Why anti-immigration Brazilians join the Chega party

According to a 2023 SEF (Foreigners and Borders Service) report, the country is home to a total of 750,000 resident foreigners. The Brazilian community is the most numerous, representing 29.3% of the total (233,138). However, experts estimate that, in reality, the number of Brazilians in Portugal could exceed 500 thousand. The difference lies in the existence of Brazilians with dual nationality or who are in the country illegally,

It is not known how many of these Brazilians are affiliated with Chega. However, among the party leaders, two seats are occupied by Brazilians. Representative Marcus Santos, 45 years old, was elected last Sunday (10), by the party.

Resident of Braga for 13 years, Pernambuco native and HR consultant Cibelli Pinheiro de Almeida was invited to be part of Chega, in 2019. She is openly conservative in her values ​​and found in the party an environment in which she felt safe to declare her opinions. “I was welcomed with open arms, I was even a party leader in 2020, president of the Braga District assembly board”, she says proudly.

As soon as I arrived in Braga I fell in love with the city, it’s enchanting. A small city, but with all the resources, which provides you with a quality of life. A quality that in my city, Recife, did not exist. There, I was the victim of 20 robberies, in some of them I had a gun pointed at my head. I have no interest in returning to Brazil, due to the increase in crime and the political and economic situation in the country.
Cibelli Pinheiro de Almeida, HR consultant

Despite being a Brazilian immigrant, the HR consultant assesses that the country’s doors were “wide open to illegal immigration” from 2007, with the Foreigners Law. When Chega was founded in 2019, concern about the entry of immigrants quickly became the main agenda of its supporters, opposed to the entry of foreigners, which for them was “rampant”.