Figured given tonight’s election results, I’d start a new topic for folks to share insights, thoughts, and hopes/fears about what comes next in the grand saga of our immigration options and divestments. Does anyone know Chega’s position on the ARI/ or the relevant alternative D Visas? Any sense of what will happen now?
For the time being it completely depends on whether PSD sticks to their promise not to form a coalition with Chega.
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Either way, PSD will still need their support in parliament, meaning Chega will definitely have some influence.
That being said, from a GV applicant perspective I don’t think it’s a bad outcome. Chega seems to be fans of the Golden Visa. Not sure what they think about the other D-visas, but I think it’s unlikely that there will be significant negative changes under the new government.
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As I understand Chega is in favor of migrants who bring investment /skills / labor to Portugal but not in favor of unlawful migration.
The New Pact on Migration and Asylum Was agreed by EU council on December 2023 and I would expect pressure from Chega to expand on the themes in that pact. If you read Chega positions carefully they want new migrants , but with a focus on those migrants who don’t undermine Portuguese language and culture . Whatever that means exactly but an obvious example would be religion .
Even though new investment and lawful migration is critical for Portugal and Chega understands this, is it possible these categories of immigration could be impacted by some broader immigration measures .
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With the balance this close (as of 20 mins ago), I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole lot of nothing happens this year, and new elections have to be held next year.
Although with governments, sometimes nothing is good. Maybe AIMA and IRN won’t need to down tools every couple months to rewrite their procedures, and can have a good 9-month run of just pushing through the backlog 
The coalition that brings together PSD, CDS and PPM (plus the Madeira Primeiro coalition, which excludes the PPM in the autonomous region) obtained 29.49% of the votes, against 28.66% for the PS. The difference is just 50,934 votes and two deputies, 79 for Luís Montenegro’s coalition and 77 for Pedro Nuno Santos’ party.
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It means we should all be prepared to pass our CIPLE tests
When I wrote to parliament last year about the delays in the GV process and the proposed changes, the only one to write back was the Chega rep. Here’s what he said:
Caro Senhor CTC,
Li com atenção o seu email, e queria dizer-lhe que estamos solidários com o senhor e com todos os investidores, que, ao abrigo da Lei, resolveram investir em Portugal.
Infelizmente, este Governo socialista, influenciado pela extrema esquerda, não vê com bons olhos o programa Visa Gold, que, nos últimos anos contribuiu muito para o crescimento económico do país, para a criação de emprego, entres vários outros fatores que consideramos muito positivos.Somos favoráveis à continuidade do Golden Visa, e vamos debater no sentido do programa continuar, sabendo que, a maioria absoluta do PS, não irá aprovar as nossas propostas de alteração ao diploma.
Agradeço muito a partilha que fez, e estamos, naturalmente, solidários com a sua, vossa causa
Melhores cumprimentos
Translated:
Dear Mr. CTC,
I read your email carefully and wanted to tell you that we are in solidarity with you and all the investors who have decided to invest in Portugal under the law.
Unfortunately, this socialist government, influenced by the extreme left, does not look kindly on the Golden Visa program, which in recent years has contributed greatly to the country’s economic growth and job creation, among many other factors that we consider very positive.We are in favor of the continuation of the Golden Visa, and we are going to debate in order for the program to continue, knowing that the absolute majority of the PS will not approve our proposed amendments to the law.
Thank you very much for sharing your views, and we are, of course, in solidarity with your cause
Best regards
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@Garbonzo Thanks for a much better analysis than what I managed to put together after staying up until the middle of the night watching the full election coverage! (It was hard enough just putting together a handful coherent sentences.) I agree with everything you wrote.
While AD (which consists of PSD and a couple smaller conservative parties) have secured 2 MPs more than PS, there are only 4 additional seats to be assigned (based on votes by Portuguese living abroad). So PS would need to get at least three of these—which seems very unlikely—to get to the same number of MPs as AD.
And even if they were to get the same or even more MPs than AD, they wouldn’t be able to govern without the support of either Chega or AD/PSD—again, which would be extremely unlikely. This is why PS admitted defeat already last night before even the last seven or eight MPs of continental Portugal had been awarded.
That being said, I agree that there’s a risk of new elections sometime soon as even AD/PSD would need the support of either Chega or PS for any legislation they want to pass (crucially, including the state budget).
That can be difficult for several reasons:
- PS stated categorically last night that they would not support any legislation proposed by PSD
- PSD has categorically stated that they will not collaborate with Chega, which they repeated last night (“no means no”)
- Chega, which have quadrupled their seats in parliament, is likely to want to seek at least some influence over the policy that it supports, if not even demanding to be part of the government
It’s easy to see how this could lead to a stalemate which would lead to new elections being called sooner rather than later.
Bonus tidbit:
AD might have made a mistake in choosing the name of their list (Aliança Democrática), as it was confusingly similar to the name of another very tiny party, ADN (Alternativa Democrática Nacional).
ADN—which received only 0.19% of votes in the previous election and not even having engaged in any significant campaigning for this election—received a surprising 1.6% of votes in this election, nearly earning them an MP.
Due to the way the Portuguese voting system works, these approximately 100,000 likely erroneous votes probably caused AD to lose several parliamentary seats to PS and perhaps Chega, making the question of which party would dominate the parliament much more uncertain than it would have otherwise.
Still, from my read of the situation, it doesn’t seem like it changed the overall power dynamic as PSD would still have needed to rely on Chega’s support.
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I’m fairly certain the ADN party came about as a spoiler intentionally advertising themselves as ADN to confuse voters and do basically what they just did.
Sad news that Chega got so many votes, for a variety of reasons. For a more personal and lighter reason, they are one of the only parties in PT that are strongly anti-cannabis, whereas the other parties were working toward legalization (extremely slowly, but still)
Where are y’all reading/watching coverage? Anything particularly good, in either portuguese or english? If portuguese, hopefully a little more simple, since I’m maybe A2 on a good day lol
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I follow Journal Expresso on Instagram and have been using it for language learning: https://www.instagram.com/jornalexpresso?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
They have a great election tracker on their website too that has the results from each freguesia. (The city of Porto appears to have been the freguesia most resistant to Chega, having captured just under 10% of the vote there. Algarve appears to have had the highest percentages of Chega votes.)
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Hmm that’s nice, but from the description of Chega as far right I’d imagine they’re rather against immigration in general. If they were the majority in parliament, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to make naturalization harder. Maybe require B1 instead of A2 Portuguese. Or lengthened the residency requirement.
But that’s just speculation since they’re nowhere near the majority, maybe lucky for us.
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Yes, definitely the most illiberal party in the country overall:
The source of the figure is one of those newspaper election quizzes that help you figure out who you should vote for. From the left in the figure: CDU (PCP), BE, Livre, PS, PAN, Chega, AD (PSD + CDS-PP), IL. (Você = you, for those of you who really haven’t started practicing Portuguese at all)
Note: I’m not entirely sure how accurate this “political compass” is. E.g. I wouldn’t judge IL to be less progressive (at least if by that they mean classically liberal) than say PS. Perhaps their definitions don’t quite map with the traditional political compass (left/right, authoritarian/libertarian).
Either way, I find the figure helpful in understanding how parties relate to each other beyond the left/right spectrum.
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I asked a Portuguese friend about this post and he said it was totally absurd to think this would be the case.
Surely you’re not suggesting a politician lied!?
Thank you for sharing, I’m more than a bit skeptical of trying to reduce politics to two axes but it’s at least interesting to see how others do it
Sorry this article is 4 days old, but is still interesting insight on the various parties’ stances on immigration. Some quick highlights:
- the fight against illegal immigration is an objective that cuts across all parties
- To combat these “significant challenges”, both the Democratic Alliance and Chega advocate the creation of quotas, or “quantitative objectives”, in order to prioritize qualifications and prevent “exploitation by illegal and criminal networks”.
- On the PS side, the "digital transformation of the documentary area" is advocated to ensure that all the services of… AIMA… are available online.
- The PCP… defends the creation of temporary teams with a view to "regularizing the pending cases transferred from SEF to AIMA".
- In the opposite direction, Chega advocates reversing the extinction of SEF and, consequently, “restoring its organic structure, its attributions and its legal and operational status”.
- André Ventura’s [Chega] party also subscribes to the need to revoke the mobility agreement between the countries of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) and, consequently, “end the automatic residence permit for CPLP immigrants”, in line with European standards. It also calls for Portuguese nationality to be granted only to immigrants who know the Portuguese language and culture.
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Reversing the SEF extinction just isn’t practical, and fortunately Chega won’t have the power to do it.
As for potential other changes regarding immigration, I would think most wouldn’t affect us, as we are legal, skilled immigrants from non-CPLO countries. As long as they don’t raise the residency requirement (which wasn’t mentioned by anyone), we will hopefully be unaffected. It’s nice to see multiple parties concerned about the AIMA backlog.
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SEF has never been extincted. In fact, it was re-born with a different name “AIMA”.
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Not exactly, SEF had multiple functions, e.g. the border guards stamping your passport when you entered Portugal were SEF, and the people processing your GV application were also SEF.
Now AIMA is processing your application, but I believe they don’t do the border guard stuff. SEF’s other functions were parceled out to different agencies.
If it is the same group of staffs who process the GV applications and the same mechanism to issue GV card (pre-approval/biometric/approval/…) and the similar waiting times (years), then I still have to keep my opinion that SEF was just re-born with a different name! Very unfortunate, but it is a reality!
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