Politics 13 September 2026

When does Chega vote on its leadership again? Its board is aiming at 20–22 November

The party's national board has proposed an ordinary congress for that weekend, with around a thousand delegates to be elected across the districts first. It has to choose new national bodies and settle the statutory problems the Constitutional Court identified.

Chega is going to elect everything again. The party’s national board has proposed an ordinary congress for 20, 21 and 22 November, with an agenda of two items that amount to one: choose the national bodies afresh, and clear up the organisational and statutory questions the Constitutional Court left hanging.

André Ventura, the party leader, announced it at a press conference at the national headquarters in Lisbon. The proposal now goes to the party’s board so that the National Council can formally convene the congress on those dates.

There is groundwork before any of that. By Ventura’s own account the party first has to elect around a thousand delegates across the country’s districts, and it is those delegates who then elect the national bodies and ratify the statutory changes. That leaves a little over two months to run an internal process in every district before anyone sits down in a congress hall.

What the court had already said

This starts at the Palácio Ratton. Ruling on party litigation, the Constitutional Court found that the election of national bodies at Chega’s Sixth National Convention breached the party’s own statutes and was therefore voidable. One of the problems it identified was the make-up of the National Council, which ended up with 70 elected national counsellors where the statutes registered with the court provided for 30.

It is a rarely discussed but entirely routine piece of oversight. Portuguese parties deposit their statutes with the Constitutional Court, and it is there that anyone decides whether a convention ran inside the rules the party wrote for itself.

The timing lands in a crowded quarter. Parliament came back this month with the state budget set for 12 October, which means the largest opposition party will be rebuilding itself from the inside exactly as the budget debate reaches its decisive stretch.

By Tomás Vasconcelos

Photo: Jose Targaryen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0) — file photograph

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