Ventura’s ability to secure almost a quarter of the ballots Sunday emphasizes how remarkable his Chega party’s growth has been in Portugal. In six years the ultranationalist grouping has gone from having just one lawmaker in parliament to becoming the country’s leading opposition party, controlling more than a quarter of seats in the country’s legislature.
Portugal is a semi-presidential republic in which the president serves as the country’s head of state and has the power to appoint the prime minister and dissolve parliament.
The president also has the right to veto laws, ratify international treaties, appoint some members of key state and judicial bodies, and issue pardons. Moreover, as supreme commander of the country’s armed forces, the president wields significant influence on Portuguese military deployments.
Law professor Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa has dominated the presidency for the past decade. Despite being the son of a minister in the 20th century administration of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, Rebelo de Sousa helped write the country’s democratic constitution and tapped that knowledge to compose exhaustive commentaries on government legislation. He was also renowned for his seemingly boundless energy and his willingness to take selfies with members of the public.
Although 14 candidates vied to succeed Rebelo de Sousa, three were disqualified for lacking the required number of signatures to run for the presidency. In addition to Seguro and Ventura, European Parliament lawmaker João Cotrim de Figueiredo, conservative TV commentator Luís Marques Mendes and Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo, a naval officer who oversaw the successful rollout of the Covid vaccine in Portugal, were among the top contenders.
Although he fell short of qualifying for the second round, Cotrim de Figueiredo secured a notable 16 percent of the vote. Earlier this week the politician, who leads the Liberal Initiative, a liberal economic party, and is vice-president of the Renew Group in the European Parliament, called an emergency press conference after a former advisor said she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against him in 2023. The lawmaker denied the accusations, which he dismissed as “dirty campaign” tactics, and retained the backing of hundreds of thousands of voters.