“The growth of the far right in this country is a sign that we have forgotten how lucky we are to be free,” he said. “I can’t believe that in just five decades we have forgotten how horrible the dictatorship was and now we have people who want to go back to life under totalitarian rule.”
The data shows that the far-right surge among youth has nothing to do with nostalgia for an authoritarian past and is driven by dissatisfaction with the country’s present.
André Azevedo Alves, a political scientist at the Catholic University of Portugal and St Mary’s University in London, said Chega – a party whose name means “enough” in Portuguese – was able to take advantage of the frustrations of Portuguese youth over quality of life issues. Was. Such as the housing crisis and the lack of good-paying jobs, and anger at mainstream parties that have failed to address those challenges.
He said, “Chega’s leader, André Ventura, took advantage of that discontent and portrayed the Socialist Party and the centre-right Social Democratic Party as the source of the country’s problems and stagnation, which drove many young Portuguese citizens to flee. Forced.” “He has won the hearts of many people by presenting Chega as an anti-establishment party that is ready to dismantle the system.”
Marina Costa Lobo, a political scientist at the University of Lisbon, agreed, saying that the rejection of traditional parties attracted young voters to new political groups such as the moderate Liberal Initiative, the animal rights group PAN, the progressive-green Livre party, and especially Chega. Is.
“Chega performed well because it invested in social media campaigns in which Ventura directly addressed young voters in a more personal and aggressive way,” he said. “Socialists and social democrats have staked everything on TV and newspaper advertising, and this may have contributed to the increasingly widening generational divide.”