Latest news with #far-right
Free Malaysia Today
3 days ago
- Business
- Free Malaysia Today
Portugal far-right party becomes second biggest in parliament
Former trainee priest Andre Ventura founded Chega in 2019. (AP pic) LISBON : Portugal's far-right Chega party won second place in snap elections last week, according to final results published yesterday, making it the official opposition party in the country just six years after its creation. Chega, which means 'Enough', and the left-wing Socialist Party (PS) had been level on 58 seats after the provisional results from the May 18 poll. But the far-right party won two of the previously unannounced four overseas constituencies, taking its tally to 60. The centre-right Democratic Alliance (AD) claimed the other two overseas seats taking its total to 91, still far from the 116 seats needed to form a majority government. The Social Democratic Party of outgoing prime minister Luis Montenegro is the main party of the alliance. 'It is a big victory,' said Chega founder and leader Andre Ventura, claiming that it 'marks a profound change in the Portuguese political system'. Montenegro is expected to try to form a minority government after the latest election and he has said he will not deal with Chega. But Ventura called on Montenegro to 'break' with the Socialists. 'Portugal is moving in line with the European trend' for a 'protest vote' and 'anti-establishment sentiment', said Paula Espirito Santo at Lisbon University's higher institute of social and political sciences. 'Divine mission' Support for Chega has grown in every general election since the party was founded in 2019 by Ventura, a former trainee priest who later became a television football commentator. It won 1.3% of the vote in a general election the year it was founded, giving it a seat in parliament – the first time a far-right party had won representation in Portugal's legislature since a coup in 1974 toppled a decades-long rightist dictatorship. Chega became the third-largest force in parliament in the next general election in 2022 and quadrupled its parliamentary seats last year to 50, cementing its place in Portugal's political landscape and mirroring gains by similar parties across Europe. Chega's policies include chemical castration for paedophiles, limiting newcomers' access to welfare benefits, and stricter controls on migration which it links to crime and higher pensions. Ventura attended US President Donald Trump's inauguration in January, and has embraced the support of Brazil's former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. He speaks of restoring respect for the police, and has protested on the streets with Movement Zero, a group of disgruntled police officers with suspected extremist ties who are demanding better pay and conditions. 'In politics, you have to be different. And I wanted to be different,' Ventura once said of himself, before adding that his path had been guided by a 'divine mission'. 'Fundamental shift' When preliminary election results came in last week, Ventura said he was confident his party would eventually finish ahead of the PS. 'Nothing will ever be the same again,' Ventura told his supporters, who chanted 'Portugal is ours and it always will be'. 'This is indeed a fundamental shift,' said analyst Espirito Santo. 'We cannot say that Chega will lose ground in the coming years… It looks as though Chega is here to stay for a while.' Many voters 'certainly support the radical and anti-establishment solutions that Chega proposes' but others may have chosen the party 'because of the erosion of the traditional parties' ability to meet expectations', she said. The future of the Socialist Party meanwhile remains 'unpredictable', Espirito Santo said. Party leader Pedro Nuno Santos, a 48-year-old economist, said he would stand down after the initial election results were announced. Under a previous PS government, Portugal became one of Europe's most open countries for immigrants. Between 2017 and 2024, the number of foreigners living in Portugal quadrupled, reaching about 15% of the total population. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa is to hold new talks with the leaders of the three main parties today and could name a new prime minister during the day.
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Portugal's Far-Right Chega Shatters 50-Year Two Party Dominance
During Portugal's recent election campaign, far-right Chega leader Andre Ventura argued that the two centrist parties that have ruled the nation for half a century have failed to increase living standards, control immigration and end systemic corruption. Ventura didn't win the May 18 election but he can no longer be ignored either. His party surged to second place, upending the decades-long dominance of the two groups that have governed Portugal since the end of its dictatorship.
South China Morning Post
4 days ago
- General
- South China Morning Post
Speedy release of Liverpool parade suspect's race, ethnicity ‘unprecedented'
The speed at which police released the race and ethnicity of the suspect in the Liverpool car incident is 'unprecedented', a former chief superintendent has said. Merseyside police confirmed they had a arrested a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area around two hours after the incident that left dozens of people including four children hurt. The force was criticised in the wake of the Southport murders last summer for not releasing more information after false rumours were started online that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker. Former Metropolitan Police chief superintendent Dal Babu told BBC Radio 5 Live: 'What we do have, which is unprecedented, is the police very quickly giving the ethnicity and the race of the person who was driving the vehicle … and it was Merseyside police who didn't give that information with the Southport horrific murders of those three girls, and the rumours were that it was an asylum seeker who arrived on a boat and it was a Muslim extremist and that wasn't the case. 'So I think what the police have done very, very quickly, and I've never known a case like this before where they've given the ethnicity and the race of the individual who was involved in it, so I think that was to dampen down some of the speculation from the far-right that sort of continues on X even as we speak that this was a Muslim extremist and there's a conspiracy theory.' 03:11 Anti-racism protests sweep UK after far-right riots against immigration Anti-racism protests sweep UK after far-right riots against immigration In March, chief constable Serena Kennedy told British MPs she wanted to dispel disinformation in the immediate aftermath of the Southport murders by releasing information about the attacker Axel Rudakubana's religion, as he came from a Christian family, but was told not to by local crown prosecutors.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Trump is ‘remarkably like' 1930s far-right fascists, billionaire investor warns
Donald Trump wants to 'dictate' policies like those of far-right regimes in the 1930s, a leading billionaire investor has warned. Ray Dalio writes in a new book that the US president is acting like a chief executive without a board as he seeks to expand executive power even more aggressively than predecessors Andrew Jackson and Franklin D Roosevelt. Dalio, 75, is the founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's biggest hedge funds, and a rare critic of the system that generated his wealth. His book How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle addresses the national debt and Trump's attacks on democratic norms. The Guardian obtained a copy. Invoking a decade when fascists such as Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy were in power, Dalio writes: 'When I say that the policies President Trump is using to 'make America great again' are remarkably like the policies that those of the hard-right countries in the 1930s used, that should not be controversial.' He continues: 'It would be fair to argue that his attempts to maximise the power of the presidency by bypassing the other branches of government are analogous to the ways that Andrew Jackson (of the right) and Franklin D Roosevelt (of the left) did, though he is even more aggressive than they were. We will see how far he will take it.' In times of conflict, Dalio notes, aggressive leaders work to eliminate the opposition, make changes to the law to assume special powers and seize control of the media to produce pro-government propaganda. If conflicts become severe, new laws and punishments target the opposition. Since returning to office in January, Trump has signed a record 152 executive orders, concentrating power and sidelining Congress. He has defied court orders and detained or deported immigrants without due process. He has sought to reward law firms, media companies and universities that bend to his will and punish those that defy him. 'Is Donald Trump a demagogue?' Dalio asks, describing a demagogue as a political leader who gains power by appealing to people's emotions, fears, prejudices and desires, typically stirring up populist sentiment and promising easy solutions to complex problems. 'The question is what will the controls be and how far will Trump push things? Unlike for a CEO, there is no board for the US president. Are there effective regulators in place? If so, it is not clear to me who they are.' Trump's strongman style is a symptom of America's polarised politics, the author argues. 'Donald Trump wants to dictate policies rather than have a classic 'let's work together across party lines' approach to governing. This confrontational approach is an extension of how great internal political conflict has become in recent decades.' Dalio grew up in a middle-class neighborhood on New York's Long Island. He began investing at the age of 12 when caddying at a local golf course. He went to Harvard Business School, had short stints at two Wall Street firms and started Bridgewater in 1975 from a two-bedroom apartment in New York. It went on to become the largest hedge fund in the world. In How Countries Go Broke, Dalio identifies the government's debt – currently more than $36tn – as the US's most serious problem, outlines what he calls the 'Big Debt Cycle' and offers advice on how people can protect themselves from the fallout. The businessman, who correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis, condemns the Trump administration's cost-cutting measures as likely to have negative consequences because 'many people who will be hurt by them will fight back and valuable support systems will be weakened or eliminated'. He adds that his own wife works to help low-income students in deprived neighbourhoods who suffer from inadequate nutrition. The cancellation of school lunch programmes on which they depend 'will have terrible second-order consequences'. Trump's policies are aimed at moving more money, power and freedom into the hands of the most productive people, Dalio adds. 'It's not easy to manage and improve a country that has been mismanaged and in such a mess while also keeping people happy at a time when democracy is fracturing. I recommend regularly checking on how those in the bottom 60% are doing and feeling.'
The Independent
4 days ago
- The Independent
Liverpool parade crash: How Southport attack forced police to change response
Within two hours of a car ploughing into crowds in Liverpool city centre, police had confirmed the alleged driver was a 53-year-old white man from the Merseyside area. No doubt desperate to halt the spread of misinformation online, which had already begun to circulate on social media along with graphic footage of the incident, Merseyside Police made the unusual decision to share the suspect's ethnicity and nationality at the earliest stages of the investigation. It marks a 'complete step change' in their approach to the response to the horrific knife attack in Southport last summer, police commentators have noted. A vacuum of information in the aftermath of the stabbing at a children's dance class was filled with misinformation about the suspect's ethnicity and asylum status, which helped to fuel angry far-right riots which erupted across the country. On that occasion, police had told the public they had arrested a 17-year-old from Banks in Lancashire, who was born in Cardiff, but it did little to quell the surge in inaccurate information being shared on social media. The mass unrest illustrated all too starkly the new threat facing police responding to high profile incidents in an online age – the tinderbox of social media and weaponised misinformation. After Monday's attack at Liverpool's Premier League victory parade, which wounded 50 and left thousands of shocked football fans stranded in the city centre, police acted faster. Peter Williams, senior lecturer in policing at Liverpool John Moores University, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there has been a 'shift' in their approach. He said: 'It has been a shift, because, particularly in relation to the aftermath of Southport… there was a lot of criticism focused at Merseyside Police and of course the CPS, in relation to how the management of information was sort of dealt with.' He later added: 'It was no surprise to me last night that within an hour or so, we got a statement to say what had happened and that somebody, a male, had been detained. 'Later on, there was a press conference led by the Assistant Chief Constable, where she shared a lot more information. 'As that investigation progresses, which will be a major one led by the major investigation team, that will be shared with the public, so there's been a complete step change in how the police will be communicating what has occurred with the public.' Dal Babu, a former chief superintendent in London's Metropolitan Police, said it was 'unprecedented' and the police acted 'very quickly' in giving the ethnicity and race of the suspect. He said it was likely an effort to cool social media speculation that the episode was an Islamist attack. Liverpool City Metro Mayor Steve Rotherham said it was 'absolutely the right thing to do' to put to put to bed online speculation. 'Because if you have a look at social media already, within minutes of the incident being posted, there was speculation, and there was some nefarious groups who were trying to stir up some speculation around who was responsible for it,' he said. 'So the whole idea was to put to bed some of that for, obviously, the misinformation and disinformation that was out there, and to try to calm people.' Pressure on police responding to such attacks is not just coming from the public - politicians are also increasingly quick to demand information. Comments from Reform leader Nigel Farage in the wake of the Southport attack, asking 'whether the truth is being withheld from us', were criticised for helping to fuel the unrest. Shortly after yesterday's attack in Liverpool, shadow home secretary Chris Philp had posted on X: 'The public deserve to know the full facts as quickly as possible.' However politicians will know all too well that police must balance the threat of public disorder with the risk of prejudicing any future trial. Contempt of court laws strictly limit what can be shared about a case before it goes to trial. Helen King, a former Merseyside Police assistant chief constable, warned we should not expect such information to be released as a matter of routine. 'I guess what concerns me is that with future incidents, there's always a risk that the police may not be able to do this, and we need to manage public and media expectations,' she said. 'There may be occasions when it's not clear, the information that the public are asking for. The police will not want to release inaccurate information and undermine public confidence in that way. 'And also there is a major criminal investigation ongoing now that investigation must not be compromised, and in future incidents, release of detail about suspects, about people arrested could potentially compromise an investigation or a court case. She said sharing information was the 'right thing to do on this occasion', but said each incident will be different. 'It is a really difficult new world, isn't it that the police the courts are operating in it is we need to let the police do their job, let the other emergency services and prosecution authorities do their job and not go around demanding information,' she added.
