Socialist António José Seguro wins 66% of the vote in Portugal's presidential election, acting as a bulwark against the far right.

BarcelonaThe predictions came true, and the socialist candidate António José Seguro secured a resounding victory in the second round of the Portuguese presidential elections. Seguro won with approximately 66% of the vote, defeating the far-right candidate. André Ventura, leader of Chega (34%), with 95% of the votes counted. The vote went ahead despite the storm. Marten which is ravaging the country and has forced three municipalities to postpone it until next week. Turnout was 49%, twelve points lower than in the first round on January 18. Ventura, however, refused to blame the bad weather: "I'm not looking for excuses, that's the result and I fully accept it: the country needs politicians who take responsibility," he said.

In addition to socialist voters, Seguro also won the votes of the traditional right-wing party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), after the debacle of its candidate in the first round of the presidential elections. The PSD is the party of Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, who did not personally support Seguro. "All the parties and all the candidates of the center bloc, both the PSD and Liberal Initiative, ended up supporting Seguro in the presidential elections: there was a pseudo-cordon sanitaire," Héctor Sánchez Margalef, a researcher at CIDOB, explained to ARA. He also highlights as key to the socialist's victory the fact that Seguro presented himself as president of all, while Ventura went so far as to say he would use the presidency to oppose the government. "The Portuguese are angry with traditional politics, which is why Chega obtained a significant result in the legislative elections and now also in the presidential elections, but the figure of the head of state is more removed from day-to-day management and cannot be blamed for the country's problems," he adds. In contrast, the candidate of the ruling party came in fifth place in the first round of the presidential elections on January 18.

Political scientist José Palmeira, in statements to Economic JournalHe had formulated it in terms of electoral geometry: Ventura faced a rival who allowed him to "polarize to the maximum," and Seguro, as the "candidate of moderation," attracted a broader spectrum of the electorate. But it would be wrong to see the result as a defeat for the far right. Ventura became the winner of the election from the outset by forcing a second round, the first since 1986, a head-to-head contest that has become a lever for legitimizing his project. Seguro built his campaign on a narrative of moderation and defense of the democratic framework. Ventura presented himself as the victim of a "cancel campaign" and denounced that "the system" is "blocking" him. More than a competition between right and left, the elections were a dispute between moderation and rupture.

Sánchez Margalef warns that this is not a bad result for Ventura: "It's not a defeat for Chega: they've forced a second round, something not seen in 40 years. It's true that his narrative has failed him because he can no longer present himself as the candidate who unites the entire right wing, but he has the campaign." The same thing happened in France with Marine Le Pen of the National Rally, who lost the second round of the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections to Emmanuel Macron, but continues to set the tone for French politics.

Polarization

He will surely replace Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who has presided over the country for the last ten years. And he will be Portugal's first socialist president in twenty years. But the second round has already left the country more clearly divided into two opposing forces: one institutional and the other anti-establishment. The result marks the normalization of radical right-wing populism within the Portuguese system. Portugal is no longer an island of harmonious coexistence between socialists and conservatives. And on the left of the socialists, no alternative is currently visible.

Since the 2019 legislative elections, the emergence of Chega – which in Portuguese means That's enough.– has shaken the political system. The party, founded a few months before those elections, propelled Ventura to the forefront, who surprisingly obtained 1.29% of the vote, enough to win a seat. Chega has a particularly aggressive discourse, promising to combat corruption, immigration, "cultural Marxism," and also the Roma, who have deep roots in Portugal. Vox's Iberian sister, initially seen as an anomaly, has followed a meteoric trajectory. From 12% of the vote in 2021, it rose to 20% in the snap legislative elections of May 2025, and today it holds 60 seats out of a total of 230. This reflects the democratic tradition forged after the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974. This discourse, unthinkable just a few years ago, highlights the depth of the political crisis masking the presidential election results and placing the country in line with the authoritarian regimes gaining ground in other parts of Europe.