Women are always right: Analyzing the gender-based perspectives of the Portuguese Populist Radical Right party Chega and its women members and supporters

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Sofia Pinto Gomes de
• 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/10071/29967
• topic: Gender; Populist Radical Right parties; Party identification; Chega; Portuguese politics; Género; Partidos de Direita Radical Populista; Identificação partidária; Política portuguesa

For the past decades, Populist Radical Right (PRR) parties have gained prominence in Europe, entering the political mainstream. Among common features of these parties are included the support for traditional gender roles, opposition to the so-called “gender ideology” and feminist movements, and the protection of women’s rights through nationalist immigration policies. While research on the gender element of these parties has surged alongside their electoral success, a scarcity is observed on gender-based research on the Portuguese PRR, particularly on the party Chega, which has become by 2022 the third largest political party in the Portuguese Parliament. This research centers Chega as a case study, setting out to answer “To what extent do the gender perspectives of women members and supporters of Chega align with the official views of the party?” This question is addressed on three different levels, from a very formal source to a highly informal one: an analysis of the Chega official documents present on its website, an analysis of a semi-public party event on Feminism, and the analysis of private interviews with Chega’s women members and supporters. The results reveal that though an overall alignment is found between these perspectives, the interviewed women generally expressed more straight-forward and radical stances regarding gender-based subjects, as well as heterogeneous views, particularly in matters such as abortion and work-family balance. This dissertation therefore contributes to the growing research on how PRR parties engage with gender, as well as radical right-wing women’s perception of this topic.