Populism and social policies: A study about CHEGA’s party positions on social policy

• Autor(a) principal: Gonçalves, Ana Rita Magalhães Godinho Silva
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30499
• topic: CHEGA; Populist radical right wing political party; Nativism; Welfare chauvinism; Partido político populista de direita radical; Nativismo; Chauvinismo social

Until recently, Portugal was one of the few European countries without a significant far-right political force. In October of 2019’s legislative elections, the newly formed party CHEGA – created on April 9th, 2019 – won one parliamentary seat. And even though it’s votes accounted very little in the great scheme of things (1.3%) the party has continuously grew, which can be observed in the 2021’s Presidential Elections. This established André Ventura’s rapid rise as the party’s leader and sole representative in Parliament, who finished third as presidential candidate, in 2021 with 11.90% of the votes. In 2022, the party obtained 7.13% of the votes, putting CHEGA above political forces such as the BE (Left Bloc) and Liberal Initiative (IL) (Mendes, 2021:329). The nativism and populism of Populist Radical Right Parties (PRRP) offer them more freedom to resist international organizations and limit the rights of labor migrants. This would imply that the inequalities are not just limited to the severity of welfare chauvinism but also to the various migrant groups’ treatment in the labor market (Chueri, 2022: 85). The political platforms and manifestos of CHEGA argue that not only should the welfare state be modest in size, but that the benefits it offers should be virtually and entirely restricted to Portuguese natives. CHEGA is only outdone by ELAM (Cyprus), EL (Greece), and RN (France) in terms of welfare chauvinism. Furthermore, CHEGA’s stance is singular in the Portuguese democratic party system, which was founded in 1974 and has since come to an agreement on the importance of extending the welfare state and implementing welcoming and liberal immigration policies (Fernandes, 2023).