A screenshot from a CNN Portugal broadcast is circulating on social media with a statement by André Ventura that has drawn criticism: "One day we'll have more immigrants than people." The phrase was indeed uttered by the president of Chega, but it is not a recent statement — it occurred on May 31, 2024, during the campaign for the European elections, when Ventura was speaking to journalists before a campaign walk in Setúbal.
The full transcript from the Efe agency shows that Ventura interrupted himself and immediately reformulated the phrase, saying: "Otherwise one day we'll have more immigrants than people… than Portuguese people, and I think that is not good." The screenshot that is circulating shows only the first formulation, omitting the continuation that changes the meaning of the statement.
That day, Ventura was talking about immigration policy and the backlog of pending cases at the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), referring to the existence of approximately 500,000 applications under review. He advocated "a suspension of entries into the country until the immigrants who are here without regularization are regularized," a proposal that was also presented as a resolution project in Parliament, but rejected in June 2024.
The post is not fabricated, since Ventura did indeed say the reproduced words, but it is decontextualized by not revealing the date or the immediate reformulation of the phrase. The full context shows that it was a campaign speech during the European campaign in which the Chega leader was defending temporarily restricting the entry of non-EU immigrants while hundreds of thousands of pending cases awaited resolution.
