Portugal’s populist anti-immigration Chega Party has scored its best ever election result with a record vote share confirmed Monday that marked the end of the country’s two-party dominance.
Chega recorded the voting triumph in Portugal’s just-concluded snap parliamentary elections – the third in as many years.
The BBC reports Chega leader André Ventura said the “historic” result marked the end of two-party dominance in Portugal as voters moved to reject mass immigration plans touted by the current government.
Ventura’s campaign had focussed on the issues of immigration and corruption, and Chega was helped by the fact this election and the previous one were both triggered by scandals involving the prime minister of the day.
Socialist leader Pedro Nuno Santos announced his resignation after his party finished in second and lost so many seats it ended up neck-and-neck with Chega.
Portugal’s governing Democratic Alliance (AD) won but fell short of an overall majority.
A Chega billboard campaign poster in front of Portuguese Parliament displays a picture of party leader André Ventura pointing to “Save Portugal, vote Chega” sentence during the snap parliamentary election on May 05, 2025, in Lisbon, Portugal. (Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty)
The final results showed the AD coalition won with 32 percent of the vote, followed by the Socialist Party at 23 percent. The Chega party comes in third with 22.56 percent.
The tie between Chega and the Socialists could still be broken when votes from overseas are counted.
“The system has been shaken,” said Chega lawmaker Pedro Pinto, Politico reports. “And we represent a governing alternative.”
Portugal has been caught up in the rising European tide of populism with Chega surging into third place in last year’s election and repeating that triumph again.
The government, led by the Social Democrats in an alliance with a smaller party, fell amid a controversy centred on potential conflicts of interest in the business dealings of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro’s family law firm.
Montenegro, who has ruled out any deal with Chega, said he hoped to form a minority government.
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