“I know we are surprised when there are people with convictions in politics.”
The phrase is from Teresa Nogueira Pinto, Chega’s “shadow minister of Culture” — who, daughter of the centrist Maria José Nogueira Pinto and Salazar’s hagiographer Jaime Nogueira Pinto, would better have the nickname of special-envoy-of-Chega-for-the-old-money-right — in a Radio Observador programreferring to André Ventura. And what convictions did this Nogueira Pinto impress on the person in question, in recent weeks in a hurried round of interviews and comments in the desire to put his patina on good-chic-good-kind to the far-right presidential candidate? Let’s see.
It is assumed that we will find it explained in a text published in Express entitled “why I vote Ventura”. In it, he begins by referring to “the triad ‘God, Country, Family’” — which, as is known, was used by Salazar as the central pillar of his regime and has been appropriated by the leader of Chega. According to Nogueira Pinto, this triad, which “recites so much horror to dominant progressivism”, was not born with Salazar but from the pen of a democratic and revolutionary nineteenth-century Italian, and is “a beautiful and simple idea”.
It would perhaps be worth remembering that the Portuguese dictator Salazar borrowed the slogan from the Italian dictator Mussolini — whom, I believe, no one will dare deny the nickname of fascist — giving the case, not a secret, that Salazar was a contemporary of Italian fascism. Trying to refute this obvious reference — all the more evident when Ventura is shouting from the rooftops that what is needed are “three Salazars” — makes as much sense as asserting that if someone goes around with a shaved head selling T-shirts with “Work sets you free” they are referring to the good that work does and the title of the 1873 book by the German Lorenz Diefenbach (another 19th century writer) and not to the infamous signs of the Nazi concentration camps.
Teresa Nogueira Pinto obviously knows this well — her short text it is a kind of childish sleight of hand, where he sows what is commonly called “dog whistles” while pretending to be denying them. Because the idea is precisely to encourage. When in the aforementioned Rádio Observador program he asserts that it is necessary to “debate with complete serenity” matters such as immigration, he immediately excuses the fact that Ventura assured that with him as president there would be people who would be arrested as “use of rhetoric and political communication”. It is, says the Chega activist who introduces herself as a “specialist in political science” and “university professor”, not an announcement of a change in regime and the end of the separation of powers that characterizes the democratic rule of law, but “a kind of stone that is thrown into the still water pond, and it works, because we talked about the three Salazars.”
As long as it works, it’s fine, so — It is assumed that Nogueira Pinto, who seems to think highly of religion and faith, will also not think it is bad that Ventura has announced that he has been chosen by his god to save Portugal (a statement that gave rise to one of the best questions ever asked in an interview — the one that Miguel Pinheiro, the director of Observertold Chega’s leader about this revelation: “When did this happen?”).
Perhaps this is one of the “convictions” that the shadow minister sees in the president of her party: that he has been anointed by the God of Catholics. What is certain is that in the text she wrote about her candidate we do not find reference to the alleged convictions that he will have, and which, according to her, distinguish him — only the certification that Ventura is “dissent”, “divergence and alternative” to “a suffocating and depoliticized consensus”. It is, therefore, “contradictory”, or “against”. In what? For what? Well, that doesn’t matter at all now.
The same goes for the historian and columnist of Observer Rui Ramos, who, in a text precisely titled “Ventura against everyone else”guaranteed to be “the only active political leader that interests the Portuguese”but not, contrary to what “rivals believe”, because of their communication tricks, but because of “substance”. And the substance is? “The shock that the country was subjected to when it realized that the government, without asking, had decided to abolish any immigration control.”
Skipping, for reasons of space, the statement that “any immigration control was abolished”, perhaps it is worth remembering that when Ventura began to assert himself politically, still as a PSD candidate for the municipality of Loures, in 2017, his “cause” — Rui Ramos states that “is the only active politician who is associated with a causeand more: the need to maintain this cause, which is not just any cause, but an existential one, in the public debate” — was the attack on gypsies and what he calls “subsidy-dependence”.
It’s strange to be drawing a historian’s attention to history, but The “existential cause” that, according to him, makes Ventura successful only appeared in his speech in 2024, when Chega already had a good number of deputies and its leader had long been the politician most interviewed on Portuguese TV.. So, I’m sorry, no, what Rui Ramos says is not entirely true. If Ventura has had a cause since the beginning of his political rise, it is discrimination against those who are discriminated against, along with the “dog whistles” that Teresa Nogueira Pinto so diligently refers to in the text cited.
Furthermore, in the midst of growing pains, Chega, that is, its leader (because Chega is its leader), abandoned the hyper-liberalism of the Milei of the initial program (from 2019) and transformed itself into a party that defends the Social State, that is, more money for public hospitals, public schools, public employees, more money for pensioners (including those who contributed little or nothing to Social Security, in a curious contradiction to its publicized aversion to “subsidy-dependence”) — in short, what “economic liberals”, as is the case with Rui Ramos, decry as “socialism”.
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