Can Chega win the next elections?

Yes you can. Four years ago, the PS won the European Championships with one million and one hundred thousand votes. A month ago Chega obtained more than one million and one hundred thousand votes in the Legislatures.

Pedro Pinto, Chega’s deputy, said a few days ago that if the country is well, Chega will also be well. False! Chega needs the country to be bad for him to be well.

And so that the extreme right can retain and re-mobilize the more than one million and one hundred thousand Portuguese people, it needs to throw more scandals in our faces. We await the contributions of corkscrew justice – the tartufos are out there and the packs are ripping their pants and putting the handcuffs on their wrists.

On June 9th, populists want to offer us the possibility that, by voting for them, we can give the rulers another slap in the face, punish the powerful and throw oil on the fire. They are not interested in informing, but in inflaming – they want us unnerved. Two months of highs are expected.

The rejection rates for Pedro Nuno Santos, Luís Montenegro and Pedro Passos Coelho show that center politicians have never been as despised as they are now, but they continue to play with matchboxes. Pedro – who no longer communicates via WhatsApp, but by letter – narrows the PS on the left and says that we shouldn’t take André seriously; the other Pedro – who is not from Chega, but seems like it – talks about his family, but attacks his own; Luís – who went from passista to cavaquista – risks choices and companies to the north.

Yes, Chega can win the next elections if PS and PSD (present and past) continue to offer us pearls of recklessness, arrogance and incompetence. The Portuguese have already lost tolerance for those who gamble with their lives and use them as kitchen scrubbers.

In the last European elections, just over 30% of registered Portuguese voted and another almost 70% justified their indifference with the lack of trust in politics and in politicians who they say are discredited or corrupt. And of those who voted, an angry 7% went to the ballot box to express their opinion or cancel their vote.

In what was the biggest abstention ever in our democracy, the Portuguese demonstrated a blatant ignorance about the European Union and the European Parliament. The elections may be different, but the reasons are the same: they don’t identify with the parties, they don’t recognize the candidates, they don’t take part in campaigns and verbal aggressiveness.

European leaders are concerned that the next elections in Portugal will be tied to public holidays, especially because, traditionally, these are moments of protest against the governing parties. And if before there wasn’t a party that gave strength to coffee topics, now there is.

Yes, in the next elections, the three biggest parties could be tied on the margin of error and Chega could get more deputies elected. All because we still haven’t been able to explain to the Portuguese that what doesn’t make a difference is indifference.

Saramago was right when he wrote that what we call democracy more resembles the solemn cloth that covers the urn where the corpse is already rotting.