I. Introduction

1. Fifty years ago, Portugal held its first democratic elections. [1] Five decades later, the country has elected 60 far-right MPs, threatening all the social gains and fundamental rights won by the Portuguese left since then.

2. The results of the 18 May 2025 elections represent the biggest electoral defeat for the left since 25 April 1974. The door is now open to a majority government of the neoliberal right with the far right, to the possibility of a reformist and conservative constitutional revision, to the privatization of essential public services and fear of the other winning out.

3. The defeat of the left was already apparent before the elections. The loss of influence and representation of left-wing parties in previous elections (PS, BE and CDU) [2]; the lack of mobilization and social anchoring of anti-capitalist or revolutionary alternative projects; the massive emergence of right-wing forces mobilizing feelings and perceptions of insecurity, resentment or nostalgia for an idealized past; and the inability of the anti-capitalist left to provide a unified response indicated the need for a combative attitude that did not materialize.

4. The crisis of the Portuguese left has manifested itself in many ways over the last few decades, including a crisis of a programmatic nature. Over the last decade, criticism of the Portuguese anti-capitalist left has highlighted its abandonment of a long-term political and ideological project in favour of immediate and mainly institutional tactics, as well as the weakening of its strategic imagination and the loss of its ability to articulate essential struggles with a historical project to overcome capitalism. The priority given to tactics, to the detriment of a transition strategy and a transformative horizon, has created serious contradictions within both the BE and the PCP, which both parties have found themselves confronted with.

5. The PCP, although it retains greater solidity in its programme and strategy, has demonstrated, in its programmatic orthodoxy and ideological rigidity, a bureaucratic internal structure that makes broader anti-capitalist convergence difficult and prevents it from adapting to the reality of many immediate struggles.

6. The BE, for its part, has abandoned a coherent anti-capitalist transformation strategy in favour of the temptation of immediate action, often without programmatic coherence, which dilutes the anti-capitalist transition strategy and subordinates tactics to governability without a revolutionary perspective.

7. The absence of clear programmes articulating a structural diagnosis of capitalism with the identification of current historical actors with an alternative social project has led both parties to subordinate themselves to simple electoral programmes which, although correct in their immediate demands, struggle to break with capitalist dynamics.

8. The experience of the Geringonça [3], which led the PCP and the BE to accept compromises including indirect austerity policies, demonstrated the inability of these two parties to impose structural changes.

Figure 1 – Results of the 2015, 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025 legislative elections, by party
Source: Ministry of the Interior, available at: https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/.

 II. The context of the 2025 elections

9. The elections were held early because, a few months ago [February 2025, Ed.], it was revealed that the head of the right-wing government (Democratic Alliance (AD) formed by the coalition of the Christian Social Democratic parties PSD and CDS), Luís Montenegro, was the owner of a family business that received monthly payments from entities linked to the gambling sector, whose concessions are awarded by the State. Faced with a potential conflict of interest, a debate began both inside and outside Parliament, demanding transparency from the incumbent Prime Minister. The insistence of the PSD leader and his government not to disclose the list of clients, to oppose scrutiny and to refuse any effort at transparency led to a breakdown of trust within Parliament.

10. The motion of confidence tabled by Luís Montenegro, after two motions of censure had been rejected, was rejected by the majority of parties in the Assembly of the Republic, leading to his resignation and the calling of early elections.

 III. Election results

11. The PS, defeated in the previous elections less than 18 months ago, based its new campaign exclusively on denouncing Luís Montenegro, without presenting a political programme that differed from that of the previous government, which had been defeated in the 2024 elections. These elections took place after the resignation of Prime Minister and Socialist leader António Costa, following an investigation by the public prosecutor’s office that raised suspicions of active corruption linked to lithium mining and green hydrogen production projects.

12. Despite the multiple crises facing the country in the areas of housing, health and education, the PS was unable to present a mobilizing programme that broke with its recent past. It proposed the same thing as in previous years, which the electorate had already rejected. It believed that the Portuguese would be more concerned with the integrity of the political class than with concrete proposals to improve people’s lives. This was the PS’s big mistake: failing to understand that, for many Portuguese, corruption in the political class has two names: PSD and PS.

13. In just six years, André Ventura’s far-right party, CHEGA, has grown from 1.3% to 23%. Even the scandals involving paedophilia, theft and crime involving several of its MPs have failed to slow its growth.

14. On the left, many thought that these scandals would deeply affect CHEGA, forgetting that a party built around a single figure is only affected by scandals when they involve that figure himself. Each scandal involving far-right MPs has been handled with an iron fist by André Ventura who, by falsely appealing to victimization rhetoric and taking advantage of structural mistrust, has managed to convey the idea that he is ‘not like the others’, that he is ‘not like the PS and the PSD’ and that ‘at his place, they really clean house’.

15. But cleaning house is only the façade of a policy that, in reality, promises to expel those who live here from their homes. Following the international trend of using migrant communities as scapegoats for social problems, the far right has pitted workers against each other, sowed fear, invaded the space of empathy and solidarity, and spread hatred and exclusion.

16. Alongside the rise of this populist nationalist right wing mixed with neoliberalism, it is worth noting the advance, albeit marginal, of ultra-nationalist far-right parties. These parties, although in the minority and with limited electoral support, continue to demonstrate growing adherence to far-right policies that go beyond those of CHEGA. As various anti-fascist groups have underlined, these parties include, among their social base and activists, openly neo-Nazi and fascist activists, some of whom have already been convicted, who seek to build a collective political project based on an armed militia logic, resulting in physical attacks against migrants, LGBTQI+ people and anyone they perceive as being on the left, whether in the political or cultural sphere. This is why the growing support for these parties should not be underestimated or treated lightly. In addition to representing the same far-right politics that, in 1989, assassinated José Carvalho (a PSR activist), that, in 1995, killed Alcindo Monteiro, and that, in 2020, fuelled the racial hatred of which Bruno Candé was a victim [4], these groups also have deep ties to sectors of the police and military forces. This relationship facilitates their growth and access to weapons and military training, thereby contributing to the strengthening of the armed militias they seek to build.

17. With the results of the latest elections, the right wing has won a parliamentary majority that poses a threat to the public sector, the right to equality in diversity and the universality of social rights. And if the PSD, despite the confusion between the private affairs and public functions of its Prime Minister, has remained in power, it is because the left has failed to understand that material reality carries more weight than rhetoric, even if one cannot exist without the other.

18. The victory of the AD without achieving an absolute majority and the rise of CHEGA to the rank of second political force, in addition to indicating a fragmentation of the political system, are the result of very concrete material conditions. The PS, with the agreement of the BE and the CDU between 2015 and 2020, governed within European neoliberal limits, implementing austerity policies subject to the rules of the euro and public debt. Even after the end of the Geringonça and the parliamentary agreement that supported the early years of António Costa’s government, the Bloco and the PCP remained associated with this governance and its consequences on people’s lives. To a large extent, they still are today.

Figure 2 – Ministry of the Interior – Results of the 2015, 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025 legislative elections, available at: https://www.eleicoes.mai.gov.pt/. The far right includes the votes of the CHEGA, ADN and Ergue-te parties; the right wing PSD includes the PSD, CDS-PP, Iniciativa Liberal, Nova Direita, VOLT, MPT and PLS parties; the left wing includes the PCP-PEV, BE and Livre parties.

 IV. The multiple crises of the anti-capitalist left

19. One of the great challenges facing the anti-capitalist left is its relationship with the parliamentary system of the bourgeois state. As internationalist revolutionaries, we do not reject the participation of the anti-capitalist left in these spaces on principle: on the contrary, we approach it with the critical lucidity of our Marxist tradition. This tradition prevents us from confusing revolutionary politics with simply managing what is possible within the framework of capitalism, and warns us against abandoning areas of struggle that can be used to expose the contradictions of the system and broaden the scope of extra-parliamentary struggles that promote a break with the capitalist order. Electoral and parliamentary participation therefore has a strictly tactical value as part of a broader strategy of social transformation, and must never be considered an end in itself, nor in any case compromise the direct mobilization of the masses outside parliament.

20. In the trade union context, crises manifest themselves in many ways. On the one hand, they are a direct reflection of the structural transformations of neoliberal capitalism, which fragments and precariousizes the workforce and weakens the traditional bases of organization. On the other hand, they also result from the institutional integration of trade unions into the state apparatus, thus neutralizing their capacity for mobilization and real confrontation with the system.

21. Since the 1980s, European integration has reconfigured the Portuguese economy in the direction of deindustrialization, outsourcing and precariousness. The Uberization of the economy, the spread of precarious work, the racialization of work and the reduction of traditionally more organized productive sectors have made traditional trade union organization difficult, particularly the promotion of workers’ self-organization, and have paved the way for new models of trade unionism and trade unions that the left has been unable to take into account.

22. Similarly, the crisis of traditional anti-capitalist trade unionism, dominated by the PCP, is due not only to these new dynamics of labour, but also to the persistence of inertia, bureaucratization, lack of democracy and dynamism in which the model and trade union policy of this party keep it trapped. Added to this is the BE’s failure to challenge the PCP’s quasi-monolithic hegemony in the trade union sphere with an anti-capitalist programme capable of linking social struggles with deeper social issues such as the housing, health and education crises.

23. On the youth side, we cannot fail to note that among the youngest voters, CHEGA is one of the fastest-growing parties, succeeding in mobilizing votes thanks to its false emotional solutions to social suffering and the lack of a sense of the future. In a state in crisis of common sense, CHEGA offers simple answers that do not require critical reflection on the consequences of its actions, proposes clear hierarchies that promote obedience to the leader, and designates common enemies that destroy the moral imagination of youth. It is therefore not just a question of finding the new digital language of young people, but of understanding that the current reality of youth is political loneliness, a loneliness that encourages fascination with power as a substitute for freedom, a loneliness in which a new collective identity is being reconstructed with a moral status that excludes difference and the other.

24. The fault does not lie with “wokeness”. Many on the left prefer the easy option of explaining the left’s defeats by repeating the far right’s discourse on “wokeness”. The term “woke”, which originated from being aware of social injustice and inequality, has been transformed by the far right into a ridicule and devaluation of the social gains and fundamental human rights of recent decades. It is the instrumentalization and distortion of identity politics, as well as the exploitation of its contradictions by the far right, to which the left has failed to respond, largely because the majority of the anti-capitalist left has maintained the division between identity struggles and workers’ struggles, when in reality they are inseparable and all concern forms of vulnerability, exploitation and precariousness that manifest themselves in different ways.

25. The left has therefore failed to broaden class consciousness and the concept of class beyond the traditional labour movement, which has led the latter into conflict with social movements that have sought to respond to the loss of a political imagination, such as the feminist movement and the LGBTQI+ movement. While social movements have been a gateway to politics for many people, today the left’s inability to articulate them within a broader definition of class has led to their permeability to right-wing, often conservative, liberal ideals. Currently, social movements are increasingly infiltrated by conservative and defensive ideas that correspond to a rollback of acquired rights. Essentialist discourses, which produce punitive, moralistic and elitist logics, have diminished the emancipatory potential of social movements. Although this is not systematically true in all sectors of the left, it is undeniable that social movements today are a space for confrontation with the right and neoliberalism.

26. What is therefore lacking is an in-depth reflection and reconceptualization of the concept of class struggle, demonstrating that the struggle for social rights is not in contradiction with the central struggle against capitalism and does not undermine it, but that, on the contrary, one cannot advance without the other.

27. Despite the continuous and historic mobilization and organization of anti-racist movements, the Portuguese left has shown great incompetence in the way it manages its relations with these movements. If we defend the idea that the anti-racist struggle must be at the centre of the left’s programme, then we cannot be condescending or give in to the logic of “public order”. It is the responsibility of the anti-racist left to call things by their name and not to echo justifications that present the structural racist and political violence we experience today as mere isolated cases.

28. Racialized people, as protagonists of their own struggles, must be brought to the forefront and receive the unconditional support of the left. The left’s continued insistence on presenting the anti-racist struggle as moments of discontent, or as exclusively identity-based, reveals a misunderstanding of racism as a fundamental structure of our society. On the contrary, the anti-racist movement has proven to be a historical subject capable today of articulating the contradiction and tension that exist between social movements and trade union movements.

29. Without the anti-racist movement, there is no way to combat the anti-immigration rhetoric on which far-right parties rely. Once again, the left has been slow to recognize this reality, and has failed to show solidarity. It has failed to show solidarity because, until now, it has been unable to engage in a real and collective way in the ongoing legal battles against the movement and the protagonists of anti-racist struggles.

30. Disinformation and the rise of the far right are not simply a communication problem. Disinformation is now a tool of class struggle and serves to reactionarily reorganize bourgeois hegemony in times of deep material crisis. Moreover, disinformation is not only an action that allows the far right to capture the electorate, it is also a profound reconfiguration of the symbolic field in favour of authoritarianism, built on the real suffering of the working class and the loss of meaning of politics as a field of emancipation. Combating disinformation cannot be done by using the same mechanisms that hegemony uses, by quantifying attention and fragmenting realities.

 V. Return to activism

31. The anti-capitalist left must identify the political issues and transitional demands that will enable us to break with the bourgeois state and promote the internationalism of our struggle. It must identify these points of resistance in order to be able to rebuild an effective programme that allows people to dream again. It must reclaim collective action, honest and humble links with social movements, combativeness in the workplace, representation of movements, and militancy. A programme that does not ignore substantial differences in practice, but also trajectories and contexts, that knows how to find points of convergence to resist the wave of the right and the far right and build an alternative to the social liberalism of the PS.

32. On the left, there is an urgent need to return to our roots, where door-to-door canvassing and grassroots work in factories and schools are not only carried out during election periods, but because they are an effective way of countering disinformation and creating the foundations for changing material reality and further anchoring activism.

33. We resist fascism by rebuilding the revolutionary anti-fascist praxis.

Toupeira Vermelha (The Red Mole)

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