Two political sea changes swept across the European continent over the weekend, signaling the rise of the right and a massive conservative backlash. We are going to see the latest on the two most recent elections in Europe, and what it all means for what appears to be a very real political paradigm shift happening right before our very eyes!
– Portugal has shifted to the political right, with the center-right Democrat Alliance winning the recent national elections.
– Chega, founded by former sports commentator Andre Ventura, emerged in 2019 as a response to growing discontent with liberal globalism.
– In Ireland, voters rejected woke proposals to change the constitution in a referendum, signaling a backlash against far-left policies pushed by the establishment.
After eight years of socialist rule, the nation of Portugal has officially turned to the political right. The winner of yesterday’s national elections was the center-right Democrat Alliance, which came in first with 30% of the vote. The real winner of the night was the astonishing rise of the nationalist-populist party, the ‘far right’ Chega party. In an astonishing surge, this once obscure party that is barely 5 years old came in at a strong third with 20% of the vote, just behind the socialists. The center-right has garnered the majority vote needed for Portugal to take its place among the rising nationalist right nations that are beginning to dominate European Politics.
The nationalist-populist party known as Chega, which means ‘ENOUGH’ in Portuguese, is very new. It is only about 5 years old. Its founding was significant in marking the end of Portugal’s drought of ‘far-right’ politics. A new right-wing has been surging throughout Europe over the last 10 years. This is a nationalist-populist right wing that’s seen a 300% increase in popularity and presence during that time. The one exception to that rule has always been Portugal. Portugal over the previous decade never had any political movements considered to be far-right until 2019.
That’s when the popular former sports commentator Andre Ventura founded the populist political party Chega. It quickly began to garner the attention of the Portuguese who had thus far felt left out of the growing backlash against liberal globalism taking over Europe. Chega’s support began small, clocking in at just 1% that founding year. But they quickly began to surge in popularity, garnering 5% of the vote in the 2020 elections. But now, to the astonishment of pundits and politicians alike, Chega is officially the third-largest party in Portugal, garnering 19% of the vote.
They’re just 5 or 6 points away from being the number-one party in Portugal. They now control 50 of 230 seats in the Portuguese Parliament. The critical question in all of this is whether the center-right party, the Democrat Alliance, is going to form a coalition with the Chega which took voters from both the center-right and center-left. In many respects, they have all of the political power right now. No other party in the Portuguese parliament can do anything with Chega’s backing, but the problem here is that no other party is willing to coalition with Chega.
The leadership in the center-right Democratic Alliance is saying that they will continue to refuse to coalition with Chega, but as analysts are noting, it’s most likely a very thin refusal. Because of the surge in support for the so-called far-right in Portugal, there is nothing that the center-right Democratic Alliance can do without them. We are now seeing yet another nationalist right coalition in the making, which is now governing nations such as Sweden, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, and of course Viktor Orban’s Hungary. We had yet another massive political earthquake that rocked Europe over the weekend, and this one involves a major conservative backlash in a nation that has been going woke over the last few years.
In a stunning blow to the ruling establishment, voters in the nation of Ireland took to the polls in a dual referendum on Friday and overwhelmingly rejected their government’s attempts to change their constitution into a radically woke far-left document. The liberal Irish government proposed two amendments that would change the meaning of the words ‘women’ and ‘family’ to be far more inclusive of alternative lifestyles and transgender identities. A massive conservative backlash flooded the polling stations, leaving the liberal establishment a humiliating loss. With all the votes tallied, the proposals were rejected by 70% of the vote. It was a stunning repudiation of a far-left establishment that has seized the leadership position of the three major parties in Irish politics.
The leaders of every single party supported these woke changes, as well as all the prominent members of Irish cultural institutions and entertainment. The fact that this dual referendum went down in flames in such a dramatic fashion exemplifies a theme of the significant and growing cultural gap or chasm between the people and their political-cultural elite! British scholar Matthew Goodwin found recently that upwards of 70% of Europeans overall believe that their government and their politicians rule by their values, interests, and concerns at the expense of those of the people.
While surveys consistently show that the vast majority of Brits believe that immigration is often detrimental to society, less than 20% of British politicians think the same way. There is a clear increasingly unbridgeable gulf that has formed between the values, interests, and concerns of the political and cultural elite and the people. That gap is beginning to reveal itself more throughout the continent of Europe. More headlines are recognizing that the populist right is poised to win a majority of seats in the European Parliament elections this summer. 2024 is the year of the elections across Europe for the EU parliament.
Already the legacy media is freaking out at all the polls that show that not only are populist, anti-EU forces surging, but that they may end up winning the biggest block of all the coalitions in the European Parliament. It’s that serious for the pro-Davos, pro-Brussels globalists! What we just witnessed over the weekend is a further indication that the populist right uprising throughout Europe is just getting started!
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