The North American non-governmental organization (NGO) Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), which monitors the activities of the so-called extreme right around the world, identified more than ten Portuguese people, including politicians, lawyers, former judges and academics as headliners at conferences held in Europe between 2000 and 2024 .
In the report, “Mapping The Far Right - The Movement's Conferences Illuminate Its Growing Transnational Networks,” the NGO compiled a dataset of speakers and organizations from this ideological area involved in 302 conferences held in 35 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Africa, including data from 3,000 people representing 1,800 organizations during this 24-year period. “Although the dataset is large, it is likely that it still underrepresents the true number of events and participants during this period since GPAHE only analyzed speakers and not all participants,” the document reads.
Regarding Portugal, the study highlights the frequent presence of a “Portuguese right-wing intellectual” with a tradition in Portuguese academia at conferences of movements pro-Viktor Orbán, the head of the Hungarian government. “Sometimes, non-Hungarians such as the American Tucker Carlson, the director of the far-right propaganda channel PragerU, Dennis Prager, and the conservative host of the Daily Wire, Michael Knowles, and the former Austrian Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz, have been invited as speakers.”
Anti-immigration and fascist groups
According to GPAHE, Chega figures have been frequently invited, especially in recent years when the party has had more votes at the polls. The party led by André Ventura is among the “largest anti-immigration parties in Europe” that have been invited to these events . “In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (National Rally, RN) and Eric Zemmour’s Reconquête (Reconquest, REC) have sent speakers, themselves or others, to many events. Other far-right political parties in Europe, such as VOX in Spain, Orbán’s Fidesz, Lega and Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, FdI) in Italy, the Polish far-right Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS), Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond (Conservative People’s Party of Estonia, EKRE), the Belgian Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, VB), the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD), which is currently under surveillance by the German government for extremism, and Chega (CH) in Portugal also appear to be particularly active speakers on the network.”
Among groups designated as “fascist” and “neo-Nazi,” holding major international conferences “is not the norm,” but the pan-European Alliance for Peace and Freedom (APF) has made “significant efforts” to bring together neo-fascist groups from across Europe . “A major APF congress in Madrid in March 2022, for example, brought together numerous political leaders from France, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom, among others. Another significant international event was the New Social Order conference (a now defunct neo-Nazi movement) held in Lisbon in 2019.”
The APF, a large pan-European coalition of pro-Russian neo-fascist parties, held a major congress in Madrid on March 26, 2022. Among the speakers was an academic and lawyer known for his pro-Putin positions. He also chaired another conference held a few months ago in Moscow.
Very close ideologically, another group such as the Portuguese Habeas Corpus, which stood out at the time of Covid-19 with demonstrations against vaccines, has also been active in carrying out this type of event, also points out GPAHE.