On the eve of the legislative elections, which take place on Sunday May 18 in Portugal, the far right leads among young people aged 18 to 24. According to a weekly survey Espressopublished on May 11, the Chega Party (“enough”) would bring together 23 % of the voting intentions in this age group, as much as the coalition of center to power, led by the outgoing Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro (Social Democratic Party, PSD, Center right). “The rise in the voting for the far -right Chega party is a sign of the end of the anti -authoritarian political culture which had prevailed in Portugal since the end [en 1974] diet [Antonio de Oliveira] Salazar. After fifty years of democracy, young people have lost their memory of the dictatorship ”notes the historian and political scientist Antonio Costa Pinto, professor at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon.
The early elections, organized after the failure of the Motion of Confidence presented by Mr. Montenegro, surrounded by suspicions of conflicts of interest, could thus allow the extreme right to reissue the record result it obtained in the last elections and reinforce its third party place. In March 2024, Chega had obtained 18 % of the votes and 50 of the 230 seats of the Assembly of the Republic, 11 points more than in 2022 and 17 more than in 2019, when he broke into the Portuguese political scene.
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Source: Lemonde