascal's party reached its peak in Ceuta, Murcia and Almería, with between 23% and 21% of the votes. Vox was also around 20% in Toledo and Guadalajara, but at the same time, compared to its average of 12.3% for the State as a whole, it was around 16% in southern constituencies such as Málaga, Granada and Melilla, as well as in Albacete, Ciudad Real and Alicante. On the other hand, in Badajoz and Cáceres, neighbors of the Alentejo, the ultras lacked power.
Not everything is coincidence. The electoral maps of Vox and Chega show relevant differences, especially with regard to the respective capitals. With its 14% from Madrid, those from Abascal exceeded their average by 1.7 points, while those from Ventura remained 1.1 points below theirs in Lisbon and thanks to the fact that in the metropolitan area they compensated for the city's marked weakness .
The north appears as an unfavorable territory for both parties, but in a very different way. It constitutes Vox's black hole, especially in the historical nationalities, from the respectable 10.6% of 2023 in Tarragona to the paltry 2.1% in Guipuzkoa, passing through 7.6% in Barcelona or around 5%. from A Coruña and Ourense. Although he plays with the advantage of not having to measure himself against a peripheral nationalism that does not exist in Portugal, in the northernmost part, the closest to Galicia in all aspects, Ventura faced the tradition of voting for the classic right, that of the PSD of Montenegro.
The only constituency in which Chega did not obtain deputies was precisely the northern Bragança, neighboring Zamora and Ourense. However, in votes he got the same as in the country as a whole, which was insufficient because there are only three seats at stake. In Viana do Castelo, Braga and Vila Real, along with Pontevedra and Ourense, it managed to reach around 18.1% of its national average. However, in populous Porto they were almost three points behind.
Ventura's objective of leading the right seemed a chimera in the campaign. At the polls, the conservative Democratic Alliance coalition surpassed Chega by only 1.6 times, but the substitution did begin from the Tajo down, where Chega occupies the space left free by the decline of the left, especially the communists, swept away from their former fiefdoms in the Alentejo. In Grândola, the town of the anthem of the carnation revolution 50 years ago, Chega climbed to second place, after the socialists, ahead of the conservative PSD and with the sinking communists.
Ventura's result in Grândola, 19.5%, more than unthinkable not long ago, is not so high in the context of the Alentejo, since, for example, he obtained almost a quarter of the votes in the Portalegre constituency, while in the neighboring Algarve it prevailed with 27.2%. In the sum of those five districts that cover, even if only in part, the Alentejo and the Algarve, Ventura fulfilled his dream of overcoming the conservatives, with a three-point advantage, propelled by an entire past of marginalization and utopias never before carried out, together with a present of sudden increase in immigration.
Chega's main asset is Ventura's skilled demagogue. But the key to the future of the Portuguese right lies in how the hitherto rather gray Montenegro takes advantage of its simultaneously privileged and devilish position as the next prime minister.
