Placing Portuguese Right-Wing Populism Into Context: Analogies With France, Italy, and Spain

Introduction

Portugal was for some time considered an exceptional case of resistance to radical right-wing politics (Salgado & Zúquete, 2016; Lisi & Borghetto, 2018; Quintas da Silva, 2018). Despite opinion studies demonstrating that the demand for RRP politics was already there, supply had been hamstrung by the absence of mobilizing, charismatic leadership (Marchi, 2013), as well as stigmatization related to relatively recent collective memory of the right-wing authoritarian regime of the Estado Novo (Salgado & Zúquete, 2016), and resistance in the news media to right-wing populist rhetoric and frames (Salgado, 2019). However, this idea of Portuguese exceptionalism has been challenged by the emergence of the Chega (Enough) party, led by André Ventura. Since its inception, Chega has risen quickly in electoral support. In the November 2019 general election, Ventura was elected Portugal’s first right-wing populist MP having garnered 1.30% of the vote, but opinion polls generally show that his support has been on the rise since then. This makes the case for looking at Portugal as an edge case in the European context, rather than an exception (Mendes & Dennison, 2020).

This chapter analyses André Ventura and Chega’s political communication and positioning within the Portuguese political system resorting to empirical data collected during the 2021 presidential election campaign. It examines how social media platforms have been used to as tools for spreading right-wing populist rhetoric and compares André Ventura’s populist approach to those of his French, Italian and Spanish counterparts, discussing whether it entails any noteworthy specificity.

Given the centrality of social media in Ventura’s political communication strategy, our approach relies on YouTube and Twitter as data collection resources to analyze his rhetoric and overall media use strategy in his 2021 presidential candidacy. Prolific political communication moments, electoral campaigns are prime opportunities to systematically collect data and examine the political parties’ positioning in relation to other national and European political actors, particularly new parties, such as Chega. The methodological approach is based on the content analysis of tweets published by the candidate’s official account during the campaign period, as well as of the videos uploaded to Ventura candidacy’s YouTube channel since it was first publicly announced, on February 8, 2020. As these kinds of texts, as Wodak points out, can be inherently ambiguous, and “cannot be fully understood without considering different layers of context” (2015, p. 51), i.e., their situatedness, our approach provides two separate levels of analysis: namely the entry-level analysis of the thematic dimension of texts – using discourse topics as a central analytical category –, and the in-depth analysis of the specific text’s genre, discursive strategies, and argumentation schemes. This thorough analytical process relates different levels of contextualization and allows for richer results from a limited number of texts. We then compare Ventura’s media use, rhetoric, and issue positioning to those of candidates from the same European party family in other Western European countries, particularly Santiago Abascal (Vox – Spain), Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National – France), and Matteo Salvini (Lega – Italy).