OPINION
Half the world’s population are going to the polls over the next year or so – but only because the globalist elite have yet to figure out a way they can stop even pretending and do away with the annoyance of elections altogether. Because, when they do have to grit their teeth and grudgingly let the commoners take their little pencils and their little pieces of paper into their little booths, the peasants have an annoying habit of just not doing what their betters tell them to.
As I wrote recently, when given the chance voters have continually rejected the woke nostrums of the globalist elite: Brexit, the Chilean referendum, the Australian “Voice” referendum, the Irish “motherhood” referendum… Viktor Orban, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Geert Wilders… just search “far right” (of course), “populist” and “wins election” and you’ll get the picture.
Of course, many of these you won’t find gaining much mention in the mainstream media (the Irish referendum has barely been given any attention), which is why you need media like the BFD. After all, you’ll search in vain for mention of Portugal’s recent elections.
I wonder why…
As a further example of insurgent parties disrupting the political ‘equilibrium’ that suits the globalist crony capitalist elites, Portugal has just said ‘Enough!’ to a cosy leftist consensus which has dominated its politics since the 1974 revolt against António Salazar’s dictatorial regime. In a surge which has given Guardianistas around the continent conniptions, last Sunday, Portugal’s Chega party (their name means ‘enough’) replicated some of the successes (or near-successes) of other populist European parties such as Spain’s Vox or France’s Rassemblement National. Chega came third in the Portuguese national elections, more than doubling their share of the vote and quadrupling their representation in parliament since the last election in 2022.
Cue the Guardian’s standard screeching about “far right”. Well might they screech, because the base of Chega seems to be the sort of voters the left have long taken to be solely theirs: the disaffected and the young.
However, what is unusual about the result in Portugal is that, despite some similarities, it appears to buck a number of other ‘populist politics’ trends. For instance, Chega performed well not because voter abstention was up, but because it was down, at its lowest level for 30 years. Many commentators seem certain that, much like voters for Brexit who hadn’t been into a polling booth for years, the majority of Chega’s electorate were long-term abstentionists. Moreover, the vote skews much younger, flying in the face of the simplistic ‘left-wing Millennials/right-wing Boomers’ divide which characterises other democratic political systems.
One of the key issues is the same which is infuriating ordinary voters around the world: the twin globalist poisons of Great Reset and Great Replacement. Like so many Western countries, young Portuguese are finding themselves locked out of the jobs and housing market, in favour of foreigners. In this case, not so much Uber drivers as ‘digital nomads’.
Bloomberg reported last year that 40 per cent of graduates leave the country to work, unable to find jobs or, crucially, anywhere affordable to live. Why? Because of the AirBNB boom caused by making Portugal attractive to non-Portuguese who can work remotely and enjoy the sun and sea that old Lusitania has to offer. Overall, the Portuguese diaspora is estimated at 25 per cent, unsurprising in a country where the average wage is just 1,000 Euros (£850) a month.
It is fitting that Chega’s name translates as enough. Which seems to be exactly what many young Portuguese are saying.
In a report produced by France24, one of the news broadcasters most panicked about the ‘rise of the Far Right’, two young women talk about their struggle to move out of their homes despite having reasonably decent salaries. Listening to them, it is clear their hopes of life getting better are being crushed by self-serving politicians at all levels. One of them closes with her simple, repeated instruction to the government: ‘Just fix it!’ It would seem that Chega may be the only hope of a ‘fix’ left for a lot of young men and women.
While Chega came third overall, with nearly one fifth of the national vote, their showing was strongest in the Algarve region. There, they were the outright winner, with 27 per cent of the vote.
This area has not only been overrun by immigration (the topic that it is taboo for all local European Union loyalists to talk about, provoking cries of ‘racism’) but also had its largely tourism-based economy crushed by the repeated lockdowns between 2020 and 2022. It still has not fully recovered, with locals living like second-class citizens in their own country.
Of course the EU elite and their media lackeys are gibbering about ‘fascism’ and the ghost of the Salazar regime, instead of confronting the horrific possibility that ordinary Europeans have no love for the petit dictateurs of Brussels.
Chega seem primarily to be the political response to the utter venality of an elite whose hands have been greased for years by EU handouts. Unbelievably, the cloth-eared Socialist Party, whose Prime Minister resigned in December while under investigation for corruption, triggering the election, appointed as its new leader the former Infrastructure Minister, a man who himself resigned in 2022 during another corruption scandal. With Chega’s slogan ‘Portugal needs a clean out’ promising to ‘end corruption and nepotism’, many electors were no doubt tempted by these Trump-like pledges to drain the swamp.
The Conservative Woman
Not that Chega is the sort of swamp-draining human Drano that Javier Milei is proving in Argentina. Instead of lifting the yoke of big government from Portuguese necks, Chega is merely offering a few sugar cubes to make the yoke seem lighter. Chega are promising to triple state pensions and hand out state-backed mortgages for first-time buyers.
On the other hand, they are determined to rein in uncontrolled, mostly illegal, immigration, dump ‘progressive’ policies of ‘repatriating’ ‘stolen’ artworks from former colonies and, above all, root out the corruption of the two establishment parties.