Welcome to the Week em Breve, a wrap-up of important Portuguese news to keep you up to date and in the know.

Winds of Change: far-right Chega becomes second biggest party in Portugal’s National Assembly

Last week marked the definitive confirmation that much of Portugal is giddily embracing populist rhetoric from the more right-of-center corners.

Launched just in 2019, Chega — the vocally anti- Roma and anti-immigrant-from-certain-countries party whose name in Portuguese means “enough” — became the largest opposition party in the country, after the votes of Portuguese living abroad were all counted.

Chega’s 60 seats in the National Assembly puts them ahead of the Socialists’ 58, and well on their way to the 90 still controlled by the main party, the center-right Democratic Alliance (AD) (no other party managed to get more than 9 seats).

Perhaps that’s not so surprising given that last month’s general election, its third in three years, was called after a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, the head of the AD, over his family’s ownership of a firm that does business with companies doing business with the government. 

Chega’s leader, Andre Ventura — a former seminary student, holder of PhD in law, novelist, and football TV show pundit — probably said it best last week upon learning of his party’s spectacular takeover at the Assembly: 

“Nothing will be the same again.”

Disinformation about elections in Portugal on the rise 

SmartVote, meanwhile, released a comprehensive report last week about the state of disinformation around elections in Portugal and Spain.  

“Trust in news is significantly higher in Portugal (56% say they trust the news) compared to Spain (33%),” SmartVote’s survey found.

“Both Spain and Portugal have seen a rise in electoral misinformation and disinformation, particularly during major elections, with social media playing a central role in the dissemination of false or manipulated content. Key topics include electoral fraud, corruption, and immigration, with the far-right parties in both countries, particularly Chega in Portugal and Vox in Spain, being the major sources of disinformation.”

Navy admiral Gouveia e Melo officially running for president

Another interesting development for Portugal’s political future is the official announcement from Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo that he is indeed running for president, as has been speculated for months. 

Gouveia e Melo — a former submarine commander who gained fame as the government-appointed head of the COVID-19 Vaccination Plan Task Force — made the announcement during an appearance at the newly re-opened ship terminal Gare Marítima de Alcântar on Thursday, presenting his run under the slogan “Unir Portugal,” or “Portugal Unite.”

Just what kind of unity are we talking about? 

As President — who in Portugal has no direct executive power but does have the power to sign and veto laws and call elections — the admiral is willing to work with everyone: as Público put it, the audience at the ceremony had “several figures from the right.”

Portugal “is not a serious country”: Cloudflare co-founder 

Matthew Prince, co-founder and chief executive officer of network security provider Cloudflare, made headlines in Portugal with an interview he gave Observador on May 29 in which he claimed that Portugal isn’t delivering on what it promised as far as cutting red tape for doing business or streamlining immigration, and criticized Lisbon’s airport.

The executive was in part responding to questions about posts he made on X saying that Portugal “is not a serious country:”

Honestly: across the board, Portugal has gotten significantly WORSE since we started making investments in the country. If the trend continues, we’ll stop investing. And if you’re considering it as a tech firm, you’d be crazy to without some hard reassurances from the government.— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) May 25, 2025

Prince told Observador that he had ample experience during his six years in the country: Cloudlfare has been in the country since 2019 and has 350 employees in Lisbon, which is the European headquarters of the San Francisco-based firm.

The tech tycoon told the publication that “the governments of the last six years have failed to fulfill their promises and are not serious about making Portugal a unicorn factory or a serious technological hub.”

He also told Observafor he had no idea what the journal Eco was talking about as far as an “incident” at Cascais Municipal Airport. 

Airport officials cited in that story said Prince apparently responded poorly during baggage check while he tried to board his private jet.

AIMA clears 85% of residency requests waiting a year or more

Meanwhile, the Agency of Migration, Integration, and Asylum (Agência para a Integração Migrações e Asilo – AIMA) announced last week that it’s processed 85% of the 440,000 residency applications, or “expressions of interest,” that were have been in its pipeline for more than a year.

That means 69,000 people will have to continue waiting, according to CNN Portugal.