Berlin, Nov. 17, 2025 (Lusa) - Historian Antonio Muñoz Sánchez believes that, more than the emergence of the far right in Portugal, it is the "enormous force" with which the expansion of Chega took place that should "set all the alarm bells ringing".
"If, in November 2015, when António Costa's first government was formed with the support of the PCP and BE, someone had said that, a decade later, a far-right party would be the second in the Parliament, they would have thought that person was crazy," Muñoz Sánchez told Lusa.
The researcher from the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, who specialises in the political relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Portugal and Spain, was in Frankfurt for a lecture on right-wing populism and debates in Portuguese historical politics.
"We now know that we haven't been able to identify the deep current of social unrest in Portugal since the 2008 crisis, and we've continued to believe, in a very naive way, in that supposed rule of Portuguese politics according to which the 25th of April immunised the country against fascism," he pointed out.
For the Spanish historian, who has also worked at the University of Chemnitz in Germany, the rise of the extreme right in Portugal should not in itself be a cause for alarm.
"It's just the obvious realisation that no nation lives on the fringes of the global “Zeitgeist”. What should set all the alarm bells ringing is the sheer force with which the Chega party has erupted," he said.
"The fact that a racist, xenophobic, ultra-liberal party, which exaggerates, insults and lies as a method, has entered like a hot knife in butter, forces the Portuguese democratic system and the country's living forces to deeply self-criticise. My concern is that the diagnosis is wrong and that the “therapy” we want to apply will give Chega even more momentum," defended Antonio Muñoz Sánchez.
In Germany, historical revisionism is widely rejected in the public arena. In Portugal, there seems to be more room for ambiguity, he believes. The historian compares a nation's past to a "huge supermarket" where the extreme right is looking for "the sweetest, most digestible, most colourful products."
"They are the idealised memories of all kinds of feats performed by great personalities, of mediaeval battles that supposedly ensured the integrity of the state in the face of external enemies, of moments and situations that show the goodness, greatness and bonhomie of that blessed lineage. In this joyful banquet, there are barely any references to the less pleasant aspects of national history, such as the victims that the exploits of great men may have left in other territories," he pointed out.
"If we now apply this scheme to the Portuguese case, we should note with alarm that the country's, shall we say, normalised view of its own history, that which is reflected in its monuments and museums, and that which is passed on to children in schools, is not far removed from the propaganda of the extreme right," he argued.
The historian considered that the German model in history education has "many virtues", but "each country must find its own way" to address its difficult or traumatic past.
"For economic reasons alone, it would be impossible to replicate in Portugal the impressive network of museums, documentation centres, exhibitions or television documentaries that deal with Nazism in Germany, for example. From my point of view, the key is not so much the means, but the will to face up to this difficult past. And that can start with the smallest, most modest things," he said.
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