Day: March 11, 2024

With 99.1% of the vote counted, the AD won 79 seats in the 230-seat legislature, followed by the Socialists with 77 seats, prompting the latter to concede defeat. 

Chega, meaning “enough,” came in third, quadrupling its parliamentary representation to 48 lawmakers after campaigning on a clean governance and anti-immigration platform. 

Chega voters said before the poll that Portugal was in a bad way, and they wanted changes in housing, education, health care and justice in Western Europe’s poorest country. 

AD leader Luis Montenegro told reporters Sunday that he expected President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to formally invite him to form a government. 

Rebelo de Sousa, who will meet with political parties from Tuesday until March 20, told the Expresso newspaper Friday that he would do everything he could to prevent Chega from gaining power. Those remarks drew criticism as the head of state is mandated to remain neutral. 

Chega leader Andre Ventura told reporters the vote clearly showed that the country wants a government of the AD with Chega. 

Ventura said in an interview with the TVI broadcaster that he would vote against the state budget if the AD did not negotiate it with his party. 

“If there is no negotiation, that would be a humiliation for Chega and I would vote against it,” Ventura said. 

The outcome was broadly in line with pre-election opinion polls, but the AD’s victory was significantly smaller and Chega’s growth was larger than predicted, political scientist Andre Azevedo Alves told Reuters. 

Alves, a professor at Lisbon’s Catolica University and St. Mary’s University in London, added that the fragility of an AD government because of its reliance on either the Socialists or Chega to pass legislation made it unlikely to last for several years. 

Javier Rouillet from rating agency DBRS Morningstar warned that if the new government was unable to pass legislation, another round of elections could be held later this year or in early 2025. 

Chega’s surge was boosted by Ventura’s communication skills and widespread dissatisfaction with the mainstream parties, he said, factors that could help it garner even better results in the European Parliament elections. 

“Political disaffection was brewing for a very long time,” said political scientist Pedro Magalhaes, at Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences. “But there was no political supply to address this political demand.” 

Marina Costa Lobo, who heads institute, said she believed Montenegro would keep his word and not strike a formal deal with Chega but there might be “piecemeal” agreements between the two going forward. 

“It’s difficult to predict Chega’s behavior because they’re an anti-system party,” she said, adding the far-right’s success in Portugal was a harbinger of what can be expected in the European Parliament election in June. 

Out of the system 

Euro-intelligence consultants said the result marked a new political chapter in Portugal after alternate governance by two mainstream parties for the past 50 years. 

“We don’t know who’ll be in charge of the country. The far right has little or nothing to offer,” doctoral student Jorge Catanheira, 29, told Reuters. 

The election result underscored a political tilt to the far right across Europe and a dwindling of Socialist governance. 

Chega has since 2020 been part of the European Parliament’s Identity & Democracy group, which is expected to see gains in June. 

Spain’s far-right VOX and Matteo Salvini, who leads Italy’s co-ruling party Lega, congratulated Ventura. 

Portugal’s PSI stock index fell 0.3% at open, in line with a decline by European peers, before flattening out. 

“The impact of the elections on the market turned out to be nil,” XTB analysts said in a note. 

Under Socialist leadership since 2015, Portugal has grown at solid annual rates above 2%, except for the pandemic-induced slump of 2020, but many struggle to make ends meet because of low salaries and a housing crisis. 

Voter turnout was 66.23%, the highest in nearly three decades. 

Magalhaes said it was possible turnout reached such levels because voters who had been “out of the system” came back to support the radical right. 

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TASS quoted law enforcement agencies as saying the man, whom it named as Park Won-soon, had been detained in the far eastern city of Vladivostok before being transferred to Moscow for “investigative actions.”

The state news outlet said it was the first such case against a South Korean national. It did not provide any details on the nature of the alleged spying.

South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement its consulate has been providing assistance since it became aware of the arrest. It declined to give more details as the matter was currently under investigation.

Russia regards South Korea as an “unfriendly” country because of Seoul’s support for Western sanctions against Moscow over the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Russia has cultivated closer relations with North Korea, which the United States says is providing munitions to Moscow for use in the war. North Korea and Russia have denied this, although they have pledged to strengthen military cooperation.

If the higher administrative court in Muenster confirms a lower court finding, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, tasked with scrutinizing threats to Germany’s constitutional order, will retain the power to deploy the full range of intelligence tools against the party.

They could be anything from tapping phones to recruiting informants inside a party whose leaders have dismissed citizens of foreign ethnic backgrounds as “passport Germans” or complained about “fecund Africans” flooding Germany.

The party, which has 78 of the 736 seats in the Bundestag, the German federal parliament, maintains that it is a democratic, non-extremist formation. Regional branches of the party have already been formally declared extremist threats.

The case’s title “AfD versus Federal Republic of Germany” hints at its significance for a country that has built its post-war reputation building a model democracy with strong safeguards against extremism now seeing a far-right party polling as much of a third of the vote in some regions.

A finding that it is suspected extremist could hurt the party in western Germany, where it is less well established, and voters are traditionally more cautious about parties that are labeled extremist.

It could also complicate dealmaking on a European level: potential partners, including France’s Marine Le Pen, have warned that overt racism could make it hard for her National Rally party to work with them.

The BfV first began treating the party as a possible extremist organization in 2021. A lower court rejected the AfD’s appeal against the move the following year.

The court in Muenster, in whose jurisdiction the BfV’s headquarters in Cologne lies, is expected to issue a definitive ruling on the facts on Tuesday after two days of hearings.

The party is now polling in first place in several of the poorer, post-industrial eastern states where its anti-establishment, anti-immigration message is particularly resonant.

But the party has also faced mounting pressure, especially after the revelation that senior figures had attended a meeting where the “remigration” of “unintegrated” German citizens was discussed — widely seen as code for the expulsion of people of non-ethnic-German descent.

That triggered weeks of street protests and even statements of concern from titans of German corporate life, normally exceptionally reticent on matters of daily politics.

The party has slipped in the polls slightly, though it remains second with around 19% support, behind the opposition conservatives but well ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats with 15%.