Creeping Fascism in Portugal Today: Urgent Lessons for the British Left

How Portugal's Geringonça Collapse Opened the Door to Chega's 20% Breakthrough

Sep 22, 2025

The political landscape in Portugal has undergone a brutal transformation. The rise of Chega, securing a staggering 20% of parliamentary seats, is not an isolated event. Chega (meaning "Enough!") is a national conservative and right-wing populist political party in Portugal, founded in 2019 by André Ventura. Its rise is a crisis born from the strategic failures of the centre-left—the "Conservative Left"—whose inability to address the nation’s deepest economic wounds allowed creeping fascism to gain a mainstream foothold.

In this article, we bring together insights from Anticapitalistas, a magazine produced by Fourth Internationalists in Portugal. For international left organizers, the Portuguese experience is a critical lesson in how ideological retreat and organizational failure pave the path for the extreme right.

I. The Material Roots: How Neoliberal Crisis Creates Openings for Fascist Advance

The global authoritarian wave, including Chega’s breakthrough, derives its energy from the long-term failure of the neoliberal economic model. The original promises of widespread liberation and abundance are "in tatters". The contemporary threat operates through an adaptable modus operandi defined by the cultivation of irrationalism and the strategic fabrication of enemies.

The ascent of the far right benefits significantly from the destruction of social bonds by neoliberalism, exploiting the resulting social anomie (a state of social disorganization, fragmentation, or breakdown of community norms). This isolation and the systemic failures of the state lead to widespread despair, which the far right successfully captures by promising security and a new order.

Class Dynamics and Portuguese Capitalism

The material grievances that fuel Chega’s rise are rooted in acute social crises. Portugal’s economy is marked by low wages, precarity (with about a million private sector workers on fixed-term contracts), and a severe housing crisis driven by speculation and gentrification, particularly in cities like Lisbon and Porto.

Chega capitalizes on the deep resentment towards social difficulties, successfully mobilising anti-system sentiment, particularly in suburban and rural areas where precarity is high. The party leverages the populist penal code—an “embuste como método” (fraud as method)—to appeal to this fear, avoiding structural solutions and instead instrumentalizing justice.

II. The Strategic Crisis of the Left: Conservative vs. Revolutionary Democracy

A. The Conservative Left: PS’s Capitulation and Its Consequences

The Socialist Party (PS) operates as the archetype of the "Conservative Left", failing to solve acute crises in Health, Education, and Housing by relying on temporary "patches and quick fixes" instead of structural reform. The term "Geringonça," which translates to "contraption" or "rickety device," was a name given to the political arrangement that governed Portugal between 2015 and 2019. In an unprecedented move for Portugal's post-dictatorship democracy, the Socialist Party (PS), led by António Costa, formed a minority government.

Organizational Failure (The Geringonça Collapse): The first Geringonça (2015-2019) proved that unity could deliver material gains (e.g., increasing wages, stopping privatizations). However, this period was characterized by pressures from the European Union and capital, and the impossibilities self-imposed by the PS. The final collapse occurred because the PS refused to accept structural conditions imposed by the left. By seeking an absolute majority in 2022, the PS polarized the field with Chega, inadvertently amplifying the extremist threat and granting André Ventura prominence in the media.

B. The Revolutionary Democracy Camp: BE vs. PCP

The Bloco de Esquerda (BE) and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) have adopted different positions in response to the crisis.

Bloco de Esquerda (BE): The BE resisted subordinate situationalism. In this strategy, a political party subordinates its transformative goals to the needs of the governing party for short-term stability or influence. This means they refused to be trapped in a position that would be incapable of imposing concrete measures on the government. By insisting on structural changes (like altering Troika-era labour laws), the BE prioritised programmatic coherence and emerged from the 2024 elections with an increased mandate, affirming its anti-capitalist agenda.
PCP: The PCP is criticized for sectarianism and organizational closure. This tendency—often influenced by digital neoestalinism and prioritising rigid dogma—isolates the party from the contemporary, heterogeneous working class and results in a "loss of social influence". The political purity this implies risks resigning the party to impotence.

C. Anti-Sectarian Balance: The United Front Logic

Revolutionary strategy demands engagement in necessary alliances, but without opportunist adaptation.

The Core Lesson of Geringonça: The experience demonstrated that unity is only effective if radical forces impose a program of transformation, rather than merely accepting the status quo. Any unity should be aimed at building alliances that invert the relationship of forces with the Conservative Left (In Portugal, the Socialist Party), the main adversary in confronting the traditional right.
Maximal Unitary Initiative: Revolutionaries must maximise unitary initiatives against the far right—such as the massive anti-fascist mobilizations seen in Germany and elsewhere—without ceding on core principles (anti-racism, anti-fascism). This approach is crucial for building resistance and translating social discontent into political alternatives.

III. International Strategic Lessons for Organizers Today

1. The Class Struggle Must Be Total

The left must affirm that anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and feminism are interconnected struggles. The far right’s "culture war," based on "anti-woke" rhetoric, attempts to sideline these issues by reducing complex problems to abstract cultural conflicts.

Immediate Organizing Implication: The response must be comprehensive—a "total analysis and politics" that coherently integrates climate science, class struggle, and anti-oppression demands. For example, no serious strategy to combat domestic violence can ignore policies on salaries and housing, as victims without economic independence are trapped. Similarly, the right's populist penal code is a trap designed to instrumentally use justice without solving the underlying social problems.

2. Digital Tactics Against the Oligarchic Dictatorship

The challenge is to counter the oligarchic control of platforms by Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, who prioritize profit and polarization. These platforms operate like large drug cartels, exploiting human vulnerabilities for profit and control through dopamine feedback loops, making political engagement atomized and transactional.

Concrete Tactical Recommendations for Base-Building:

Mobilize Ultra-Precarious Workers: Platform workers (couriers, drivers) leverage digital networks—including WhatsApp groups and social media—to coordinate protests and strikes. These platforms provide a space for workers lacking a common physical workplace to share information and strategies, building solidarity.
Counter-Hegemonic Communication: Alternative groups use social media to bypass mainstream media bias. The intense use of the internet and social networks, including short videos (shorts) on Instagram and TikTok, serves as a counterpoint to hegemonic narratives (e.g., regarding the situation in Gaza), providing real-time denouncements and acting as crucial instruments of struggle.
Organizational Cohesion: Left organizations should use digital tools to connect their base and provide information, as demonstrated by Die Linke using platforms about rents and energy prices to prove the party's utility to new audiences.
Build Alternative Infrastructure: The revolutionary strategy must incorporate “digital sobriety”, the use of free software, and the creation of autonomous, decentralised digital networks as an act of technological disobedience against the power of tecno-oligarchs. This is seen as critical as the struggle for public services like water or energy. The Wikipedia project is a successful large-scale, non-profit example of open digital collaboration.

The Revolutionary Goal: The ultimate aim is to create popular digital power by withdrawing economic power from the tecno-oligarchs and ensuring that digital spaces are governed by democratic criteria, not the logic of profit and polarization.

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