🍻 Selber Bier Brauen

Vielerorts stehen Skiferien an. Robert Steiger, Experte für nachhaltigen Tourismus, erklärt, wie sich Wintersport klimafreundlicher gestalten lässt und weshalb die künstliche Beschneiung besser ist als ihr Ruf.

Ein Schimpanse und ein Hausschwein brachten es als Maler zu Ruhm. Wer aber schuf die abstrakten Kunstwerke, die Taucher vor der japanischen Küste auf dem Meeresgrund entdeckt haben? Und wozu?

Haben Männer eine Krise, sprechen sie meist entweder mit ihrer Partnerin oder mit niemandem. Freundschaften lassen sie oft verkümmern, wie die Forschung zeigt. Das schadet ihrer Gesundheit. Die Kolumne «Psychologie des Alltags».

Wir werden gesteuert von archaischen Kräften in unserem Inneren: Mit dieser These begründete Sigmund Freud einen neuartigen Umgang mit psychischen Leiden. Freies Reden sollte helfen, sie zu heilen. Der fünfte Teil unserer Serie zu den grössten Erkenntnissen der Wissenschaft.

Das Versagen der Nieren ist weit verbreitet, und doch wissen bis zu zwei Drittel der Betroffenen nichts von ihrer Erkrankung. Hinzu kommt: Viele von ihnen sterben vorher an Herzinfarkten oder Schlaganfällen.

In July 1936, Sotheby’s sold the so-called Portsmouth Papers – an unordered corpus of manuscripts in Isaac Newton’s own hand, including his extensive alchemical writings, which until then had attracted little scholarly attention. John Maynard Keynes, an avid collector of art and manuscripts, bought them. He revered Newton, regarding him as the embodiment of the rationalisation of scholarly inquiry. It is likely that Keynes saw himself as standing in Newton’s tradition when, having studied mathematics and written his doctoral dissertation in that discipline, he attempted to place economics on a new foundation.

One can imagine the economist’s astonishment when he was able, for the first time, to witness the depth and seriousness of Newton’s alchemical studies. Keynes surmised that these studies possessed “beyond doubt, no substantial value whatever except as a fascinating sidelight on the mind of our greatest genius,” since they documented, in “extensive records”, Newton’s comprehensive alchemical pursuits. “It is utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to it.” Keynes was equally struck by the care – indeed, the methodological rigour – with which Newton had pursued his magical speculations: “There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical.”

At least since the emergence of modern conceptions of rigorous scholarly inquiry, Newton had been regarded as “the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason”. Yet anyone who had read the Portsmouth Papers, Keynes argued, could no longer sustain this classification: “I do not think any one who has pored over the contents of that box […] can see him like that.” Newton was, in Keynes’s words, “clearly an unbridled addict” to magic and alchemy. The Newton who emerges from these writings is not the first of the rational scientists but “the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians – […] Copernicus and Faustus in one.”

Like Newton, Keynes undoubtedly belonged, within his own discipline, to those thinkers whom Foucault once termed fondateurs de discursivité. Such figures are not merely authors of works: “Ils ont produit quelque chose de plus: la possibilité et la règle de formation d’autres textes. […] [I]ls ont établi une possibilité indéfinie de discours.” Keynes’s thought dominated political economy for a time. In 1965, even the anti-Keynesian economist Milton Friedman quipped: “We are all Keynesians now.” Yet this assessment later gave way to criticism. The Stanford economist Robert Barro has gone so far as to claim that “[t]here is no meaningful theoretical or empirical support for the Keynesian position”. Future generations may well take yet another view of the ideas of Keynes, Newton, and all earlier great thinkers. One can imagine a world in which Newton’s alchemy is valued more highly than his physical and mathematical work; and one need hardly strain one’s imagination to trace the rise and fall of Keynesianism’s reputation.

What, then, does all this imply for the epistemological and methodological status of Newton’s thinking, Keynes’s thinking, or our own today? Was Newton simply mistaken in his alchemical writings – was he merely dabbling? Are economists correct about Keynes half of the time and mistaken the other half?

Proceeding from these introductory reflections, I will critique the project of a general theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry (what Germans call Wissenschaftstheorie) using the figure of reflexivity. I understand critique here as a procedure that seeks to ceaselessly subdivide its object and thereby complicate it. This specific conception of critique is restless and – crucially – self-reflexive. It must carry on endlessly and thereby be brought to bear against every distinction it has itself drawn.

Against a generalised theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry, I will contrast an historically unsettled concept of epistemology. It will prove less determinate and less clear. Ultimately, however, it points toward an optimistic understanding of inquiry – one that has not merely come to terms with the historical contingency, restlessness, and endlessness of the epistemic process but can even experience them as liberating.

Unsettling history

In their global anthropological study of human societies in the distant past, David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate that a teleology according to which humanity progressively refines its social, epistemic, and cultural concepts and practices is historically untenable. Anglo-American discourse has a term for this view against which Graeber and Wengrow write: Whig history. It denotes, essentially, a Eurocentric perspective on history that takes the present, with all its achievements, as its telos. From this vantage point, historical development appears almost inevitably to culminate in the (undoubtedly valuable) norms of contemporary Western modernity. Seen this way, the history of knowledge becomes a narrative of linear progress, gradual enlightenment, and the disenchantment of the world. Past knowledge is judged in the light of its modern counterpart. Where past thinkers fell short of the insights of the enlightened present, Whig history explains this primarily by their lack of intellectual capacity or by the insufficient state of knowledge of their time. As Paul Feyerabend once put it: “Thus in retrospect everything becomes more simplistic, and we do not learn anything about the manifold and often very surprising coincidences, without which philosophy and the sciences would not have been possible in the first place.”

By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow show that although human beings throughout the history of the species were subject to very different conditions, which produced different modes of perceiving the world, the epistemic, cultural, and political ideas and practices of early human history – so far as we can reconstruct them today – were at times comparable in complexity to those of the present. In this way, a “completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years” emerges. The authors invite the reader to adopt a transformed, anti-teleological and anti-evolutionist view of history, “one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity.”

From studies such as these, we learn that alternative worldviews – such as the natural philosophies and myths of earlier epochs – do not necessarily fall short of our own worldviews in terms of developmental level or complexity. They should not be read in a primitivist manner, nor dismissed as erroneous, dysfunctional, or merely fantastical. Such scientific self-righteousness from a modern vantage point overlooks the fact that our own perceptions and interpretations will one day presumably appear just as outdated to our descendants as those of our predecessors do to us. Once we understand that human cognitive capacities were not necessarily weaker in different local historical constellations but simply different, we should also assess more cautiously the epistemic prospects of an abstract, rigid philosophy of knowledge. There is no super-theory that, from an Archimedean point, can deliver correct knowledge on the basis of invariant, objective, and time-independent criteria. The value of a theory cannot lie in its correspondence with a rigid external standard (for example, “truth”), but only in its always provisional, culture- and time-specific fit with human needs. Different approaches – whether within a single discipline or across disciplines – are better treated as different tools, “as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.” Even scientific thinking operates according to criteria of situational, often provisional fruitfulness.

Those who set out to reconstruct a contemporary scholarly practice should beware of taking its self-description at face value. Every discipline has the capacity to conceal its own illusions behind a fog that it itself generates – and that also envelops its own practitioners. A general theory of knowledge and inquiry that seeks to approach this will have to relinquish, to some extent, its illusion of pure contemplation. More than that, it must accept that it will absorb its object, perhaps even consume it entirely. But this is also an epiphanic self-consumption of theory itself: once an object has been brought fully and accurately into theoretical view, theory and phenomenon collapse into one, and the object of theory is aufgehoben in its contemplation. Theory is therefore not merely speaking about or thinking of something; it intervenes in the event of being itself. A theoretical relation to the world is always a transformed – and transforming – relation to the world.

For concrete scholarly work, this means that we – reflexively – should sharpen our senses for ruptures, resistances, and fragmentations that ultimately unsettle our very own position. The price to be paid for such epistemological pluralisation is polyphony and discontinuity. Where one previously felt secure in one’s place within a designated coordinate system, an entirely new, deterritorialised topology opens up – marked by contradictions, overlaps, and proliferations. This multiplication should not be understood as a threat to knowledge and understanding. Rather, it calls for exploration, for opening dead ends. It clears the space so that we may go on and free thought itself from the contemplation, reflection, or communication of eternal values, transcendentals, or universals.

Jurisprudence occupies an ambivalent position here. On the one hand, law is the instrument through which freedom and equality can be realised. On the other hand, it justifies and stabilises an often manifestly unjust status quo. If we calibrate our expectations of law’s capacity on the basis of a theory of scholarly inquiry grounded in sharp clarity across all domains, we will frame the concerns we bring to law in a rigid and uncompromising manner, rather than leaving them open. Instead, the “decidedly artificial” character of legal enclosures should not be concealed but, on the contrary, displayed, continually demonstrating that in the world of law everything could remain as it is – or be entirely different.

Unsettling scholars

Seen from this vantage point, the question of who pursues a scholarly question becomes equally as relevant as its objects, purported methods, and so on. The scholars of the Western canon sometimes erred not only in matters of scholarship itself but also in morals – at times closely connected to their intellectual work. John Locke owned shares in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted every American slaveholder in the province of Carolina “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves”. Hannah Arendt disparaged non-Ashkenazi Jews as oriental and inferior, repeatedly referred to Black Africans as “savages”, and criticised the civil rights movement as excessive and prone to violence. A number of French intellectuals, including Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (all personal heroes of mine), de Beauvoir, and Sartre, signed a 1977 petition to Parliament calling for the abolition of laws on sexual majority, particularly age-of-consent protections. Louis Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980 and claimed in his autobiography that he had thereby done her a service.

One can presumably condemn slavery, racism, antisemitism, the demand to extend sexual maturity to children, and femicide – yet still read all of the authors mentioned. Intellectual history may then ask how biographical facts and patterns of thought relate to one another within a particular, as precisely delimited historical context as possible, or at least explore possible connections. It examines how objects of knowledge and domains of cognition depend on historically contingent arrangements. Apparently, epistemic systems encode blindnesses that prevent even brilliant thinkers from seeing certain forms of harm.

This leads to a different kind of epistemology – one that asks not about the correctness of grand theoretical edifices in the narrow sense, nor one that sets standards for their construction or demolition. Rather, it explores the conditions of thought as comprehensively as possible and works out how particular people, at particular times, thought about particular questions. Even the “why” must be handled with care.

An optimistic outlook

An epistemology thus conceived is less a path to self-assurance than to self-unsettlement. But this should make us optimistic. We no longer need to argue about whether this or that attempt to think about something counts as “scholarly” in the strict sense. We might “substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking,” to put it with Richard Rorty. Thus, in a Nietzschean manner, we can ask other questions of those who call themselves scholars: Where does this lead us? Where does your thinking come from? What does it bring with it, and what does it exclude? Do we like that? Why? Does it allow us to see something anew, or more sharply?

It may be that all that remains for us is to circle again and again around ultimately the same questions – questions we may never resolve. But is that so bad? If we succeed in continually reformulating our striving for knowledge in ways that mean something to people at particular times and in particular places, would that not be enough? Exploring what Joel Modiri, among the first cohort of fellows at our newly founded Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, during his stay with us in Berlin once aptly referred to as “the éros of research”, the sheer joy of scholarly curiosity, is a worthwhile undertaking in and of itself.

The post Method in the Madness appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Over roughly the past decade and a half, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have undergone what is often described as a “global turn.” This shift starts from a historical insight into the disciplines themselves. As they are institutionalized today across universities worldwide, the modern disciplines largely took shape in nineteenth-century Europe and continue to bear the imprint of that moment of origin. Two features are particularly consequential. First, their close entanglement with the nation-state has fostered a predominantly national framing of research questions, archives, and narratives. Second, they have been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions that were deeply embedded in an age marked by imperial expansion and European global hegemony.

A century and a half later, the world has been profoundly transformed. Empires have collapsed, new states and regions have emerged, and social, economic, and cultural interconnections span the globe with an intensity unknown in the nineteenth century. Yet, to a remarkable extent, scholars continue to analyze this world with conceptual tools, categories, and narrative templates forged under very different historical conditions.

Seen in this light, the global turn can be understood as an attempt to critically interrogate these inherited assumptions and to render the disciplines more adequate to the globalized world we inhabit today. Scholars no longer take globalization for granted as the natural teleology of an increasingly integrated world, nor do they understand it as a unilinear process radiating outward from Euro-American centers. Instead, the concept of reflexive globalization, as employed by the Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, foregrounds a more complex and contested architecture of global interaction—one in which processes of homogenization and fragmentation unfold simultaneously, in which new connectivities generate forms of disconnection, and in which the dynamics of global integration originate from multiple geographies, albeit under conditions of persistent power asymmetries. Crucially, this analytical perspective is grounded in a reflexive awareness of knowledge production itself: interpretations of globalization are understood as situated, shaped by the positionality, epistemic frameworks, and institutional locations of their observers, and therefore as objects of critical scrutiny rather than neutral descriptions of a global process.

A central component of this endeavor has been the critique of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, however, does not manifest itself uniformly across fields. The following reflections are written from the perspective of a historian, though the underlying concerns are likely to resonate beyond the discipline of history.

Institutions, Narratives, Concepts

In historical scholarship, Eurocentrism operates on at least three interrelated levels. The first concerns institutions. The enduring dominance of Western institutions – from universities and curricula to conferences, publishers, and academic journals – means that scholars speak with unequal authority depending on where they are located. Dipesh Chakrabarty has famously captured this condition in his notion of an “asymmetry of ignorance”: while Western scholars can often afford to remain largely unaware of scholarship produced outside Europe and North America, non-Western scholars cannot ignore Western literature without risking marginalization.

The second level is that of narratives. Eurocentric views of world history position Europe as the sole active agent, the “fountainhead” of historical change. Europe acts; the rest of the world reacts. Europe possesses agency; others are rendered passive. Europe makes history; the rest of the world acquires a history only once it enters into contact with Europe. Europe stands at the center, while other regions are relegated to the periphery. Within such a framework, European history becomes the implicit benchmark against which all other histories are measured and evaluated. It is precisely this narrative hierarchy that makes a sentence such as “Charlemagne was an important European ruler of the Tang period” sound jarring, whereas the statement “Hârûn ar-Rashīd was an important Near Eastern ruler of the Middle Ages” appears entirely unremarkable.

The third level concerns concepts. Historical scholarship relies on a vocabulary that claims universal validity but is, in fact, deeply rooted in specific European experiences. Concepts such as nation, class, revolution, liberty, rights, or religion emerged in particular historical constellations in Europe before being projected onto social realities elsewhere. Their global circulation often required the invention of neologisms and complex politics of translation in order to render them intelligible and operative in new contexts. Since then, scholars have engaged in sustained debates over the extent to which societies outside Europe have been – and continue to be – interpreted and evaluated through an idiom that is not their own. The global turn, in this sense, is also an invitation to reflect on the histories embedded in our concepts and to consider alternative ways of thinking that do not take the European experience as their silent point of reference.

As one possible remedy, scholars have increasingly sought to unsettle this terminological hegemony by experimenting with alternative ways of naming and conceptualizing social realities. Rather than relying exclusively on a vocabulary forged in Europe, they have begun to mobilize local and vernacular idioms in an effort to loosen the Eurocentric constraints of the modern disciplines. At stake are fundamental epistemological questions: how can we ensure that societies are not evaluated according to standards foreign to their historical experience? How can we grasp the life of communities in a language that resonates with their own categories of meaning? Decolonial scholars, in particular, have forcefully placed such concerns on the agenda and have proposed a range of alternative concepts intended to provincialize Europe’s conceptual authority.

A recent volume edited by Dilip Menon offers an instructive example of this intervention. Menon argues that, for too long, scholarship has been guided by the trajectories of a European history and by what he calls a self-regarding, nativist epistemology – one that acquired its universal status largely through the violence of conquest and empire. The consequence has been a persistent asymmetry: events and processes in the global South have routinely been interpreted through Western theoretical frameworks, while the reverse movement has remained rare. In this process, alternative forms of knowledge have been marginalized or lost altogether, even though they may hold considerable analytical promise. The contributions to the volume accordingly propose concepts drawn from different regions of the world, concepts that articulate local realities and encode alternative cosmologies.

The aspiration to develop a more place-specific terminology is both understandable and, in many respects, welcome. Nor is it without precedent. Over the past decades, a number of terms originating outside Europe have entered the conceptual repertoire of the social sciences and humanities. Some designate singular historical events, such as the Shoah, the Holodomor, or the Nakba. Others – terms like taboo, fetish, or jihad – have traveled far beyond their points of origin and have been re-semanticized in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Beyond individual concepts, entire theoretical approaches that emerged in the global South have gained wide international currency. Dependency theory, formulated in Latin America, and intersectionality, with roots in both African American and African intellectual traditions, are prominent examples.

Challenges to Unsettling Vocabularies

Such efforts to diversify scholarly vocabularies are undoubtedly productive, and they are timely at a historical moment when Europe’s geopolitical dominance has long since declined, even as its conceptual authority appears strikingly resilient. At the same time, this project confronts a number of challenges. Let me briefly highlight four of them.

First, the decolonial effort to rehabilitate pre-colonial or non-Western concepts is driven by a critique of the hierarchies embedded in Eurocentric vocabularies. Yet the concepts recovered from local or pre-colonial contexts often carry hierarchies of their own, reflecting the social stratifications and exclusions of the societies from which they stem. The analytical task, therefore, is not simply one of recuperation, but of critically assessing the emancipatory potential of these concepts in light of the inequalities they may also reproduce.

Second, questions of representation loom large. It is not always evident who is entitled to speak for “native” or marginalized pasts. In some contexts, alternative cosmologies have survived – at least in fragments – and continue to shape lived realities within local communities. In others, however, the voices articulating these traditions appear to be more closely aligned with transnational academic elites than with the constituencies on whose behalf they claim to speak. Claims to local knowledge are thus also interventions on a global academic stage, embedded in struggles over recognition, authority, and power.

A third challenge is closely related: the critique of Eurocentrism has coincided with the proliferation of alternative centrisms. Yet it remains unclear to what extent the celebration of one cultural tradition over another helps to resolve the epistemological dilemmas at hand. This concern becomes particularly acute when the promotion of alternative knowledges is intertwined with state projects, as in the cases of Xi Jinping’s China or Narendra Modi’s India, where invocations of civilizational distinctiveness can serve explicitly political ends.

Finally, the problem of Eurocentrism cannot be addressed at the level of discourse alone. As Arif Dirlik once observed, “without the power of capitalism, and all the structural innovations that accompanied it … Eurocentrism might have been just another ethnocentrism.” Reworking scholarly vocabularies may be a necessary first step, but it is unlikely to be sufficient. As long as global systems of knowledge production are underpinned by enduring geopolitical and economic asymmetries, conceptual reforms will remain partial. The critical interrogation of terminology must therefore remain on the agenda, even as we recognize that its transformative potential ultimately depends on broader shifts in the distribution of global power.

 

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On 8 February 2026, Portuguese voters will decide a presidential runoff between António José Seguro, backed by the Socialist Party, and André Ventura, leader of the far-right Chega. The argument I advance here, however, is analytical rather than electoral: that this election crystallizes a confrontation between two models of democracy – one liberal, rooted in the constitutional settlement that emerged from the 1974 revolution, and one illiberal, that treats constitutional constraints as obstacles to the expression of popular will rather than as safeguards of it.

The powers of the president

The Portuguese presidency is not a ceremonial role in the German or Italian sense. Portugal’s semi-presidential system grants the head of state significant powers, the most consequential of which is the ability to dissolve the parliament and call early elections. The outgoing president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a prominent constitutional law scholar, exercised this power three times. Since 2022, Portugal has held three legislative elections – a situation of political instability which has certainly played its role in the growth of the far-right. In a fragmented parliament where no party holds a majority – which is Portugal’s current situation – the president’s role as moderator, arbiter and, in extremis, decision-maker about the survival of governments is of decisive constitutional importance. The president also wields a suspensive political veto over legislation and holds the exclusive power to trigger the Constitutional Court’s a priori review – effectively converting the presidency into a de facto negative legislator.

It is this institutional context that makes Ventura’s candidacy constitutionally alarming. His political project is not simply about occupying the presidency; it is about redefining the rules of the game. His party manifesto includes life imprisonment and chemical castration for sex offenders, and his slogan deliberately echoes the motto of Salazar’s Estado Novo dictatorship, previously appropriated by Bolsonaro. In December 2025, a Lisbon court ordered the removal of discriminatory campaign posters targeting Roma people. Chega, founded only in 2019, now holds 60 parliamentary seats and constitutes the main opposition force.

The drivers of Chega

The most powerful driver of Chega’s rise has been immigration – specifically, the sharp and visible increase in migration from South Asia, a recent phenomenon in a country historically accustomed only to immigration from Portuguese-speaking and Eastern European countries. The second has been corruption – or, more precisely, the perception that the political establishment is structurally corrupt. The resignation of Prime Minister António Costa in November 2023 amid a criminal investigation was followed by yet another parliamentary dissolution in 2025, this time triggered by conflict-of-interest allegations against Prime Minister Luís Montenegro. Together, these events provided Ventura with a narrative of systemic failure that reinforces the nativist one. As the political scientist António Costa Pinto has argued, Chega is not a neoliberal protest party but a welfare-chauvinist one: it demands a strong state, exclusively for nationals, and frames immigrants as parasites on the welfare system. This combination of exclusionary nationalism and social statism gives Ventura’s political project its electoral base.

Portugal’s trajectory differs from countries with continuous post-war organizational legacies – Italy’s Fratelli d’Italia descends from the neo-fascist MSI; France’s Front National (later Rassemblement National) was founded in 1972 by figures with Vichy-era backgrounds. Chega has no such lineage. The 1974 revolution did not merely end the dictatorship – it produced a rupture. The revolutionary period radicalized the transition, the 1976 Constitution enshrined antifascism as a foundational principle, and the political system that emerged excluded the far right from legitimacy for decades. Yet the absence of organizational continuity does not mean the absence of ideological inheritance. Ventura’s slogan echoes Estado Novo rhetoric: Salazar is selectively rehabilitated as a figure of order and probity; colonial nostalgia runs through the party’s nationalist imagery. That Chega emerged from the mainstream conservative party – much like Spain’s Vox emerged from within the Partido Popular – may say less about novelty than about the limits of democratic consolidation: the sympathy for authoritarian rule that both transitions were supposed to have buried never fully disappeared and has now found autonomous political expression.

Towards a Southern Hungary

The broader model is not difficult to identify. As Costa Pinto puts it plainly, Orbán’s Hungary is the template. The competitive authoritarian regime that Orbán has built – using democratic elections to gain power, then systematically hollowing out the constitutional constraints that prevent majorities from concentrating authority and marginalizing minorities – is precisely the kind of political order that Ventura would seek to consolidate, adapted to Portugal’s semi-presidential framework. Ventura’s Chega sits in the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament alongside Orbán’s Fidesz. The distinction between liberal and illiberal democracy – first articulated by Fareed Zakaria in 1997, and since then tested in practice from Budapest to Warsaw – maps precisely what is now being contested in Lisbon: whether democracy is reducible to winning elections, or whether it necessarily entails the constitutional protection of rights, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.

What would be the imminent risks of a far-right victory? Even if Ventura won – the polls point unanimously to Seguro’s victory – Portugal would not become Hungary overnight (neither did Hungary become Orbán’s Hungary overnight, for that matter). The president does not hold executive power – although he indirectly influences public policies through his veto and moderation powers. But the risks would be real and specific. A President Ventura would control the dissolution power, as well as the power to dismiss the government, turning the permanent threat of early elections into an instrument of political pressure – effectively presidentializing a system designed to resist precisely that, especially after the constitutional revision of 1982, which reduced the powers of the head of state. The 1976 Constitution, drafted in the aftermath of the revolutionary period, had created a strong presidency where the president could dismiss governments without invoking any grounds. The 1982 revision curtailed this power, conditioning dismissal on the need to safeguard the regular functioning of democratic institutions, meant to prevent a directly elected president from claiming a mandate superior to parliament’s. But the power to dissolve parliament, conceived as an escape valve for parliamentary deadlock, remained less constrained – a tension in the system’s anti-plebiscitary design that a President Ventura could exploit. He would command the most powerful bully pulpit in Portuguese politics, lending the legitimacy of the highest office to a discourse that frames constitutional limits as elite impositions on the sovereign people.

A Trojan horse in parliament for nationalists and neonazis?

The confrontation between Chega and constitutional constraints is already underway. The party has been in a condition of de jure internal illegality since 2021, after successive court rulings blocked its conventions and statute amendments for violating internal democratic requirements. More recently, Chega members have attacked the Constitutional Court for striking down restrictions on immigrants’ rights negotiated with the governing PSD, qualifying the rulings as “a betrayal of Portugal”. The porosity between Chega and organized extremism is not hypothetical. In January 2026, the Judiciary Police dismantled the neo-Nazi group 1143 in the largest operation against organized hate crime in Portuguese history. Among the 37 arrested were active Chega members and former party candidates; the group’s leader, currently serving a prison sentence, had reportedly described Chega in 2019 as a “Trojan horse” for the far right in parliament, encouraging nationalists to join the party, according to journalist Miguel Carvalho’s investigation Por Dentro do Chega. The party’s vice-president spoke at a November congress alongside the founder of American Renaissance and the organizer of the 2026 Remigration Summit, the pan-European gathering of identitarian activists scheduled for Porto in May.

The breadth of cross-partisan support for Seguro – spanning from former conservative presidents to the liberal centre and the left – signals the perceived magnitude of the constitutional threat. Notably, Portugal is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its Constitution at this critical juncture.

Portugal was the last Western European country without a significant far-right force in its political system. That exceptionalism is over. The question now facing Portuguese voters is the same one facing democrats across Europe: whether democracy means merely winning elections, or something more.

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