Portugal goes to the polls this weekend for parliamentary elections and it looks likely to become the latest European country in which a populist hard right party shakes up politics.

Chega – which means ‘enough’ – was only founded in 2019, yet it is forecast to more than double the 12 seats it won at the 2022 election. This would make the party, led by Andre Ventura, a charismatic former football pundit, potential kingmakers in a new conservative coalition government. Ventura is no stranger to controversy, not least over comments he made about Romani people (he has said the Portuguese government needs to ‘resolve the issue’). Yet the party’s right-wing position on a range of key issues has won over many Portuguese.

Ventura’s Chega share the same slate of policies and attitudes that have brought the populist right to the gates of power across Europe: opposition to mass immigration, a crackdown on Islamist extremism, euroscepticism, and resistance to ‘woke’ culture. They have made anti-crime and corruption pledges, and have promised to clean up the graft scandals that have hit both the bigger centrist parties. Ventura has said that Sunday’s election is about fighting ‘50 years of corruption… 50 years of taxes that were used to support parasites’.

Ventura has said that Sunday’s election is about fighting ‘50 years of corruption’

The elections come after a corruption scandal felled the Socialist government of prime minister Antonio Costa late last year. For the first time in nine years, Costa will not be running for office. The centre-left Socialists have alternated with their centre-right rivals the Social Democrats in power for most of the half century since the 1974 coup against the dictatorship. Although polls tip the Social Democrats to win most seats in this Sunday’s elections, they may have to form a coalition with Chega to achieve a parliamentary majority.

This shake-up of Portuguese politics is long overdue. Public disillusionment with the democratic old parties has been increasing as Portugal gears up to celebrate next month’s 50th anniversary of the leftist military coup that ended the Estado Nova dictatorship that had ruled since the 1930s. Half a century on, every party is looking rather rotten. The Social Democrats’ campaign slogan was ‘it can’t go on like this’, which looked embarrassing after two of their senior officials in Madeira had to resign following a corruption scandal.

Young people I spoke to in Lisbon’s bars on a recent visit to Portugal share the general cynicism and indifference to politics of so many members of Generation X. I was in Lisbon to research a book on military coups: the radical idealism that followed the 1974 carnation revolution has long since faded for a generation born years after. Corruption is one concern, but Portugal also shares some problems with the UK: the young are being priced out of getting on the housing ladder, while wages are low and public services are not performing well.

This is the climate in which Ventura’s Chega party look likely to dominate the election. Ventura has been criticised for using a variation of former dictator Antonio Salazar’s motto ‘Deus, Patria, Familia’ (God, Fatherland, Family) as his own party’s watchwords. Yet many look back nostalgically to the Salazar era as an age of stability, prosperity, and order. The association doesn’t seem to have harmed Chega.