Portuguese presidential candidate André Ventura lambasted the establishment “conservatives” who have endorsed his socialist opponent as being craven, self-interested politicians.
The leader of the anti-mass-migration Chega party, who became the first right-wing populist to reach the second round of voting in a presidential election in Portugal, cast his candidacy as the best chance to prevent the socialists from retaking power in Lisbon.
“We have already passed to the second round, we have already won all the space of the right and centre-right. Our opponent is not right-wing or centre-right, our opponent is a socialist, we have no excuses at this moment, we have to defeat socialism in Portugal,” Ventura said on Monday, according to Correio da Manhã.
“We don’t want to be a socialist country, we want to be a modern and free country. That’s what this second round will be about. And, my friends, we will win,” he added.
Ventura, who has risen to prominence as a firebrand critic of open borders, still faces an uphill battle for victory on Sunday.
While the Chega boss has attempted to cast himself as the standard bearer of the conservative wing in Portugal, the political establishment, including former Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, apparently disagreed, and many so-called centre-right leaders rallied around his socialist opponent, António José Seguro.
This puts the alleged conservatives in the same camp as the Portuguese Communist Party, which also endorsed Seguro.
Although legacy media such as POLITICO have characterised the move by the centre-right to back a socialist as “previously unthinkable”, it has become increasingly commonplace for supposedly conservative parties in Europe to side with the left to prevent right-wing populists from taking power, including in Austria and Germany over the past year.
Ventura said that the move was “hilarious” but that he believes he has “the people” on his side. The Chega leader said that the establishment politicians were merely acting out of self-interest rather than what is best for the country.
“Portugal has become a kind of common protection of interests, in which when this system of protecting interests was challenged, everyone, whether right-wing, center-right, center-left, immediately came out of their hiding places to say ‘I’m on the other side, I’m also on the other side,’ including people who should, by definition, be closer to this political area,” he said.
“They say it’s in the name of decency, I think it’s in the name of the gravy train.”
