Mário Cruz / Lusa
Chega’s president, André Ventura
A “supermarket” where Chega looks for sweets. The irruption of the “racist, xenophobic, ultra-liberal party, which exaggerates, insults and lies as a method” should “sound all the alarms”. Spanish historian fears wrong therapy.
The historian Antonio Muñoz Sánchez considers that, more than the emergence of the extreme right in Portugal, it is the “enormous force” with which Chega’s irruption occurred that should “make sound all the alarms”.
“If, in November 2015, when António Costa’s first government was formed with the support of the PCP and BE, someone had said that, a decade later, an extreme right-wing party would be the second in the Assembly of the Republic, they would have taken this person for crazy”, highlighted Muñoz Sánchez in statements to Lusa.
“Now we know that it was not possible to identify the deep current of social unrest in Portugal since the 2008 crisis, and people continued to believe, in a very naive way, in that supposed rule of Portuguese politics according to which the 25th of April would have immunized the country against fascism”, pointed out the researcher from the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, a specialist in political relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Portugal and Spain, who was in Frankfurt for a lecture on right-wing populism and debates on historical politics in Portugal.
For the Spanish historian, who also attended the University of Chemnitz, in Germany, the emergence of the extreme right in Portugal should not, in itself, be a cause for alarm. “It’s just the clear observation that no nation lives outside the global Zeitgeist. What, yes, should raise all the alarms is the enormous force with which this irruption of Chega occurred”, he maintained.
“That a party racist, xenophobic, ultra-liberal, who exaggerates, insults and lies as a methodhaving entered like a hot knife in butter, forces the Portuguese democratic system and the country’s living forces to a deep self-criticism”, he said.
“My concern is that the diagnosis is wrong and that the ‘therapy’ that we want to apply will give Chega even more impetus”, defended Antonio Muñoz Sánchez.
The “supermarket”
In Germany, historical revisionism is widely rejected in the public space. In Portugal, there seems to be more room for ambiguity, he considers. The historian compares a nation’s past to a “huge supermarket” where the far right seeks “the sweetest, most digestible, most colorful products.”
“These are idealized memories of exploits of all kinds carried out by great personalities, of the medieval battles that supposedly ensured the integrity of the State against external enemies, of the moments and situations that show the goodness, greatness and bonhomie of that blessed race. In this joyful banquet, there are barely any references to the less pleasant aspects of national history, such as the victims that the exploits of great men may have left in other territories”, he pointed out.
“If we now apply this scheme to the Portuguese case, we must notice, with alarm, the fact that the, let’s say, normalized vision that the country has of its own history, that which is reflected in its monuments and museums, and that which is transmitted to children in schools, is not very far from the far-right propaganda”, he argued.
The historian considered that the German model in historical education has “many virtues”, but “each country must find its own way” to address your difficult or traumatic past.
“For economic reasons alone, it would be impossible to replicate in Portugal the impressive network of museums, documentation centers, exhibitions or television documentaries that, in Germany, deal with, for example, Nazism. From my point of view, the fundamental thing is not so much the means, but rather the desire to face, bluntly, this difficult past. And this can start with the smallest, the most modest”, he considered.
