EUPopLink Country report - Portugal

Abstract

Portugal has long been regarded as a Euroenthusiastic country, with broad support for European integration among citizens, political elites, and organised interests since the 1980s. This permissive consensus has been politically sustained by the country’s two mainstream pro-European parties, the Socialist Party (center-left) and the Social Democratic Party (center-right), which have alternated in government throughout the democratic period. However, this consensus has increasingly been challenged by parties at the ideological extremes, namely the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the Left Bloc (LB), and the populist radical right party Chega. While the PCP articulates a hard Eurosceptic position, the LB advances a soft Eurosceptic stance, and Chega combines conditional Euroscepticism with a pragmatic approach to the European Union (Kopecký & Mudde, 2002; Vasilopoulou, 2018). This report argues that, although Portugal’s populist and Eurosceptic landscape remains contained, it is undergoing important change. So far, these parties have not fundamentally altered Portugal’s overall relationship with the EU, which continues to be shaped by a strong pro-European tradition and resilient public support for integration. However, Chega’s electoral rise and the weakening of the mainstream party system may create new conditions for a stronger politicisation of European issues in the years ahead.