Portugal’s two choices: reform the system to be more like Finland and Germany or end up like Bangladesh says Portugal’s Chega party populist leader
Portugal needs a profound political, administrative, judicial and fiscal reform if it is to join the ranks of the successful economies of Europe and not end up like Bangladesh warns populist Chega party leader André Ventura.
Text: Chris Graeme; Photo: Fernando Bento (ICPT)
The entrepreneurs and Chega party faithful who gathered at Lisbon’s Sheraton Hotel & Spa to hear Portuguese populist politician André Ventura address the International Club of Portugal last week seemed transfixed.
On the table at which I was sat a beautiful woman stared adoringly at the former TV football pundit, nodding her head in agreement and seemingly hanging on his every word.
There is no doubt about it. André Ventura, who founded the far-right populist party Chega in 2019, is a charismatic and enthralling speaker.
The lawyer and member of the Portuguese parliament touched on all the ills that have dogged Portugal for what he says has been 50 years – meaning since the fall of the Salazarist dictatorship in 1974, without ever directly saying that he would wish for a similar system to be implanted in Portugal.
From the member of the State Council who saw his party’s share of the popular vote increase during the general election of 2022 to become the third largest party in Portugal, the message was clear – the country has sickened from too much State interference in business and life at all levels of society.
Yet the system he all but failed to mention did interfere in Portuguese society at every level, stifling initiative and keeping the country solvent but woefully backward for almost 50 years prior to 1974.
Portugal faces an election on May 18 and André Ventura called the pre-election period a “difficult” one for the country, saying it was “important to be clear” about what Portugal wanted for its future.
In his third address to the International Club of Portugal, he spoke of what had not been achieved and what needed to be done, but stressed that with polls that were “so different and diverse” no one could say what would happen on the morrow.
But André Ventura admitted that of the three main candidates standing for the elections – the current Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro and the current leader of the PS opposition, Pedro Nuno Santos, and himself, Chega was the least likely to win.
The previous night André Ventura had been on a face-to-face TV debate with Pedro Nuno Santos who had, according to TV commentators, won hands down. Ventura reacted wryly: “We all know that whoever I face I’m always going to lose all the debates that have ever existed”.
“If I had debated against a brick wall, the brick wall would have been declared the winner”, he added to much laughter.
“I had this sense when I left (the studio) that I had been debating with a man who is made of plastic. Nothing there was authentic and debating with the Socialist Party irritates me”, confessed the Chega leader.
Calling the PS leader “probably the most radical left leader Portugal had seen in many years” he said that Pedro Nuno Santos was presenting himself to the country in a “different suit”, a man who deep down didn’t want to reveal that he was the “grandson of a shoemaker, neither a man of TAP Portugal or the railways” in a dig at the leader of the opposition’s performance in the previous governments regarding the management of Portugal’s public companies.
“I thought to myself how can the Portuguese believe in him? He was one of those responsible for destroying our economy, for TAP ending up in the state that it is in, a man who managed companies via WhatsApp”. (A dig at him firing the former TAP CEO Christine Ourmières Widener via that social media messaging platform), and gave the OK for a €500,000 golden handshake to a TAP director who had clashed with the CEO and then resigned from the national airline.
“The Bible warns us to beware of wolves disguised in sheep’s clothing” and those that come and pretend that they want to appear moderate and statesman-like, but in fact will do exactly the same as all the others that came from the left-wing.”
Which was to take money from hard-working people and investors and redistribute the money to all the others.
The former TV football pundit said that the difference between Chega and the other parties was that Chega genuinely wanted to reduce the taxes of those who worked and invested, whereas the Socialists wanted more taxes instead of less – less takes that would enable private companies to grow and create more synergies.
“No, they want to take away from those who work and invest and hand it out to those who don’t want to work and want to do nothing”, he said.
This, said André Ventura, was what was all wrong in Portugal. “For years we have been sustaining a parasitical political class and State that supports those who don’t work.”
The Chega leader slammed plans to increase the IUC vehicle tax on cars over 15 years old. “In Portugal not everyone has the financial means to drive around in a Porsche. “Lots of people have a drive around in cars that are more than 15 years old”.
However André Ventura was not quite correct. In fact the previous PS government backtracked on the unpopular measure and it was never actually applied.
He said that Pedro Nuno Santos had voted against a Chega policy to charge 0% VAT on a basic shopping basket of essential foods in the wake of the Covid-19 period to deal with the cost of living crisis. “It was our policy in 2023 and now they want a 0% shopping basket policy. What has changed? The elections”.
Concern over uncontrolled immigration
The campaign, he said, had got to the point where “even on immigration they (the Socialists) can’t reach an agreement”. Pedro Nuno Santos had accused Chega of being “radical and extremist” over immigration policy, saying Portugal needed more immigrants.
However, Ventura pointed to the statistics that had recently been published that showed that immigration was a mess up and down the country.
(In 2023, Portugal recorded its highest number of resident migrants ever, with over 1 million foreign citizens living in the country. This was a 130% increase from 2022 while the number of foreign residents in Portugal had been projected to reach 1,546,521 in 2024, which would make up 15% of the population).
“Go to Lisbon airport at 11pm and see. The figures don’t lie, 1.6 million immigrants in a country of 11 million people.”
“I know that there are many companies here that need immigrant labour, but this country was one of the countries in the EU where immigration most grew in terms of percentage. We don’t know how to integrate them, we don’t give them housing, we don’t give them access to healthcare; you just have to see the chaos that there is,” he slammed.
“And then they say it’s cheap labour to do the jobs that the Portuguese don’t want to do, when what the Portuguese don’t want is low salaries and a country that has been paying subsidies for 50 years.”
André Ventura insisted the neither the PS or AD (Aliança Democrática) had a solution. “Now they want a fast-track process for those wanting to come to Portugal. You can’t do that and then say the country is in a calamitous situation.”.
Crime on the up?
The Chega leader warned that crime was rising and new kinds of crime were infiltrating Portugal, with an increase of thefts, assaults and attacks on companies in the county. “It’s shocking the attacks with hammers, the stabbings and guns”.
“This is not Brazil in the 1950s, it’s Portugal today in 2025, and we’ve let this happen and we were warned that this was happening.” (Some 328,000 immigrants of all nationalities entered Portugal in 2023 (ICTE) – of which 600,00 are Brazilians)
“This country will get worse if we think like France and Belgium did in the 1980s which was “let them in any which way because we need them”.
“And then when they come and bring their families they need a house because they can’t live in the street. They need hospitals when we have’t got the capacity for ourselves. They need medicines when we haven’t got them for ourselves. And then we start to think it wasn’t such a good idea after all. So, what are we going to do now?” He asked. (There are currently around 70,000 Bangladeshi citizens living in Portugal, most of which have come in over the past five years)
“Oh, they rape women! We have to put up with it. Oh, they don’t have work, we have to pay for them! One thing is to be a Christian and have Christian values; another is to accept our country to be a front yard with doors and windows open onto the street without any controls at a time when international criminal groups are gaining ground in Europe. (Violent and serious crime increased by 2.6% last year compared to 2023, with 14,385 registered crimes, while overall crime fell by 4.6% to 354,878 incidents, according to the Annual Internal Security Report (RASI)
“We want to get our country and economy working, but we don’t want to do so at the cost of our security and stability”, he said.
Criticizing hand-outs
And André Ventura criticized the far-left and Socialists for wanting to take money from those who worked and give to to those who didn’t, and slammed the opposition for rejecting his party’s idea to create a national holiday on November 25th to commemorate the armed forces in 1975 who put pay to the Communist movement PREC (Revolutionary Movement in Course) in Portugal.
André Ventura also pointed to the fact that in 2024 the then PS Socialist government had allowed the tax burden to reach 35% of Portugal’s GDP and said regarding tax cuts that life had only improved for 1.5% of the population, namely pensioners.
Two choices
He reminded that tax, inflation, crime and insecurity and immigration had all increased under the governments of António Costa.
“We have two choices: either to let the country go to the dogs, or face the huge challenges ahead. Many people might have doubts about me; they might think that I am authoritarian, that I’ll make excessive cuts, or remodel the State, and even that I don’t believe deep down in democracy. But I do. But one thing is certain, if you never give us the change to govern, you’ll never know.”
“We have a chance to make a profound change to our political system and political culture, and values.
“Many business owners ask me “when are we going to have a country for companies or are we going to continue being dependent on the State?”
“Some artists don’t like me. But when you are an artist or actor and you need the State to pay your salary then you can’t much of an artist, and I know we have a business sector that is very dependent on the State, but rather than State hand-outs, business needs a favourable environment with less bureaucracy”, he said.
André Ventura added that studies had shown that when there was less bureaucracy, less tax burden, and more simplification economic growth exceeds compared to those countries that don’t by 15-20%.
A slow justice system
Ventura went on to lament Portugal’s slow justice system. “There can’t be a justice system slower than ours, and I say to you face-to-face that having a slow justice system is in a lot of people’s interest”, he said in what can only have been a dig at rich and powerful law firms making money out of the mega legal cases involving politicians, bankers, company executives and other senior figures in Portuguese society over the past decade.
“Can you believe we have an ex-prime minister for whom it’s taking 14 years for him to be tried?” he added referring to ex-Prime Minister José Sócrates, adding that Portugal’s legal system had fallen to the level of Bangladesh.
Support for tariffs?
Ventura threw down the challenge by asking if Portugal wanted to be on the same level as Finland Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands, or preferred being like Bangladesh. “This (the former) is the model that I want”.
“We want an economy that protects our companies, our industry and our producers and not be like Europe and its absurd policies that let imports flood in under conditions of unfair competition.
“Wake up! The world is not going to change overnight, but we have two choices, protect ourselves or let our industries and companies die”, he said in a nod to the policies currently being pursued by the Trump administration.
“What Europe is now doing should have been done several years ago. We could create partnerships with other parts of the world. We can do business with MERCOSUL, India, Africa and China but we can’t let them compete with our businesses on an uneven playing field because those who produce in Brazil don’t have to pay the quantity of taxes we have to pay here. Those who produce in Venezuela or the Arab states don’t have to pay the salaries that we have to pay here”.
“When the Americans say they are going to protect their products, we are going to do exactly the same”.
Restructure the public administration
And he didn’t spare the public administration which he said his party would restructure if it got into power.
“Many public workers vote for Chega and we want that to continue. But in recent years the State has turned into a bloated machine and that’s completely unacceptable. Today we have over 100 institutes, 150 public companies, 46 general directorates, 134 technical commissions, 103 autonomous funds and scores of other publicly-funded quangos.
“We cannot continue to have independent non-salaried workers all over the place in the public administration, more public sector workers and politically motivated appointments just to win votes and replicate the same jobs,” he said.
“I am sure that most of the people working in all these bodies are doing absolutely nothing. The first thing that we’ll be demanding when we arrive in the name of public money transparency is what are you spending our money on? What are you people doing? And those who aren’t doing anything – out!”
