Intruders have broken into the office of Chega leader André Ventura at Portugal’s Assembly of the Republic, ransacking the room and removing documents, the party has said.
Ventura published a video on X showing papers and personal items strewn across the floor and cabinets left open. “We have reached the zero point of our democracy,” he wrote.
A Chega MP raised the alarm at about 6.30am on July 28, according to an official party source. Neither the adjoining group room nor the party’s other office appeared to have been disturbed.
Speaking to reporters at parliament, Ventura said two sets of documents had gone missing along with two USB drives and some personal belongings.
One set concerned the parliamentary inquiry into Luís Neves that Chega intends to force through in September. The other contained political material relating to the office of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro and was more than a year old.
Ventura linked the break-in to remarks he made on July 24, when he told journalists he held relevant documents on the current interior minister. He described the episode as an act of intimidation and denied it had been staged.
The Judicial Police (PJ) confirmed to Lusa that its National Counter-Terrorism Unit had taken over the case and was carrying out checks at the parliament in Lisbon.
Chega announced on July 24 that it would force an inquiry into Neves’s tenure as national director of the PJ between 2018 and 2026. With 60 seats the party exceeds the 46 signatures required under Portuguese law to compel one.
Neves, an independent, was sworn in as interior minister in February 2026 after the resignation of Maria Lúcia Amaral. He has faced questions over building work at a property he owns in Odemira, southern Portugal, carried out by a firm that had previously won contracts from the PJ.
He has also been asked about a trailer seized in a drug-trafficking case that was later found at the same company’s premises. The minister has denied wrongdoing and said he was available to answer questions in parliament.
The PJ reports to the justice ministry rather than to the ministry Neves now runs. He led the unit now handling the case earlier in his police career.
Montenegro said the break-in was inconceivable in a democracy and called for an investigation that was “swift and conclusive”, given that it took place inside a sovereign body.
Parliament speaker José Pedro Aguiar-Branco was following the case with parliamentary services, his office said, adding that establishing the facts was a matter for the PJ.
Chega became Portugal’s main opposition party at the May 2025 general election. Ventura reached the presidential run-off in January before losing to Socialist António José Seguro in February.
