Unlawful but Cheap: What Portugal’s Court Ruling Signals for Extremist Politics in Europe

In the final stretch before Portugal’s elections this Sunday, a familiar pattern has come sharply into focus.

André Ventura, the presidential candidate of the Chega party and a frontrunner in the first round, has built his campaign around promises to fight corruption and restore order. As part of that strategy, his party placed racist campaign posters across the country that explicitly targeted and scapegoated Roma, portraying them as a collective threat and as people uniquely outside the law.

A Lisbon court responded by ordering the posters removed, ruling that they were discriminatory and risked inciting hatred. That decision was correct. But what followed reveals the deeper problem. The court imposed a €2,500 fine. Ventura complied formally, then installed new billboards in the town of Vila Nova de Milfontes that were widely understood to convey the same underlying message, only expressed more carefully.

Legality was acknowledged. Escalation continued.

This distinction matters. Courts do more than decide what is lawful. They also signal what is politically tolerable. In this case, the signal risks being dangerously weak.

A fine of this size does not deter a national political actor in the middle of an election campaign. It prices the offence. The lesson learned is not that collective targeting is unacceptable, but that it is affordable. Extremist politics is not being blocked. It is being costed.

The timing makes this especially significant. Elections take place this Sunday, after a period in which Chega has consolidated support and normalised its presence in national politics. 

The posters were not an outburst. They were a calculated test of how far equal citizenship constrains political messaging. That is how contemporary extremist politics operates: incrementally, deliberately and with close attention to institutional responses. When enforcement is minimal, escalation follows.

It is also worth stating plainly that this form of targeting makes no sense as policy. Roma do not drive Portugal’s fiscal pressures, security challenges or institutional failures. Targeting them does not reduce corruption or improve public services. Its function is symbolic: a low-cost way to project broader grievances onto those least protected.

Nor should this be dismissed as a side issue. On paper, extremist platforms often appear broad and respectable. In practice, abstract promises only become politically effective when anchored in exclusion. Targeting Roma is not incidental. It is the mechanism that makes those promises legible.

Europe has seen this sequence before.

In Hungary and Slovakia, early anti-Roma mobilisation was repeatedly ruled unlawful, but sanctions were slow in coming, small and isolated. Extremist actors adapted quickly. Overt incitement gave way to coded language, intimidation was displaced rather than stopped, and by the time the state reacted more forcefully, the political baseline had already shifted.

Italy shows that this dynamic is not confined to weaker institutions. There, campaigns against Roma settlements were reframed as matters of security or administration. Courts raised concerns, but consequences remained limited. Exclusion was professionalised rather than reversed.

Bulgaria illustrates the endpoint of this process. Roma targeting seeped into everyday political practice through tolerated vote-buying, intimidation and clientelism until it became part of how elections functioned. Extremism no longer required spectacle. It became routine.

Romania shows the strategic cost of allowing that process to run its course. Persistent Roma targeting has not only fuelled extremist mobilisation but weakened the state itself—eroding trust in institutions, distorting representation and creating openings for external actors to exploit internal division. Democratic weakness becomes a national security liability.

Germany and Spain demonstrate that this trajectory is not inevitable. There, early boundary-testing was treated as a threat to the constitutional order. Sanctions were proportionate, cumulative and followed through on. Extremist actors did not disappear, but their ability to learn how to escalate was sharply constrained.

Portugal now stands at an early fork in the road.

The question is no longer whether the posters were unlawful. That has been settled. The real question, on the eve of this Sunday’s vote, is whether Portugal—and Europe—are willing to defend the substance of democratic order before its erosion becomes irreversible. Until that answer is clear, rulings of this kind do not deter escalation—they invite it.