The Constitutional Court (TC) confirmed that it received a request for the dissolution of the Chega party, confirmed by Judge Maria Benedita Urbano. The request was initiated by lawyer António Garcia Pereira, who in February reinforced before the Public Ministry (MP) the request for legal mechanisms to be activated to dissolve Chega, considering that André Ventura's party violates the Constitution by having an "evident, successively reaffirmed and reinforced, racist and fascist nature". The complaint invokes links between Chega and the neo-Nazi group "1143" and a court ruling that ordered André Ventura to remove posters against the Roma community.
The TC is the only body in Portugal with the power to declare the dissolution of a political movement, but only after a request from the MP to that effect. Maria Benedita Urbano stressed that this is the first request linked to alleged political extremism and that, personally, she believes "parties from the extremes should be banned in Portugal", but emphasized that "it is very difficult to ban a party and say it is fascist". The magistrate questioned what type of evidence would be needed to justify such a decision, referring to the example of Germany, where the Federal Constitutional Court rejected in 2017 dissolving the National Democratic Party.
The complaint also points to irregularities in Chega's leadership bodies. In May 2025, the TC confirmed as invalid the elections of the party's national bodies in 2023 and 2024. Urbano lamented that "Chega has not yet changed its statutes which were not approved by the Constitutional Court, they were rejected, and in the meantime it has already organized a congress", exemplifying how "not all Constitutional Court decisions are respected, sometimes they are ignored".
Maria Benedita Urbano was speaking at the 29th Meeting of Public Law Professors, held for the first time in Macau, a Chinese region whose justice system is based on the Portuguese one. The magistrate, a lecturer at the University of Coimbra, revealed that "so far we have not had time to decide" on the Chega case, lamenting "the excessive number of constitutional review requests" and "the fashion for preventive review" of legislative proposals.
