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NEW BEDFORD — The staccato chorus of “Stayin’ Alive,” the 1977 disco classic by the Bee Gees, began to play on the sound system at the United Fishermen Club in the city’s South End as four men dealt their next round of canasta.
Each one cheered, conversed, and gesticulated in Portuguese over the ebbs and flows of their hands. Among them was Fernando Pereira, a septuagenarian who emigrated to the U.S. 52 years ago. He threw a card down on the table. He said he plans to vote in the Portuguese presidential run-off this weekend.
“I vote in every election,” he said in Portuguese. “It’s important for my country.”
The contest will square António José Seguro, the front-runner, of the center-left Partido Socialista (Socialist Party, PS), against André Ventura, head of the far-right nativist CHEGA party. It’s only the second time since the current constitution went into force in 1976 that a presidential election has hit a second round.
The date is set for Feb. 8, but Portuguese citizens living abroad can vote at consulates, including the Consulate of Portugal in New Bedford, on Feb. 7 and 8.
Pereira was unequivocal in his preference.
“I’m voting for Ventura,” he said. “Things have gone too far to the left, and I’ve always been a man of the right.”
Across the Fairhaven bridge, Helen da Cunha sat on her couch in the New Bedford suburb. Photos of her children, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren hung on her walls. The elections hit a different tenor for the 62-year-old. Born in Newark, New Jersey, to immigrants from Madeira, she only obtained Portuguese citizenship in October, meaning this is her first time voting in the nation’s elections.
“I was very excited when I got my letter saying I could vote,” she said. “I remember even sending that out into the family group chat. It’s just the thought that I could have some influence on what’s happening in the homeland.”
Da Cunha said she is voting for Seguro.
“I may live there in the future, so that’s definitely an incentive to want to see the country go in that direction,” she said. “I’d prefer not to see it go in the direction that CHEGA and Ventura want to take it.”
Seguro won the first round on Jan. 18 against seven other candidates with 31% of the vote, far below the 50% necessary to avoid a run-off. Ventura was second-place with 24%.
An analysis of polling data by the Portuguese newspaper Público, published on Jan. 29, gave Seguro a comfortable lead, with 67% of the vote going to him over Ventura’s 33%. Most political figures from the center-right to the far left have endorsed him following the first round of voting.
The analysis also found that Seguro won in 96 out of 100 electoral simulations. But it also hedged its bets, noting that Ventura’s 4% chance of victory is still a chance.
Different from the U.S.
Portugal has been what political scientists call a semi-presidential system under the current constitution.
“The real power is in the National Assembly with the prime minister,” said Paul Manuel, an affiliated professor specializing in Portuguese politics at Georgetown University. “The president is ceremonial, but he holds reserve powers. He can dissolve parliament if they’re at an impasse.”
The president can also veto legislation, serves as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and, most importantly, holds the power to appoint the prime minister. What makes the current elections so important, though, is the rise of the far right, the furthest it has come in politics since the military overthrew a near-five-decade-long fascist regime in the 1974 Carnation Revolution.
“This presidential election is fundamentally different because it takes place in a context of the rise of right-wing populism that challenges the democratic regime,” Pedro Sousa, a researcher in political science at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, told The Light in an email. “André Ventura is the leader of a party with this ideology and has already stated that he does not commit himself to full compliance with the Constitution, which is another of the president’s duties.”
Manuel said Seguro voters skew older.
“Seguro is the older generation; he’s traditional, institutional,” he said. “Being a Socialist in Portugal is different from how we talk about [Socialism] in the U.S. He doesn’t want to redo the system.”
Where to vote
The Consulate of Portugal in New Bedford is located in Suite 204 at 628 Pleasant St. It and the Consulate General of Portugal in Boston and the Vice-Consulate of Portugal in Providence will be open for voting on Feb. 7 from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Feb. 8 from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
If you are a Portuguese citizen registered to vote, you can find your assigned polling location at the Internal Administration Ministry’s website.
Since 1976, two parties have dominated Portuguese politics, the center-left Socialist Party and center-right Social Democrat Party. But the rise of CHEGA over the last decade, alongside other European far-right figures, has concerned many observers of democracy.
Portugal is grappling with the economic headwinds that have hit much of the rest of the world. In addition, several corruption scandals in recent years have led to the fall of two governments.
In 2023, after almost a decade in power, Socialist Prime Minister António Costa resigned due to a corruption scandal involving lithium mines, though he was eventually absolved. The current prime minister, Luís Montenegro, a Social Democrat, leads a minority government; his governing coalition fell to a no-confidence vote after his family firm’s involvement in helping a Spanish hotel and casino conglomerate win contracts in Portugal raised questions of impropriety. His coalition, the Aliança Democrática, barely won the resulting May 2025 parliamentary elections that also saw large gains for CHEGA.
In essence, the political scientists said, CHEGA’s rise has coincided with economic hardship, changing social mores, and a rise in immigration to Portugal. That last group has provided a convenient scapegoat for many on the right as they campaign on platforms addressing Portugal’s problems.
“For the first time in maybe ever, Portugal is welcoming immigrants more than sending emigrants out,” Manuel said.
The immigrant population quadrupled in Portugal between 2017 and 2024, according to an analysis published by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, a Portuguese nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy. Immigrants now total 1.5 million residents out of a population of almost 10.8 million, just under 10%. Brazilians make up the largest portion of those numbers, with 484,596 residing in Portugal. But immigrants from non-Lusophone countries, such as the almost 99,000 Indians and slightly more than 55,000 Bangladeshis, have received the most venom from the far-right. Slogans used throughout Ventura’s campaign include Isto não é Bangladesh! (This is not Bangladesh!) and Limpar Portugal! (Clean up Portugal!)
Shortly after the first round of the election, agents of the Polícia Judiciaria (Judicial Police or PJ, similar to the FBI) arrested 11 neo-Nazis, among whom were five CHEGA members. They included a member of the Polícia de Segurança Pública (Public Safety Police), charged with policing urban areas in Portugal and border control.
“To attack democratic institutions, populist parties in Europe and Trump’s GOP have chosen the immigrant, the foreigner, as one of the scapegoats blamed for all social ills,” Sousa said. “These are simple and false explanations, but they are easy to consume for the most disadvantaged social groups, who seek an enemy on whom to take revenge for their situation.”
“Três Salazares”
Ventura has invoked António de Oliveira Salazar — the founder of the Estado Novo dictatorship — throughout his campaign.
“I am a democrat by nature, but there is an expression that you hear a lot and that makes sense,” he told SIC Noticias in an October interview. “We don’t need just one Salazar, but three Salazars, because the country is so rotten with corruption, impunity, and banditry that we would need three Salazars to put it all in order.”
Pereira, at the United Fishermen Club, said he would support a dictatorship in Portugal.
“I think it would be a good idea,” he said. “We need someone who can understand what faces Portugal.”
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But Pereira is an exception, according to Manuel. Ventura’s most fervent supporters appear to be young men struggling economically, who have seen three legislative elections in three years, several corruption scandals, and new social mores around gender roles and other issues.
“CHEGA tends to vote for a shakeup and live in more economically challenged environments,” he said. “If you’re voting for CHEGA, you probably feel like you haven’t been heard and you want people to hear your voice.”
That is reflected in Ventura’s style, more bombastic, charismatic, with a firehose style of speaking — he rose to fame as a soccer club announcer — that contrasts sharply with Seguro’s calmer, dialed-back approach.
New Bedford’s Portuguese voters
The voters’ registered at the New Bedford Consulate have shifted right. During the first round, Ventura won 43% of the 95 votes cast, according to Portugal’s Secretary General to the Ministry of Internal Administration’s elections website. In the 2021 presidential elections, 66% of the 58 votes cast in New Bedford went for the current president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a center-right Social Democrat, while Ventura won only 16% of local votes.
That change correlates with the city’s rightward turn during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when President Donald Trump won 15,440 votes, but still lost here to Kamala Harris’ 18,128.
This is not surprising to Sousa.
“This conservative trend can also be observed among Portuguese communities in Europe [beyond Portugal],” he said. “It is intriguing that people who emigrated, who found a direction for their lives in another country, applaud an ideology that calls for immigrants to return to their countries of origin.”
Portugal, like other democracies, has seen increased polarization.
“Faced with an increasingly extreme political debate on television and especially on social media, people feel the need to assert their position, often against one ideology rather than in favor of another,” Sousa said.
Pereira, at the United Fishermen Club, said that he voted for Trump in 2024, for reasons similar to his vote for Ventura.
“Ventura is a good Catholic man, just like me,” he said. “And Trump strikes me as a man both cool and serious.”
That second part prompted a laugh from one of his card buddies.
“Serious?” the man scoffed in Portuguese. “You call Trump serious?”
But over in Fairhaven, da Cunha said she has always held progressive values. She says the Trump administration’s current immigration enforcement tactics have given her pause about the route Portugal is taking.
“The way immigrants are being treated, that’s a sore subject for me in a lot of ways,” she said. “Despite the fact that I was born here, if my family hadn’t come here from Madeira in 1920, I wouldn’t be here.”
She said that the rightward tilt of the Portuguese community locally has been dispiriting for her.
“In speaking to a lot of Portuguese people in the area, I’m always a little displeased to find out which way they lean even here,” she said. “It doesn’t make me happy.”
And that is why she will vote for Seguro.
“I think that my feeling for what’s transpired here has definitely influenced my desire to have a voice there as well and not see that happen in Portugal,” she said. “I definitely have a desire to not see Portugal turn to the right.”
“I am invested,” she concluded. “I know it’s a small thing, one person voting in New Bedford, Mass., but it’s a vote.”
Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
I’m going to run Portugal in a few years 👑⚡🌞
Diversity, equity, and inclusion have contributed significantly to Portugal’s progress, which makes the recent rise of Chega particularly concerning. My family came to this country fleeing the Salazar regime—a government that kept its citizens illiterate, segregated, isolated, and economically disadvantaged, prompting large waves of emigration. It has been less than 50 years since Portugal transitioned to democracy.
During the dictatorship, political dissent was met with persecution and disappearance, socioeconomic inequality was extreme, and opportunities for education and advancement were reserved almost exclusively for the wealthy. Even personal communication devices, including transistor radios, required government registration. For many, broadcasts from Radio Free Europe offered rare hope that democracy would eventually take root—hope fulfilled when courageous military officers ultimately overthrew the regime.
Today, Portugal is a transformed nation. Increased diversity in Lisbon and throughout the country has strengthened its cultural and economic standing. Given this progress, it is difficult to understand why some would support a political movement that appears to echo aspects of the country’s authoritarian past. It is deeply disappointing to see support for ideals that risk undermining the hard‑won freedoms and opportunities Portugal now enjoys.
* As of April 25, 2026, it will be 52 years since Portugal began it’s transition to democracy.