Portugal’s imminent presidential race looks set to be a very tight affair.
André Ventura, leader of the hard-right Chega (Enough) party, is emerging as a serious contender and could yet upset Socialist frontrunner António José Seguro.
Recent polling suggests that no candidate is likely to secure an outright majority in the first round of voting, scheduled for January 18, making a run-off increasingly probable.
According to the polls, Ventura currently leads with 24 per cent of voting intentions, narrowly ahead of Seguro, on 23 per cent.
João Cotrim de Figueiredo MEP remains in the race with 19 per cent.
Most polls indicate that, should no candidate cross the 50 per cent threshold, Ventura would advance to a second round, expected in February. That scenario would likely set up a head-to-head contest between the Socialist and the Chega candidate.
However, analysts believe that the faithfulness of Portugal’s right-wing party might be similar to Le Pen’s National Rally in France, liable to fail in the second round of voting.
“The likeliest scenario is that of a Jean-Marie Le Pen paradigm. The CHEGA electorate is very consistent and loyal, which gives Ventura excellent chances of going to the second round, but the politically correct profile of all the other popular candidates would indicate that there is a strong likelihood that voters would unite against Ventura in a second round,” Miguel Nunes Silva from the Conservative Trezeno Institute told Brussels Signal.
Chega’s rise has been rapid. Since entering parliament in 2019, the party has steadily consolidated its position within Portuguese politics.
In the 2022 general election, it surged from a single seat to 12 in the 230-member assembly, becoming the country’s third-largest political force and capitalising on voter frustration with the long-dominant mainstream party.
According to Miguel Nunes Silva, this rise can be explained by the alienation of the core conservative voters in Portugal by the traditional right-wing Portuguese party PSD and CDS.
“The leaderships of both PSD and CDS – the two political parties considered to be on the parliamentary Right – had decided to veer Left, while the rest of the world was seeing a shift to the Right. This caused many conservatives within their ranks to be outraged and decide to leave,” he explained.
Chega has been running on anti-mainstream, anti-immigration platforms. Last year, Portugal’s Government approved for a new immigration law setting stricter conditions for foreigners seeking to settle in the country.
In Portugal, the president has no direct executive authority but Ventura has already pledged to adopt an unusually interventionist approach if elected.
He vowed to act as an active counterweight to the government from the head of state.
Such a dynamic could echo the institutional tensions seen in Poland, where ideological clashes between the right-wing Ventura and the liberal pro-European Union Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government have repeatedly occurred.
When he announced his candidacy back in 2025, Ventura said he believed that if he won or managed to reach the second round , “it signifies the rise of a political movement unlike anything ever seen” in Portugal.
