Portugal’s far-right Chega party has won its first mayoral seats in local elections, final results showed, but fell well short of expectations and its vote share halved from parliamentary elections in May.
The six-year-old nationalist party, whose name means “Enough”, took control of three city halls: São Vicente on the island of Madeira; the central town of Entroncamento; and Albufeira in the south. It won an 11.86% share of the overall vote.
But Chega’s leader, André Ventura, admitted “we wanted more” and said Sunday’s elections had not given the party the victory it wanted.
Some pre-election polls had put Chega ahead in the national vote for the first time, and it had hoped its cocktail of populist policies, including stricter immigration controls and chemical castration for paedophiles, might help it win 30 of the country’s 308 municipalities.
Chega won almost 23% of the vote in parliamentary elections, giving it 60 MPs and making it Portugal’s official opposition party. Analysts said the local election results suggested the party could underperform when its Ventura was not on the ballot.
The ruling centre-right Social Democratic party (PSD) won the largest share of mayoral races, capturing 136, including Portugal’s largest cities, Lisbon and Porto, up from 114 four years ago. Its centre-left Socialist rivals won 128.
Chega received the third biggest share of votes but that translated to fewer mayoralties than independent candidates, who won 20, and the Communist party, which captured 12.
Ventura, a former columnist and football pundit, put on a brave face on Monday morning, telling supporters the results were “a great victory for Chega”, which was expanding to become a “party with a municipal base”.
It almost trebled its vote share from the previous local elections in 2021, and will play a significant role in shaping policy in several councils.
Of the three municipalities it captured, it won 49% of the vote in São Vicente, 40.5% in Albufeira in the Algarve – which Ventura has called the party’s “stronghold”, and the springboard for Portugal’s “conquest” by the far right – and 37% in Entroncamento.
It was defeated, however, in several municipalities where it had high hopes of winning, including Faro, the Algarve’s biggest city, and Sintra outside Lisbon.
Voters in Lisbon returned the incumbent mayor, Carlos Moedas, heading a centre-right coalition, to office less than six weeks after a deadly funicular crash that killed 16 people, including 11 tourists, and caused a national outcry.
Moedas, a rising star of the PSD, has rejected blame for the 3 September accident, one of Lisbon’s worst tragedies in living memory, and refused to resign. He scored 42% against 34% for the Socialist candidate Alexandra Leitão.
An investigation is focusing on whether poor maintenance was to blame for problems with the funicular’s brakes and a safety cable. After three national elections in the past two years, Portuguese voters will return to the polls in January for a presidential vote.
