“I’ll give a thousand contos to whoever brings me a serious gypsy” and “most gypsies steal”.
If I say that these two sentences were uttered by a politician, the chances are that whoever reads me will assume that he is someone from Chega. This is not the case; the author, called Armando Costa, was in the PSD and was mayor, president of the Parish Council of Gandra, when he proclaimed them, in the middle of the Municipal Assembly of Paredes, almost 30 years ago.
However, being from the PSD and having said something extremely racist does not justify bringing him to the table: after all, André Ventura was a candidate for the same party for the Chamber of Loures when in 2017 he began his brilliant political career using, precisely, the racist speech against gypsies as a springboard.
Armando Costa is interesting for another, much rarer reason: he was convicted, in criminal proceedings, for what he said. In 2002, the Paredes Judicial Court imposed a nine-month prison sentence on himsuspended, for racial discrimination (crime provided for in article 240 of the Penal Code, whose current title is “Discrimination and Incitement to hatred and violence”).
During the trial, the mayor, who had previously assured Lusa that he was not racist, took the opportunity, in the interview, to incriminate himself further — he accused “gypsies” of living “very much around skills and drugs”, asked “Have you ever seen a gypsy working in a company?” and concluded: “If I were talking about Lisbon, I would be referring to black people, there are many of them there and everyone knows they steal more” — he swore, according to the report that then made the Publicwho didn’t even know what that word meant and even had, imagine, a black maid.
Whether Armando knew the meaning of racism or not, the court ruled that, despite “the objective type” of the crime described in article 240 “being structurally very complex”, it was clear that the expressions made by the defendant imputed “facts or value judgments that seriously undermine the honor and consideration of two groups of people”, namely, “the gypsies” and “the blacks”. It was also clear to the court that there were intention of inciting racial discrimination or encouraging it, since as president of the council he had wanted to convince the City Council “to deny the gypsy people the exercise of fundamental rights”.
Sim, Armando Costa, the first and only politician to date convicted of the crime of racial discrimination, was Chega before Chega. See the twin statements by the mayor of Albufeira, Rui Cristina, who on November 26, 2025, also at the Municipal Assembly, said: “I will not spend money on gypsies while I have Albufeirenses in need of a home. You can call me xenophobic or whatever you want! First it is us, who pay taxes, and then these communities. It’s as simple as I’m saying and that’s how it’s going to be.”
Cristina is, it was reported, being investigated by the Public Ministry (MP) for the same crime for which the mayor of Gandra was convicted. But the comparison ends here: if the MP accuses the mayor of Albufeira, it will be the first time in decades that he accuses a politician for the crime in question, and an absolute first with regards to Chega. What is all the more remarkable when Much of this party’s political discourse consists of calling for discrimination, defaming vulnerable groups and inciting hatred.
It is all the more ironic when in 2002, in reaction to the conviction of Armando Costa, the then high commissioner for Immigration and Ethnic Minorities, José Leitão, congratulated himself, in statements to the Publicwith what he saw as “an increasingly demanding social sensitivity against racial discrimination”, which would be “in line with legislative improvement in this matter”.
24 years later, despite a huge increase in participation — between 2015 and 2025 alone they increased by 2236%, from 15 to 449 —, there are still very few investigations into this crime that end in indictment. How many, in fact, it was not possible to understand, since the information communicated by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) to the DN about accusations of “hate crimes” — 26 since 2020 — includes other crimes motivated by hate, not just those referring to article 240.
This lack of information — public, at least — is all the more bizarre when Since 2023, the criminal policy law has emphasized “the need for prevention and repression” of “hate crimes”, and the latest Annual Internal Security Report (RASI) attributes the increase in records for these crimes to a greater “crisis in Brazilian society” resulting from “political, racial, religious, and/or sexual polarization” accompanied by “disinformation phenomena”.
And RASI goes further, accusing, in the chapter of “Global threats to internal security”, the extreme right of seeking to “provoke and openly confront their targets, in order to derive electoral benefits from the polarization of Portuguese society around fracturing themes on its political agenda”, and, “by disseminating propaganda and disinformation online”, continue “to promote the normalization of public discourse on discrimination, hatred and anti-democratic ideas, contributing to encouraging racist or xenophobic behavior, and radicalizing militants and sympathizers towards violent action.”
“Promoting the normalization of public discourse of discrimination, hatred and anti-democratic ideas” is what Chega does daily — it is its recipe, more than proven and assumed in thousands of statements, tweets, posts on Instagram and tiktoks. However, all the criminal investigations launched so far against party leaders have either been summarily closed by the MP, without even establishing defendants, or they will be heading towards the same destination, since, with the exception of what has Rui Cristina’s statements as their subject matter, no steps are known about them.
This was the case with the criminal investigation opened in 2021, due to Ventura, as a presidential candidate, having, during a television debate with Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a photo of seven black people with the President was shown, claiming that Marcelo was there with “thugs” and “banditry”; This was the case with the investigation into posters from the same Ventura’s presidential campaign, which read “Gypsies have to obey the law”, “Immigrants cannot live on subsidies” and “This is not Bangladesh”. In both cases, the MP filed without even appointing the president of Chega as defendant (a condition for which it is necessary to request the waiver of the respective parliamentary immunity, which did not occur).
Also when Ventura and the deputy from the same party Rita Matias recited, in July 2025, as undesirable and scandalous and with clear discriminatory intent, the names of foreign children allegedly enrolled in a kindergarten in Lisbona criminal investigation was opened, in which the two parliamentarians have not, to date, been indicted.
Equally unaccused will be (once again, there is no news of requests for waiver of immunity) the investigation opened in October 2024 against three members of Chega, all current deputies — André Ventura, Pedro Pinto and Ricardo Reis — for congratulatory statements regarding the death of Odair Moniz, shot by a PSP agent.
It should be noted, in fact, that although the crime typified in article 240 does not depend on a complaint — the MP can independently open investigations — in none of the cases relating to Chega and Ventura would this have been the case.
We therefore have to ask why — especially since, as we know, the civil justice system considered, in higher court decisions, unlawful, discriminatory and defamatory, Ventura’s actions in which the MP saw no evidence of a crime (the televised slander against the black family in the Jamaica neighborhood and the posters against the gypsy community).
Does the Public Prosecutor’s Office think that the crime of discrimination and incitement to hatred should not exist, and therefore acts as if it did not exist?
Or, as he takes from the unbelievable archiving order in the posters case, he defends, against the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (which the prosecutor speciously invokes, ignoring the relevant rulings, which contradict his thesis) that the crime should not apply to politicians for something they say “as politicians”?
According to this logic, the greater the danger, due to the diffusion and capacity to influence and harm hate speech, the less the law could be applied?
Of course this is not the case: so much so did the legislator foresee the application of article 240 to politicians that he determined that whoever is convicted by it may, “taking into account the concrete gravity of the fact and its projection on the agent’s civic integrity”, be incapacitated, for a period of two to ten years, “to elect the President of the Republic, the deputies to the Assembly of the Republic, the deputies to the European Parliament, the deputies to the Legislative Assemblies of the Autonomous Regions and the heads of the bodies of the local authorities” and “to be elected as such (…).”
Just as the Constitution of the Republic prohibits the existence of racist parties, the Penal Code, through article 246, allows the removal of civil rights from racists and instigators of hatred, preventing them from electing and being eligible.. Case in point, emulating Armando Costa: good luck to anyone who finds a lawyer with courage.
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