The two councilors of the Funchal Chamber elected by Chega last year decided to leave the party and will become independent. The decision by Jorge Afonso Freitas and Luís Filipe Santos was due to differences with the party’s regional leader, Miguel Castro, and left the third most voted force in the capital of the Autonomous Region of Madeira without representatives in the municipal executive. chaired by Jorge Carvalho, at the head of a PSD-CDS coalition that obtained an absolute majority.
After Jorge Afonso Freitas announced his departure this Wednesday, February 18th, alleging “insurmountable political differences”, Luís Filipe Santos also confirmed, to Madeira News Diarywhich “political, ethical and strategic conditions no longer exist to continue integrated into the current Chega na Madeira project”.
The two elected by the party, which obtained 14.78% of the votes in October 2025, just behind the 41.34% of the PSD-CDS coalition and the 19.06% of Juntos pelo Povo, complained about the lack of conditions to exercise their mandate, allegedly because they had been left out by Chega’s regional leadership in the selection of officials for the cabinet. But the last straw was the news that the structure led by MiguelCastro requested a legal opinion that considered it “inadmissible” that Luís Filipe Santos was a councilor and inspector of the Madeira Regional Authority for Economic Activities.
AoDN, Jorge Afonso Freitas said that “the objective breach of institutional trust in relation to the regional structure of the party”, exposed in the letter sent to André Ventura in which he announced his disaffiliation, led to “great disappointment” with Chega, a party he joined after a long period of activism in the PSD.
The differences with Miguel Castro, who is also Chega’s parliamentary leader in the Madeira Regional Assembly, would have been resolved by the intervention of national leaders, such as deputy Eduardo Teixeira, but ended up leading to the separation of both from the party.
The two councilors guarantee that they will continue to make “responsible opposition” as independents. For Jorge Afonso Freitas, an employee of the Funchal Chamber for 26 years, the priority is to work on revising the municipal master plan and fighting against “huge real estate speculation” in Funchal.
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