Chega leader André Ventura announced on Tuesday his candidacy for the Portuguese presidential elections in 2026.
“I will be a candidate in the 2026 presidential elections. I will be a candidate because under the circumstances we are conditioned by, we have no other choice but to defeat the system in these elections as well,” he declared at a press conference at Chega’s headquarters in Lisbon.
In a speech where he claimed to have sought other names to run for Belém, Ventura emphasized, “I did not wish to be a candidate.”
“I would have preferred Pedro Passos Coelho to be a candidate for President of the Republic,” he admitted, stressing, “These presidential elections were not my desire, but they are the best way to lead the opposition in Portugal.”
Pointing out that the party must “have a voice” in these elections, he stated that Chega “cannot look the other way,” quoting Francisco Sá Carneiro: “All my political life was and continues to be within what Sá Carneiro said: ‘Politics without risk is boring.'”
“Putting an end to bipartisanship once and for all, as we did on May 18, will be the guarantee that we made the right choice for these presidential elections. If we go to the second round and even if we win these presidential elections, it meant the rise of a political movement never seen in our country, capable of defeating PS and PSD in a few months and capable of returning them to the insignificance of their candidacies,” he argued.
Ventura also criticized the candidates for Belém, saying he wants the country to be different “not with the likes of Marques Mendes or Admirals, but with new politicians, different politicians who have not been hit by the vices the political system carries within itself.”
“When I heard the three presidential candidates say they agreed with Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s veto on the foreigner’s law, I was even more certain: that this party had to have a candidacy that said ‘no, we should not veto the foreigner’s law, we should not continue to have open doors for everyone without rules, benefiting from subsidies,'” he shot back, later criticizing Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s diplomatic relations with leaders of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries.
Regarding Henrique Gouveia e Melo, Ventura was more specific, saying about the former military figure: “In truth, there is no duplicity or struggle between anti-system candidates. There is an anti-system candidate, and there is a candidate who happens to be a military man and who will represent the space of socialism and the political center in Portugal.”
“Never has a candidacy with this dimension had a phrase that made so much sense, but we will carry it until January 18: the Portuguese first,” he asserted.
