All the organizations mentioned here present a nationalism style with ethnic traits that, in some way, challenge the multiracial imperial tradition cherished by the Portuguese Estado Novo. However, within the Portuguese right-wing groupuscule, some organizations raise the banner of lusotropicalism and imperial nationalism. This chapter addresses this issue using Nova Portugalidade as an example. This group dedicates its efforts to historical research and the planning of debates and conferences held in Lisbon, Porto, Coimbra, and the Algarve—although more often in Lisbon—and appears as an outlier in the field of Portuguese right-wing groupuscules.

It is a group that tries to reconcile metapolitics with historical research, something close to a think-tank, which recovers the lusotropicalism, whether as put forward in Estado Novo or its milder post-April 25 version. To a large extent, it carries forward the ideas of Jaime Nogueira Pinto. Among all the groups studied here, it is the most institutionalized and closest to intellectuals in the academic mainstream. It differs from the rest of the groupuscules for its absolute rejection of ethnonationalism, even though the media considers it an extreme right organization. It emerged as a form of protest against what they saw as the dominance of the left in the university world, becoming a research center focused on recovering the memory of Portuguese work overseas and on the project of a “Lusíada” Commonwealth. It has a few dozen members, remaining very much around the center of Lisbon and its founders, Rafael Pinto Borges and Miguel Castelo Branco (considered its leading ideologue).

Nova Portugalidade started its activity in 2016, founded by Rafael Pinto Borges and Miguel Castelo Branco. At the time, it was an entirely informal group with a very small number of employees. Its primary objective was to unite the peoples of “Portugalidade” (portugality) and the cultural fight for the preservation of Portuguese history, in particular its connection to the peoples of Africa, America, and Asia. The group refers to this space as “Portugalidade,” sees it as a space of common past and future, and proposes its organization in a geopolitical unit armed with common power and mechanisms of integration and harmonization of decisions (Nova Portugalidade, 2020). In its first months, the activity was developed mainly through its Facebook page, and in 2017 the group became an official organization. On Facebook, the group quickly gained thousands of followers (currently, it has over 56,000) and performed the pedagogical function of attracting attention and enlightening members of portugality to the scope, depth, and multiplicity of nuances of the common history of its peoples. This page is perhaps still one of the most effective instruments of the movement.

Nova Portugalidade has organized multiple events to raise the public’s personal and direct awareness of themes concerning portugality. Its path, not exempt from some public controversies, helped it gain more supporters and collaborators. It also introduced the concept of portugality into the public’s current vocabulary, which has been profusely read, heard, and discussed since the movement’s appearance. Of these events, the conference given by Dom Duarte de Bragança at the Faculty of Law of Lisbon in October 2016 certainly stands out, as well as an event scheduled for February 2017 at Universidade Nova de Lisboa but canceled in an atmosphere of media scandal with Jaime Nogueira Pinto. These events and the widespread interest created in the media channels catapulted Nova Portugalidade toward the public debate on the extreme right. They also brought many curious and interested people and helped it gain a greater presence in the public space. However, the price to pay for this rapid success was the weight of a relentless defamation campaign against the movement and its leaders. Another relevant moment for the affirmation of Nova Portugalidade was the participation, represented by Miguel Castelo Branco, in the television program “Prós e Contras”Footnote 1 (Pros and Cons). The group also became involved in the controversy surrounding the Discoveries Museum at the time of a proposal to transform it into a Slavery Museum. Another demonstration led by Nova Portugalidade was a petition to the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon, gathering more than fifteen thousand signatures against the proposal of removing the military coats of arms from Praça do Império.

As of 2018, large-scale colloquiums have been organized. These events aim to be more relevant each year and take the form of “general studies.” They have improved rapidly in an organization, quality of speakers, interest, and convening capacity. The number of participants grew from approximately 50 to 120 from the first to the second event—an impressive achievement that the leader of Nova Portugalidade believes will motivate greater future investment in this model. For some time now, Nova Portugalidade has been formally established as a private membership organization, a status that allows it to extend its activity and have autonomy, as a collective entity, in the various endeavors to achieve its goals.

Despite often being framed as part of the new Portuguese extreme right, Nova Portugalidade does not present an interpretative proposal of portugality in ethnic terms, just as it does not see Portugal within a European political bloc based on ethnicities. Rather, it defends the resumption of a transoceanic Portuguese identity, which refers to the time of the Portuguese Empire and its overseas conquests—a Portugal more focused on its departures toward the Atlantic Ocean than toward Europe. Thus, this organization appears as an outlier within the field of the new nationalist rights in Europe and even in Portugal. It takes up some traits of the Estado Novo’s imperial nationalism doctrine based on portugality as something expanded far beyond the European Caucasian Portuguese world. In an article on the group’s website, entitled Portugalidade, não Lusofonia (2019) (Portugality, not Lusophony), member Rafael Pinto Borges highlights the survival of portugality in Asian lands, where Portuguese is no longer spoken, but elements of the Portuguese presence can be perceived in surnames of individuals from certain communities, and in the practice of Catholicism, inherited from the Portuguese presence. Many of Myanmar’s 450,000 Catholics still bear Portuguese surnames, and although they no longer speak Portuguese, their faith is also a legacy of the Portuguese commercial, religious, and military presence of other centuries. According to Rafael Pinto Borges, the Sé da Cidade (episcopal see of the city) in Chittagong, Bangladesh (led by Cardinal Patrick d’Rozário) is known as the “Portuguese Church.” The church is not Portuguese, was built in the nineteenth century, and presents an English architectural style, but serves a community where the Portuguese surname is common, even though the locals do not speak Portuguese.

Rafael Pinto Borges emphasizes examples like these throughout Asia. Malacca, which is not a Portuguese territory since 1641, still has a Portuguese neighborhood (Kampung Portugis) and a Portuguese creole language, Papiá Kristang. Similar phenomena can be observed in Sri Lanka, India, China, and Thailand. In 2017, in a specific episode in Bangkok, during the Duke of Bragança’s visit, Dom Duarte Pio, a crowd with Portuguese and Thai flags could be seen to welcome the Duke. According to Pinto Borges, these distinct mestizo people constitute a bridge between Europe and Asia. They no longer speak Portuguese but have names such as “da Horta,” “Rodrigues,” “Saldanha,” and “da Cruz” in their family lineages.

For Nova Portugalidade, everyone was Portuguese, with a level of portugality that would surprise any Portuguese in European Portugal. Pinto Borges emphasizes the efforts of these communities to organize themselves in the Congress of Asian Portuguese Communities, seeking a common identity linked to Portugal. The author claims that, despite Lisbon supposedly ignoring these communities, they assert their portugality thunderously. Luso-Malaysians, Macanese, Timorese, Bangla-Portuguese, Luso-Thai, Luso-Cambodians, Luso-Indonesians, Luso-Sinhalese, and Indo-Portuguese feel so Portuguese that they begin to outline a framing of the world in which they see themselves as one collectivity within the Asian continent, the Asian Portuguese.

Discussing the national character of the Portuguese, the text by Miguel Castelo Branco entitled Patriotismo sim, nacionalismo não (2019) (patriotism, yes, nationalism, no) and published on Nova Portugalidade’s website, emphasizes the “non-tribal” national character of the Portuguese. Castelo Branco states that the “ethnicity-language-religion” triad of Central-Eastern European nationalisms and the “language-religion-natural borders” triad of nationalisms such as France and Italy, or even the “ethnic void” of the Spaniards do not apply to Portugal. The type of identity of the Portuguese is in their maritime-expansionist vocation toward worlds beyond the seas. To be Portuguese is to be a product of this expansion and a product of continental and European Portugal. In this sense, the author rejects the model of European ethnic nationalism, so characteristic of the central and eastern regions of the continent. However, the civic-territorial nationalism characteristic of countries like the USA, the UK, and France (Greenfeld, 1992) is also rejected.

The group defends transcontinental patriotism, a characteristic of the Portuguese Empire, where the characteristics of the Portuguese described by the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre and retaken by Antônio Ferronha are presented with great esteem. Plasticity, adaptability, easy interaction with other cultures, and even a greater propensity for biological miscegenation are supposedly fundamental traits of a portugality that underpin the foundations of Brazilian civilization and are brought back to the fore by Nova Portugalidade. In this sense, the Freyrian elements of the Portuguese’s civilizational character are more relevant than Lusophony in the group’s discourse. In other words, it refers to the resumption of a proposal of overseas patriotism not centered on language, ethnicities, or even borders but on a trait of the Portuguese that is unique among Europeans—their greater predisposition to miscegenation. This trait found one of its most relevant intellectual expressions in the work of Gilberto Freyre. The Brazilian author and how his work was used are closely linked to the idea of portugality the groupuscule defends, i.e., the incorporation of the Empire’s inhabitants into portugality, together with the Portuguese of European Portugal. Portugality extended beyond the notion of forming a centralized state, the monarchy, and the Catholic Church, as defended by Alfredo Pimenta.

With the work of Antonio Ferronha, Ideário de Portugalidade. Consciência da Luso-tropicalidade, published in 1969, practically merged the ideals of portugality and lusotropicality. The entire work is oriented toward the overseas provinces, especially Angola, where the author trained native Angolans within the portugality theme. With the writings of Ferronha, portugality gained, within the doctrine of Estado Novo, its lusotropicalist face, which meant a single and indivisible Portugal, covering territories very distant from the Iberian Peninsula, based on multiracialism (Sousa, 2013b). A pluricontinental and multiracial nation in which the Portuguese’s supposedly civilizing and evangelizing mission permeates territorial and racial barriers. This was the historical destiny of the Portuguese nation within the narratives of the Estado Novo, sustained by the lusotropicalist emphasis.

The Estado Novo regime adopted the concept of lusotropicalism, reworked by Antonio Ferronha (who was inspired by Gilberto Freyre), as its main doctrine, defending that the Portuguese imperial mission occurred in a harmonious socio-racial space and pointing out the limitation of racial theories (Ribeiro, 2018). In this way, Estado Novo was based on the convergence of Portugality, as the consolidation of a vast empire originated in the struggle for Portuguese independence against the Spaniards, in a first stage. In addition, Estado Novo defined Portugality based on the shift toward the world of the sea and beyond the sea and on the lusotropicality (i.e., in the “natural” ease of the Portuguese in dealing with the social and racial universes found in this new world). In this sense, Portugality—in a sense forged during Estado Novo, especially during Marcellism (1967–1974)—is closely linked to Lusotropicality.

Hugo Dantas, a leading member of Nova Portugalidade, in a conference given in the city of Porto in 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7wXBK8XaNQ), states that his organization’s proposal is the voluntary communion in a bloc of cooperation of all peoples who, for one reason or another, were influenced by Portuguese overseas expansion. It is the resumption of the old Portuguese Empire, no longer through the force of conquest effected by the “sword and cannons” but, instead, by the free will of the people formed to whatever degree, by the Portuguese presence around the world. In this sense, the group’s geopolitical project is the voluntary formation of a Euraphrasiatic bloc, an incisive point of divergence in relation to the more identitarian right, emphasizing the formation of a bloc of European nations.

The discourse of Nova Portugalidade presents a curious position regarding the tension between cultural identity and biological identity, something present among identitarians, a political-ideological line of which Nova Portugalidade does not form part. By including groups in Portugality that no longer share a proper Portuguese culture, in the sense that they no longer speak Portuguese, other ties with Portugal are established. These ties are neither cultural nor part of a linguistic-national vernacularization—albeit some of them speak creole Portuguese—process present in the formation of modern nations (Anderson, 1983; Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawn, 1990). They are often biological—considering that these people do not practice the Catholic religion and are not necessarily connected to a symbolic cultural pantheon or an ethnosymbolism, in the sense of Anthony Smith (2009). In this case, they are not connected to an ethnosymbolism strictly intricate to Portugal.

There is a connection with the nation of origin, a collective memory shared by some Asian Portuguese that takes place in the field of biological ancestry more than in the cultural sphere. They are part of a pre-modern ethnie, a fundamental trait in the formation of modern nations (Smith, 1988), but only in the sense of having some genetic inheritance from mainland Portugal, from members of the Portuguese ethnie. Thus, identity is biological, but not in a sense portrayed by some sectors of identitarian nationalists and the alt-right, where biological and genetic identity is aligned with ethnic and cultural homogeneity. The group does defend Luso-Iberian elements, such as traditional Portuguese architecture or what they call “Portuguese spirituality.” However, these elements do not exclude the extension of Portugality to peoples who basically have some biogenetic heritage and little or nothing else, at least in the case of Asian Portuguese, who does not speak Portuguese or practice the catholic faith anymore. The point is that this heritage is not linked to an idea of “pure race” or homogeneous ethnicity.

The members of Nova Portugalidade defend the Portuguese culture, a Portuguese culture of their own that seems to be linked to the Freyrian idea of culture. In its most profound origins, it is a cultural proposal created by North American cultural anthropology, founded by the German anthropologist Franz Boas. It is an interpretative proposal of culture in which its permanently fluid character is emphasized, different from the Herderian model of culture. According to the Boasian theory, cultures interrelate more fluidly. They are not juxtaposed territorial, cultural blocs as in Herder, nor necessarily intricate with the biological group that created the culture. Thus, the cultural matrix of Nova Portugalidade takes place on a plane where cultural and biological identities interpenetrate, but in a totally different way from that proposed by the other groups studied in this book. What happens is the praise of biological miscegenation that accompanies—or generates—more significant intercultural fluidity. Therefore, Nova Portugalidade finds itself in a wildly divergent position from the rest of what is considered the Portuguese extreme right. It also takes some distance from the Lusophone ideal, which can be seen with its slogan, “no Lusophony, yes portugality.” As Hugo Dantas states, it is a Universalist patriotism of “many races, many cultures, many languages,” a communion of the entire social universe through which Portugal has passed, from Brazil through Africa toward the limits of Asia.

This proposal of a tropicalist Euro-Afro-Asian solidarity—and also Luso-American—is not new in the Portuguese political landscape in the post-Salazar era. By carrying out this maneuver beyond Lusophony, Nova Portugalidade resumes, to a good degree, the experiences of groups located in the field of the far-right that, gaining more momentum during the government of Marcelo Caetano (1967–1974), also acted after the transition to democracy. Within the far-right field, but with remarkable differences in relation to the MAN skinheads, there was the Nova Monarquia group, representative of the most radicalized monarchists in the 1980s and early 1990s in Portugal. Nova Monarquia’s project was very similar to that of Nova Portugalidade, i.e., the experience of a lusotropicalist multiracial right somehow existed during the so-called Third Portuguese Republic. It is possible to say that the current Nova Portugalidade is, to a certain extent, a resumption of the Nova Monarquia project.

Nova Monarquia: The Roots of Nova Portugalidade

The Partido Popular Monárquico (PPM) (People’s Monarchist Party) was the only monarchical party to become official after April 1974. However, Nova Monarquia was the product (among other things) of PPM’s inability to unite all the supporters at that moment, although many of them adhered to the Partido Social Democrático (PSD) (Social Democratic Party), the Centro Social Democrático (CDS) (Social Democratic Center), and even the Socialist Party (PS) (Marchi, 2019). The monarchist milieu was fragmented with other monarchist groups, such as Causa Monárquica (Monarchist Cause) (official organization of the Royal House), the Liga Popular Monárquica (Popular Monarchical League), and the Gabinete de Unidade Monárquica (Cabinet of Monarchical Unity), frequently clashing with PPM. After the unsatisfactory result of PPM in the legislative elections of 1983, Nova Monarquia appeared in October of the same year (Marchi, 2019).

In the beginning, Nova Monarquia was driven by about fifty young people affiliated with PPM and other figures, veterans of Portuguese imperial nationalism, impatient with the low activation level of monarchical leaders and desirous of relaunching activity and the monarchical ideal (Marchi, 2019). It was guided, above all, by the Church’s social doctrine, seeing the family as the basic cell of society and its primacy before the state. They also valued the community’s organic character against the class struggle principle, which was considered disruptive. Rejecting what they called “party-cracy,” they defended a state reform in which the government rested on a bicameral system, with a chamber focused on the parties, and another on intermediate bodies, with an economic, cultural, and professional vocation. Responding to the tendency to strengthen regional governments, Nova Monarquia defended the municipalism of the Portuguese monarchical tradition, esteemed by the Portuguese integralism of the early twentieth century (Marchi, 2019). There are also criticisms of the bipolar order of the Cold War, and the great emphasis on the market economy as the main propellant of the cohesion of European nationalities in the European Union’s consolidation. This last aspect places Nova Monarquia close to the Portuguese and European extreme right from this period, at least in this aspect of criticism, both of the free market and communism.

Nova Monarquia positively recognized the legacy of Estado Novo and saw Salazar as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. The group claims to be the heir of the pre-constitutional Portuguese monarchical tradition in opposition to the Proclamation of the Republic on October 5, 1910 (Marchi, 2019). If, on the one hand, it defends Salazar’s heritage, on the other, it explicitly rejects the fascist and national-socialist experiences, stating that they are just other manifestations of socialism. The nationalism defended by the organization is of a multiracial type and bears the ideological style originating from Estado Novo. However, despite its eminently multiracial traits and the defense of a more Universalist nationalism, Nova Monarquia opposed “stateless cosmopolitism,” resuming the myth of the empire. Thus, it legitimized the African War, blaming the events of April 25 for destroying the last five centuries of Portuguese history (Marchi, 2019). Here we have the outline of what could be called the multiracial or intercultural conservatism of Nova Portugalidade.

The quarrels with PPM are constant. Nova Monarquia openly accuses the party of being too open to causes considered leftist, such as environmental and urban issues. It also criticized PPM for focusing only on establishing the Constitutional Monarchy, leaving aside an older monarchical tradition focused on eminently social issues. PPM countered the criticism, stating that Nova Monarquia is a totalitarian movement, a defender of elements contrary to the people-centered and socially advanced Portuguese monarchical tradition (Marchi, 2019).

Despite occupying a position to the right of the PPM, Nova Monarquia receives harsh criticism from even more radicalized factions from the monarchical milieu. Usually from fascist-inspired hyper-minority groups from the 1940s and 1950s. An example is the intellectual fascist and monarchist influences of Antônio José de Brito, who in 1988 accused Nova Monarquia of too much moderation, an inconvenient acceptance of the system of parties, and of presenting heterodox positions concerning the traditional monarchy. The line followed by Antônio José de Brito comes from the thoughts of Alfredo Pimenta, who defended Portugal’s rapprochement with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, even though Brito assumed the defense of Salazarism and criticized the former lines. This current was not crystallized in any organization and was reduced to isolated figures that criticized Nova Monarquia.

Nova Monarquia is a group apparently open to contrasting trends, such as traditionalists, liberals, conservatives, and renovators within the monarchist scene. Its main intellectuals include authors who are incisively critical of the fascist tendencies that orbited around Salazarism during the war and even after it, such as Jacinto Ferreira and Henrique Barrilaro Ruas. The friction with PPM and the criticism directed at it led Nova Monarquia to approach the PSD in 1985, which manifested a clear turn to the right with the election of Aníbal Cavaco Silva to lead the party. He was successively appointed Prime Minister after his victory in the legislative elections of the same year. Nova Monarquia’s relationship with the parliamentary parties got closer as it planned to form a coalition of anti-socialist parties, which was built afterward from the rubble of the PS-PSD center bloc. This dynamic resembled the Democratic Alliance based on the parliamentary parties, but with Nova Monarquia playing the role of an extra-parliamentary element. This coalition assumed the leading role in the Portuguese right. It was an ideological power cross-cutting the parties and in close relationship with them.

However, the conservative and Christian-democratic line led Nova Monarquia to distance from Cavaco Silva’s technocratic liberal model, accusing the PSD of seeking protagonism within the right and, at the same time, assuming positions of a supposedly moderate left. Nova Monarquia distanced itself from the PSD in the 1987 legislative elections, supporting the campaign of Adriano Moreira of the CDS and launching some of its leaders as independent candidates on the lists of the same party. Nova Monarquia also organized demonstrations and public acts in Lisbon, using a repertoire of actions outside institutional politics and actively acting in “street politics.” Well-known names from the Portuguese right, such as Jaime Nogueira Pinto and Bernardo Guedes da Silva, participated in this extra-institutional politics (Marchi, 2019).

This, however, did not prevent Nova Monarquia from suffering a resounding setback following the defeat of the CDS, which had the worst result in its history, going from 9.96% (22 deputies) in 1985 to 4.34% (4 deputies) in 1987. Although Nova Monarquia was defeated at the electoral level, it managed to increase its number of affiliates by a few dozen, most of them young people who left the CDS, attracted by the monarchist organization during the 1987 campaign. And albeit it was defeated in the 1987 party representation, it obtained a significant victory with student representation bodies. With an enlarged and rejuvenated militant base, it was able to elect candidates in the student representative bodies of the Faculdade de Direito de Lisboa (Lisbon Law School), Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa (Lisbon Language School), and Associação Acadêmica da Universidade de Coimbra (Academic Academy o Coimbra University), the last two being traditional bulwarks of the left. It also creates the Claustrum Association, active on the academic front in organizing events, such as the conference of the Israeli ambassador in Portugal at Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa (Marchi, 2019).

In the wake of the expansion and rejuvenation of its militant base, Nova Monarquia changed its name to Frente Nacional—Nova Monarquia (FNNM). The intention was to increase the number of members and attract nationalists of all kinds, not necessarily concerned with the subject of monarchy restoration. A more significant shift to the right was seen with the new general secretary of the FNNM, Miguel Castelo Branco, participating in 1988 in a ceremony commemorating Francisco Franco and José Antônio Primo de Rivera, organized in Madrid by the Spanish extreme right. Castelo Branco currently coordinates Nova Portugalidade. At this event, Castelo Branco, together with the leader of the Spanish Fuerza Nueva party, Blas Piñar, and with delegates from the parties Movimento Sociale Italiano and the French Front National, affirmed his confrontational position in relation to the Europe of markets to the detriment of the Europe of nations. Thus, the FNNM, in an international European scenario, approached parties and groups very close to the ideas of the Nouvelle Droite, although continuing to reject in its speech any collaboration with pagan or racial movements. However, the inclination toward the European scenario remains largely visible, as the FNNM also established links with the Paneuropa Union chaired by Otto von Habsburg of Austria (Marchi, 2019).

These connections became closer and closer, and in 1989, Miguel Castelo Branco participated in the III Congress of Spanish Fuerza Nueva, where he met the French leader Jean Marie Le Pen. The French Front National sent representatives to Lisbon, with the possibility of creating a Front National in Portugal, based on the structure of the FNNM and absorbing dispersed elements from deactivated organizations, such as the Movimento Independente da Reconstrução Nacional/Partido da Direita Portuguesa (MIRN/PDP) (Portuguese right party) or other extreme right groups from the 1980s.

Blas Piñar’s conference in Lisbon on May 11, 1989, boosted the consolidation of the FNNM as a party. Miguel Castelo Branco and Professor Pedro Soares Martinez from the University of Lisbon law school coordinated the event under the title “A pátria que temos na Europa que queremos” (The homeland we have in the Europe we want). The Spanish leader spoke to an audience of around two hundred people coming from different organizations of the Portuguese extreme right. FNNM was presented as the main exponent of the Portuguese extreme right and as Portugal’s reference in the European far-right—in the set of European extreme right parties in the European Union parliament at that time. Because newspapers associated the event with the centenary of Salazar’s birth, Miguel Castelo Branco tried to clarify that FNNM was not a fascist-inspired organization by rejecting Mussolini’s principle of “living heroically.” FNNM highlights the specificity of the Portuguese movement for its denial of ethnocentric traits in the conformation of the idea of nation, proposing the union between Portugal and Cape Verde in a single homeland with an Atlantic vocation. Before becoming FNNM, Nova Monarquia had already proposed a confederation of Portuguese-speaking states to encompass, in addition to Portugal, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, and Timor. It maintained a close relationship with the mentors of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) and held three conferences on Timor-LesteFootnote 2 between 1984 and 1989. At this point, it is already possible to perceive how Nova Portugalidade took up a project of FNNM, occupying a Eurosceptic political field but internally defending a type of patriotism very different from the rest of the European extreme right scenario. This reality manifested in the past for FNNM and for Nova Portugalidade today.

FNNM’s Euroscepticism made it break definitively with the CDS at the time of the European elections of June 1989, calling for absenteeism (Marchi, 2019). The relationship with the European far-right became even closer, and in June 1989, the entire European far-right group met in Lisbon, with the presence of Jean Marie Le Pen, delegates from the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the German Republikaner, the Belgian Vlaams Blok, and the Scottish Nationalist Party. Le Pen met with FNNM leaders to create a party in Portugal. However, the meeting did not generate significant advances in this regard due to the French leader’s negative statements about Portugal and the Portuguese. Still, there was an attempt to take the party project forward with the withdrawal of the PPM leader, Gonçalo Ribeiro Teles, from the Lisbon municipal elections, leaving an open space to the right of the PSD-CDS coalition (Marchi, 2019).

In this vacuum, Miguel Castelo Branco considered Francisco Casal Ribeiro as a candidate for mayor of Lisbon (Marchi, 2019). However, Casal Ribeiro declared he was not available for the endeavor, and the project was suddenly aborted. The efforts of FNNM leaders toward consolidating a political party faltered because the political environment was not favorable, nationally and internationally, to the role of FNNM in the right-wing field. Moreover, there seems to have been a common origin in forming this unfavorable conjuncture. Ethnic nationalism in Europe made FNNM a foreign body within the Euroright.

The European far-right manifested through political parties and the neo-Nazi wave, which became part of the extra-institutional political landscape. Another right-wing organization challenged the monarchist movement with a very different proposal. This proposal resonated better with the right-wing in Europe, with the skinheads. At the Blas Piñar conference in 1989, groups of young people with shaved heads, wearing Celtic crosses, and crying “death to democracy” emerged, drawing attention from the press (Marchi, 2019). Faced with this situation—which was not conducive to its growth and considering the massive failure of its project to establish a political party—FNNM disappeared after a few years of existence without leaving a new generation of activists to continue its work, at least in that particular moment.

Nova Portugalidade: The Amplification and Reformulation of the Old Project of Nova Monarquia

Nowadays, Nova Portugalidade takes up many of the proposals of the former Nova Monarquia. It is possible to say that they are equivalent organizations, although the two have some differences. Within the Portuguese groupuscular right, Nova Portugalidade is the heir to the monarchical ideal left by Nova Monarquia. In an interview on October 19, 2021, for the YouTube channel TV Kuriakos, Rafel Pinto Borges posed as a monarchist, a critic of the Portuguese Republic, praising the figure of Dom Duarte de Bragança for his role in the Lusíada world, especially in Asia, without receiving anything from the Portuguese state. He defended the monarchy not as a government but as a mechanism to secure the continuity of the state—managing political changes, especially in times of crisis, for example. Pinto Borges appreciates monarchy more than Salazarism, moderately criticizing the latter for its authoritarianism, although recognizing it offered some stability to the country. Nova Portugalidade is a defender of a Portuguese identity that goes far beyond European Portugal, also putting itself in open confrontation with the European Union project. As Rafael Pinto Borges (2019) states, the economic area coordinated by Brussels prevents many of its members from establishing relations with former colonies, which could constitute spaces of cooperation of their own, going far beyond the economic or political universe. Thus, the Portuguese distanced themselves from the world they helped to create overseas, and the French remained distant from the Francophonie and the Spaniards from the Hispanic world (Pinto Borges, 2019).

When considering the geopolitical dimension, the group favors a rapprochement and opposes, to a certain extent, the European Union. The organization advocates cooperative relationships with nation-states, social niches, and transnational institutions that, to a greater or lesser extent, were shaped by the Portuguese overseas expansion. This included nation-states, members of the Portuguese-speaking world, groups of Portuguese descendants overseas, and institutions such as the Luso-Asian Congress. At the February 2019 conference organized by Nova Portugalidade, its most prominent members stated that the geopolitical project of their movement is not a resumption of colonialism but a voluntary cooperation of the entire social, political, and cultural universe the Portuguese created.

They do not believe that globalization is a phenomenon that can be reversed or even avoided. However, an alternative globalization was proposed, a Lusíada globalization. In order not to remain on the periphery of Europe in a globalizing project led by the European Union, or even in the hyperperiphery of such a project in a North-Atlantist way, an alternative Lusíada globalization was proposed, possibly constituted by a Lusíada Federation, formed by Portugal, Cape Verde, Sao Tome e Principe, and Timor.

Thus, the Lusíada Confederation should be developed with Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau (Nova Portugalidade, 2019). Portugality, in these terms, is not just an inheritance but a geopolitical project to come. A confederation that integrates the nations of Portuguese tradition in a political, geopolitical, economic, military, human, and democratically cohesive space founded on a stable institutional base. This base could become a common parliament, a “Lusíada parliament,” the legislative space of a territorial-political unit whose inhabitants would have access to citizenship based on portugality (Nova Portugalidade, 2019).

It is important to highlight that the Lusíada Confederation project had already been outlined by General António de Spínola (1910–1996) (Poças, 2022). Spínola, who governed Portugal for a few months (1974–1974) under the PREC regime, already defended Lusíada citizenship. When he governed Portuguese Guinea—present-day Guinea-Bissau—between 1968 and 1973, he leveraged policies to bring the local population closer to Portugal, including paid trips to Mecca for the Fula, a majority Muslim ethnic group. Such policies, known as “Spinolism,” represent an attempt to maintain Estado Novo and the Portuguese Empire in a period when state institutions were not very present in overseas territories (Poças, 2022). The Lusíada identity—the Spinolism and the Church’s social doctrine defended by Nova Monarquia, aimed at integrating all peoples of portugality—was proposed again by Nova Portugalidade. The aim of bringing together all the peoples of portugality in a Lusotropicalist Commonwealth created by the Nova Portugalidade was based on Spínola’s project but incorporated Brazil into the Lusíada universe.

The inclusion of Brazil, with its more than 200 million Portuguese speakers, would help to place the Confederation as an official language of the United Nations, in addition to a seat on the UN Security Council. Foreign policy focused on the reality of the Lusíada space, similar to the UK, with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and France and its Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs. Following these examples, the group proposed a Ministry of Portugality and Foreign Affairs that, closely linked to the Institute of Portugality, was attentively concerned with strengthening ties of all kinds with the Portuguese world (Nova Portugalidade, 2019). The group rejected any diplomatic orientation of the so-called ambassadors of the European Union in states and regions of the planet, where secular bilateral relations of Portugal may suffer interference contrary to its interest (Nova Portugalidade, 2019). Thus, Nova Portugalidade defends that Portugal remains in the European Union, but not without a profound reform between this and the Portuguese state. This reform recovered the role of the European Council, reconsidering the excessive interventions of the Commission and the European parliament in the life of the nations of the Union, something that prevented these same nations from strengthening ties with nations outside Europe (Nova Portugalidade, 2019).

In a socio-cultural dimension, Nova Portugalidade maintained a “Gilbertofreyrian” position or a culturalist perspective divergent from that of Herder, and from the biological and racial theories that were so important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Portugality is very different from Volksgeist, Kultur, and Staatkultur, in a national spirit. It was a particular way of modernity itself, considering that the meeting of peoples and nations in a highly dynamic process is an unequivocal part of modernity (Nova Portugalidade, 2019). In this sense, the various social nuclei, which could be seen as watertight coexistence units, were understood as likely to interact symbolically and mix biologically. The group mentioned the book “The Portuguese genetic heritage,” published in 2009 by the geneticist Luisa Pereira and journalist Filipa Ribeiro, in the sense of conferring legitimacy to the idea of “gene adventure,” i.e., the Portuguese genetic material spread in populations from all continents. Therefore, in some way, the group was inserted in the discussions of the Euro-American extreme right where there is, currently, the typical relationship between cultural and biological identities.

However, Nova Portugalidade did so in the opposite direction to that typical of the American alt-right or the European identitarian movements since every human population that has some Portuguese genetic trait, no matter the percentage, was considered part of portugality and its expansion. The “genetic adventure” goes hand in hand with the cultural plasticity theorized by Freyre and gives biological overtones to Franz Boas’ discourse. In 1922, in Pasadena, California, Boas stated that Brazil was one of the main models of civilization for modernity, given the enormous degree of miscegenation that Brazilians had gone through. For European and North American ethnonationalists, this was a true opprobrium, the ultimate disfiguration of their populations. For them, the Volk, the land, and the genetic pool interpenetrate in an isolationist process. In the discourse of the organization by Miguel Castelo Branco and Rafael Pinto Borges, the genetic pool expands to many soils and penetrates many populations, permanently reconfiguring them. It should be remembered that culture has an enormous weight in the ideological construction of Nova Portugalidade since entire social sectors, which do not show clear marks of miscegenation but bear some Portuguese cultural traits, were seen as part of portugality. Genes and culture are part of a game where these two elements weigh one more than the other, and sometimes they are completely mixed.

On its Facebook page, on October 11, 2019, Nova Portugalidade shared photos of Portuguese-Thai groups in an exhibition of Portuguese songs, with mestizo dancers in Portuguese costumes (facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2441081549483531). In a 2018 article on the organization’s website, Hugo Dantas accuses the Bloco de Esquerda of being a racist party for treating races as watertight social units (Dantas, 2018), dividing the population into racial theories. This division, for Rafel Pinto Borges, is imported from the universities of California and was not related to Portugal, where in its first constitution, in 1829, it had Black legislators. In the text, Dantas states that even though Bloco de Esquerda aimed to defend Black people’s rights, its narrative fit racist discourses by establishing racial divisions. In an interview on the YouTube channel TV Kuriakos on October 19, 2021, Pinto Borges highlighted that in the Portuguese parliament of 1822, there were already Black legislators, something that did not happen anywhere else in Europe (https://youtu.be/8kWoVEfJVfE).

In Nova Portugalidade’s point of view, culture and society form a space for creation and inter-learning among peoples touched and mediated by the Portuguese, with no room for separatism, whether due to a biological racial or cultural bias, or both. Portugality is a particular way of coordinating modern intersocial and intercultural relations, driven by the supposed Portuguese exceptionality, its plasticity, and ease of mixing. All this can be seen as a particular way of generating and driving globalization, not containing it. In short, Portugality is Portugal’s relationship with the world. It appears that Portugal was the country that inaugurated the modern world in the sense of initiating a deeper process of bringing peoples together (Nova Portugalidade, 2019). The education advocated by Nova Portugalidade recognizes this character of the Portuguese as central to the history of their identity, which goes, as the organization states, “from Acre to Timor.” It vehemently refuses any pressure to express regret for its imperial past and any repairs and return of movable heritage present in Portuguese museums to the former colonies (Nova Portugalidade, 2019).

The territory covered by Portugality, whether in overseas territories or Iberian Portugal, was not subdivided into territorial units with congruence between political-administrative and cultural divisions, at least not in terms of emphasizing local cultural autonomies. In a Facebook post from 2019, Portugal’s regionalization and decentralization project was criticized, stating that this would only create party feuds, breaking with a centuries-old tradition of centralized politics (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2600025803589104). It can be said that Nova Portugalidade revisited the idea of the imperial territory described by Professor Alexandre Franco de Sá at the conference on November 9, 2019, entitled “O Império contra-ataca” (The Empire strikes back) in his presentation “Razões do Império” (Reasons of the Empire). The Empire, unlike the Polis, was not characterized by homogeneity but by heterogeneity built in a permanent dynamic process. According to Franco de Sá, in the Platonic view, Polis excluded barbarians and maintained ethnic homogeneity. Moreover, Aristotle’s Politeia was a self-government existing through an exclusionary inclusion, as there is a set of equal citizens insofar as they belonged to that Polis. Hegel, in turn, replaced the term Polis with Volk, influencing more socially and culturally homogeneous forms of political community in modernity.

Franco de Sá placed the empire in opposition to Polis. The idea of Cosmopolis and the extension of the territory beyond the homogeneity of Polis emerged in the empire founded by Alexandre Magno. The Roman Empire maintained this principle when managing a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Empire. The axis that kept the Empire unified was the loyalty and worship of the Emperor by social groups who spoke different languages and followed different gods. The Emperor personified the coexistence of highly disparate and diverse groups in the same territorial unit through the cult of leadership with divine traits. The Polis was anthropological, and the Empire—or Cosmopolis—was cosmological.

In these terms, according to Rafael Pinto Borges, Nova Portugalidade recovered the tradition of the ancient great European empires by bringing up the Lusíada imperial tradition. This notion places the Portuguese Empire on the European path toward modernity. It is a modernity that resumes the ancient European imperial models. Like the ancient Romans and Greeks/Macedonians, the Portuguese created a Cosmopolis beyond the European continent, in a point of view supposedly marked by the incorporation of disparate human populations. In the Portuguese case, the imperial dynamics count on the Gilbertofreyrian theoretical background that offers a modern tone to the Lusíada Cosmopolis. This is because the social and cultural traits pointed out by Freyre regarding the Portuguese gave the empire the possibility of constituting a territory marked by the melting pot. In other words, the different peoples in this empire not only had a common idea of loyalty to the imperial center but also came to amalgamate in a transterritorial perspective within, of course, the empire’s territorial borders. The cultural units administered by the empire would not only be spatially juxtaposed social nuclei, practicing their own religion and having the Emperor’s cult as the only point in common. They would merge, creating social niches that could be characterized as melting pots, which placed the Portuguese Empire as one of the main paths toward modernity.

Therefore, in the modern Lusíada universe of Nova Portugalidade, the center—formerly occupied by the Emperor—is the Portuguese nation itself. The justification for this idea is the assumption that the Portuguese nation radiates the inaugural spirit of modernity and a specific form of globalization. However, if, on the one hand, it maintained a position of centrality, on the other, it was not a closed and watertight unit to other peoples in a cultural and biological dimension. In relation to territorial-political administration, there is also no need to have representatives elected by a region who necessarily carry the “blood and soil” of the same region. Also, in posts on the group’s Facebook page, there is the esteem of Black legislators and representatives, such as Sinclética Soares dos Santos Torres, born in Luanda, elected to the National Assembly in 1965 (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2438662066392146). Another character is Antônio Burity da Silva, also a native of Angola, who, in the 1960s, was already a speaker at the legislative sessions of the National Assembly and who represented Portugal at the 25th UN General Assembly in 1970 (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2438089889782697). In yet another post, the group remembers Narana Sinai Coissoró, a Hindu Indian from Goa and naturalized Portuguese, who was a deputy for the CDS, leading the parliamentary group of the same party from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2439462569645629). Deputy Viriato Gomes da Fonseca (from 1919 to 1925) was also mentioned in a post-Nova Portugalidade shared on social media. The deputy was a Black man and a guest at the post of Governor-General of Angola, which he declined because he considered himself more prepared for the general government of Cape Verde, (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2443616449230041).

It is possible to say that Nova Portugalidade proposed, to some degree, the return of imperial citizenship interrupted by the 1822 Constitution by emphasizing and valuing this type of territorial administration and the political representation of the Empire, considering a new Lusíada citizenship. In the presentation entitled “A ideia portuguesa de Império” (The Portuguese idea of Empire) conducted at the November 2019 Conference, Professor José Adelino Maltês, complimentary of miscegenation, presented the idea that Portugal “left and cannot return.” He argued that the Portuguese vocation is a biocultural combination and mentioned the book Genes adventure. He criticized the Portuguese government’s reproduction of the English colonial model, arguing that this approach contributed to the breakdown of Portuguese imperial citizenship existing until 1822. For Professor Maltês, corroborating Franco de Sá, the Cosmopolis project originated with Alexander the Great is observed in the construction of the Portuguese Empire. The Armillary Sphere, a symbol from Alexander the Great, appeared on the first Brazilian flag and is also on the coat of arms used by Nova Portugalidade. Therefore, the socio-territorial principle defended by the group of patriotic intellectuals can be classified as something that goes beyond the dichotomy between ethnic nationalism and civic-territorial nationalism. In principle, it is something like a Cosmopolis Nationalism.

The criticism of Lusophony takes place in this aspect since Lusophony, reduced to language, only constituted the communicative mechanism of the community of Portuguese-speaking countries and not a more institutionalized common space of cooperation between them. Portugality, a type of broader civilization pattern, could not be reduced to a language that conveys international relations between nation-states but must be a specific transcontinental territory imbued with this expanded civilization pattern.

Concerning religion, the prerogative of the lusotropicalist ideal of Nova Portugalidade is noted. Despite Portugal being a traditionally Catholic country, the social doctrine of the Church is not defended, at least not as it was by Nova Monarquia. Although Portugal has a traditionally Catholic majority, Nova Portugalidade did not exclude other religious groups from the civilizing process constituted and leveraged by the Portuguese. It also cherished the Hindus and Muslims who were part of the Portuguese conquests, fighting alongside the Portuguese. Catholicism was valued as long as it was an element of diffusion of Portuguese civilization beyond the religion itself. Asians who do not speak Portuguese but are Catholic were considered part of the Portuguese world since Catholicism was brought to their region by the Portuguese. If a non-Catholic person carries, to some degree, a Portuguese heritage, they are considered part of the Portuguese world, regardless of the nature of this heritage. Catholicism as an institution and social doctrine is considered part of the Portuguese civilizing process in all corners of the planet, but it is not its only element, nor is it indispensable.

In another presentation held during the November 2019 Conference, Madalena Larcher Nunes discussed the topic “A Igreja na expansão: missionação e ciência” (The Church during the expansion: mission and science). Larcher Nunes emphasized the role of religious orders Vigararia de Tomar, the Order of Christ, the Padroado, and the entire ecclesiastical jurisdiction originating from Portugal in its expansion toward other continents. Many comments were made on the supposed tolerance of Portuguese religious orders toward the customs of local inhabitants (particularly in Asia) and their role in conducting interracial marriages between Portuguese and natives to facilitate the relationships. In this sense, the Church, diffuse genes, and Portuguese culture go hand in hand, at least in the discourse of Nova Portugalidade.

Regarding the cultural diffusion of the Portuguese around the world, Nova Portugalidade emphasizes all possibly identifiable points, including technical aspects. Thus, Portugal is a diffuser of a culture without being restricted to language, religion, or popular culture. Something highly valued is the technical advances taken by the Portuguese and their participation in highly qualified administrative bodies in areas that were not even colonies of Portugal. Miguel Castelo Branco states that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Portuguese and Portuguese-descendant communities emerged in various parts of Asia and significantly influenced the areas where they lived. In the Siamese court, full of Belgian, German, French, and English advisers, there were about 80 Portuguese, 20% of the foreigners in the service of the state, many of them showing excellence in the art of navigation, in the service of the Siamese navy. The Portuguese founded the Bancoque Philharmonic Orchestra and the Portuguese Dramatic Amateur Co., Singapore’s most relevant theater company (Castelo Branco, 2019). On Facebook, Nova Portugalidade discusses the superiority of the Portuguese over the English and Dutch in terms of ease in dealing with local elites in territories far away from Europe. It is emphasized that even in areas of British influence, such as Hong Kong, the Portuguese were essential in establishing themselves as a line of mediation between Anglo-Saxons and Chinese (www.facebook.com/novaportugalidade/photos/2436842143240805).

Nova Portugalidade defends the Portuguese civilizing legacy as the diffusion of a cultural universe, which, to some extent, holds the embryo of modern Western civilization. The cultural epicenter of this modern civilization is the supposed plasticity, the ease of a specific people to intermingle, outside of a purely French rationalist or Anglo-Saxon utilitarian perspective. Therefore, Gilbertofreyrian lusotropicalism plays a significant role in the Portuguese identity of Nova Portugalidade. The political proposal of a bloc based on all territories touched by this spirit demonstrates this: “From Acre to Timor” stands out as a form of cooperation in an increasingly multipolar world divided into blocs (Castelo Branco, 2019).

In addition to the theoretical bases of lusotropicalism, Nova Portugalidade recovers the Portuguese imperial past, both in the colonial experience—which goes until Brazilian independence—and the Estado Novo. In this sense, Nova Portugalidade presents curious peculiarities since it was connected to the old extreme right described by Ignazi. There is something close to a continuation of Estado Novo imperial nationalism, even though it criticizes the Estado Novo regime. The postulate “From Acre to Timor” makes this principle of continuity clear since it is the re-articulation of the Estado Novo postulate “From Minho to Timor.” Concerning the new extreme right, there are peculiarities in how it influences Nova Portugalidade. There are theoretical resonances with Eurasianism, in the sense that Nova Portugalidade believes in a world divided into civilizational blocs but defends a bloc that is not European but overseas. The organization defends a Thalassocratic bloc instead of a Tellurocratic bloc. Nova Portugalidade focuses on the Freyrian theoretical model of culturalist/Boasian inspiration. However, it uses the “genomic revolution” to identify peoples that may be inserted in Portugality, even if in a mold diametrically opposed to that of O Bom Europeu. Definitely, Nova Portugalidade moves away from the extreme right ideology described by Mudde (2000) since it aims to include populations outside Caucasian Portugal in its project of a Portuguese state. However, it is still in the field of the Portuguese far-right.

It is possible to say that Nova Portugalidade is a point outside the curve within the groupuscular right in Portugal, remaining as the great heir of the idea of Portuguese exceptionality, that the Portuguese find it easier than the rest of Europeans to impact people from other continents. It is not ethnic nationalist, and it is not fully civic-territorial nationalist. It is what can be called Imperial Nationalism in the sense of being the conception of a nation through territorial expansion in imperial ways, a model of non-particularist nationalism (Kostø, 2019).

However, it also does not fit in with the model of British imperial nationalism that centered either on the consolidation of the British state throughout the territory it covered or on the expansion of Anglo-Saxons toward countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (Wellings, 2003). The Imperial Nationalism of Nova Portugalidade develops by connecting culture in its broadest sense of the term and genetic ancestry in constant expansion, creating a biocultural synthesis between very different populations. Such a synthesis is antithetical to the defense of bioculture made by the North American alt-right, the European identitarian movements, and the racialist tradition of the Anglo-Saxon world. Thus, the Imperial Nationalism of Nova Portugalidade can be defined as Cosmopolis Nationalism since it is a nationalism with an imperial line, whose dominant trait is the conduction by the metropolis of a process seen as typical of the globalization of the present day. It is not just the coexistence of different peoples in the same territory of imperial proportions but their amalgamation through cultural and biogenetic lines.

This ethnoracial and cultural cosmopolitism conducted by a specific people (the Portuguese) is seen as typical of modernity but does not include gender. Nova Portugalidade, like all other groups of the Portuguese right groupuscule, rejects gender narratives, which makes its discourse close to a form of right-wing interculturality. This is a particular style of leading and absorbing globalization, its Lusíada way. The Lusíada way of ethnoracial and cultural cosmopolitism is illustrated in a modification made at a given moment to the profile picture on the group’s Facebook page, placing next to the Armillary Sphere the image of four human arms holding hands, forming a square, each of these arms with a different color, suggesting the process of uniting the human races.

The organization’s Cosmopolis Nationalism stands out for being a kind of very particular and curious multiracial project but conservative in terms of gender and praising a regime considered to be extreme right or old extreme right. By multiracial, I do not mean it is really intercultural or multicultural. At least not in the terms the left defines inter and multiculturalism. It is definitely not the proposal of liberal, socialist cosmopolitan nationalism as proposed by Kai Nielsen (1999, 2003). In Nielsen it is defended the conciliation of socialism, multiculturalism, and some kind of defense of the nation-state. In Nova Portugalidade, there is a multiracial commonwealth centered at a Portuguese historical memory and imaginary landscape.

It is the defense of banal Portuguese nationalism, but in a different way than Portugueses 1, Escudo Identitário, or Mário Machado’s groups. In those cases, points of banal nationalism are defended to activate another type of identity, the ethno-identitarian. Nova Portugalidade, on the other hand, defends the symbols of banal nationalism to activate the elements of the very banal nationalism and strengthen all the ideological and theoretical substance behind them. Regarding the Padrão dos DescobrimentosFootnote 3 controversy, on October 1, 2021, Nova Portugalidade organized a letter of protest to the short film “O princípio, o meio, o fim e o infinito” (the beginning, the medium, the end, and the infinite) which was to be shown in front of the monument. The film dealt with what it called Portugal’s colonial and racist past, and the group accused it of being an attempt against the Portuguese memory. It was the only group of all those studied in this work that moved to defend the Padrão dos Descobrimentos during the controversies around the monument.

Thus, Nova Portugalidade is a lusotropicalist exception within the set of Portuguese groupuscules, so it cannot be considered part of Portugal’s identitarian right ideology, even though it is part of the Portuguese far-right. Although its Estado Novo heritage places it, to some degree, within the old extreme right, and there is the use of concepts and categories from population genetics studies, it does not fit with the current ideology of the European extreme right (Mudde, 2000, 2019), nor of the nativist right (Gattinara & Pirró, 2018; Mudde, 2019) due to its non-ethnic particularism. From the point of view of the other analyzed groups, it is nothing more than multiculturalism filled by a greater centrality of the Portuguese. This is because it defends the creation of a Lusíada passport with free movement of all Portuguese peoples in Portugal and because it tended to oppose political parties of the populist right with anti-immigration proposals, namely Chega. Its great particularity is the continuity and even resumption of the lusotropicalist conception of the Estado Novo ideology, the project of now extinct right-wing organizations, such as Nova Monarquia, and the criticism of Causa Identitária, made by nationalists of previous generations, such as Antônio Jose de Brito.

Despite all these features, which could be considered just as multiculturalism by the ethnonationalist groupuscules, Nova Portugalidade leader and Rafael Pinto Borges have posted recently posts with a different tone. In their personal Facebook pages, some appraisal of far-right parties can be seem, something that did not happen before. It is quite contradictory at first glance because, Rafael Pinto Borges posted in his personal FacebookFootnote 4 page in May 15, 2022, a text about ethnodemographic changes in the USA (https://www.facebook.com/rafael.pintoborges/posts/pfbid07Pagk6k4cmsfQ3bfNMmo3uRky5mxbs1YJuKJzPw6oDFYd7RCtPbnaywWnUvnmThSl). It was about the future of white Americans and how they are becoming a minority in the USA, mostly due to Hispanic immigrants. Borges celebrates this, and states that the Anglo-Saxon world never knew how to deal with other peoples and that they stole lands from Mexicans. At the same time he makes vows to the Hispanics that carry on what they call “la Reconquista,” clearly supporting the end of White America. He states in a celebration tone that the future Americans will see their grandparents in the Iberian world, not in England and Germany.

However, posts praising Marine Le Pen and Éric Zémmour also appear in Borges Facebook page. That is, on the one hand, he appraises the Hispanicization of the USA, and on the other hand he celebrates notoriously anti-immigration parties in Europe. At April 11, 2023, Borges posted a text with appraisals to Le Pen and Zémmour, defending that the former had intelligence and the latter courage. And albeit Zémmour is described as somehow radical, both represented a good alternative to Emmanuel Macron, since he had absorbed some right-wing demands, as security, defense, and immigration control. Those right-wing demands are described in a positive tone (/www.facebook.com/rafael.pintoborges/posts/pfbid02xxD8KyFqQhBzCSGQ9eGJRLN3VcS3q4VodKgPDND1q9pF3123ZFd4zY5EG1xUEeSHl). Thirteen days later, at April 24, 2023, Borges posted a text appraising what he calls the “national bloc in France,” a political bloc formed by Le Pen, Zémmour and Dupon-Aignan, against the so-called French bourgeoisie. With the post, there is a picture of Marine Le Pen (//www.facebook.com/rafael.pintoborges/posts/pfbid02Agb9EaWpk6nTr6S9G7G6D5Jk6AVkG31237gBYy1wZTFjMdDmhWV5ypXJkUjzC8xGl). True, much of these support may come from what Borges regards as a more civic-nationalist side of these political tendencies. For example, in April 11, 2022, he had posted a photo of Marine Le Pen together with a black woman (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=483428316847411&set=a.283013206888924&type=3).

Anyway, in spite of these relapses, Borges and Castelo Branco keep their push toward an imperial, non-ethnic model of nation-state.Footnote 5 It becomes clear with regard to their interpretation of the Ukraine war. Both men are undisputably pro-Russia, against OTAN, which they interpret as and Anglo-Saxon world manifestation. And fiercely anti-Ukrainian as well, as they regard it as ethno-exclusivism and even a national-socialist experience. At 11 February 2022, Borges posted that if war came to Ukraine, it would be result of the greatest twentieth-century tragedies. That is, the end of the great empires, described as civilizing plow to more backward regions, the end of the empires consisting in the independency of these same regions (https://www.facebook.com/rafael.pintoborges/posts/pfbid0Yohf1tMUx3vntSX6DiBKecGbu9fbnZSnRZC5dtRr1yQLA8YJCLuMDYTV4NjTh12Rl). Miguel Castelo Branco has posted highly pro-Russia posts in a regular basis. Something very different from Nova Portugalidade’s Facebook page, which does not give too much attention to the war.

At April 25, 2023, Borges posted a text fiercely contrary to Chega party, who utilized 25 April date to give support to Ukraine and criticizes the visits from Brazilian President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The critics were in the sense that Chega was more worried to Ukrainians than to Brazilians, allegedly part of the Portuguese world, and from which many immigrants produced hundreds of jobs in Portugal (https://www.facebook.com/rafael.pintoborges/posts/pfbid021jWrWEpRZRDvQgw85Xx2Cvkdp1tdau9E88t2S459S4AkoSYCCcgJXk6CzRHC7cH2l). In the same day, Miguel Castelo Branco posted an appraisal to Lula’s visit, describing Brazil as Nova Lusitânia, and part of Portuguese world (https://www.facebook.com/miguel.c.branco.5/posts/pfbid0fR2efFURXVyxPST9X2iMXqXJbfNU19HpvEaMJmiVKutkpfohC3nhBKaE843DymLZl). This entire appraisal is done in spite of the socialist tendencies of Lula and his party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party).

Thus, in spite of a recent dialogue with the more contemporary partisan far-right, Nova portugalidade continues to defend an old style Imperial Patriotism. It is noteworthy that Jaime Nogueira Pinto, an author highly associated with this style of nationalism and with Nova Portugalidade, more recently has emphasized in newspapers the problems of immigration in Europe (https://observador.pt/opiniao/demografia-europeia-resistir-ao-inevitavel/). He also has started to defend Chega, a party that talks in the Portuguese parliament about the risks of replacing the Portuguese regional accents for the Brazilian Portuguese accent. Furthermore, if taken into account that Nova Portugalidade display a huge interface with Nogueira Pinto ideology that signalizes to some points of contact between Nova Portugalidade and the more pan-European nationalism. However, the group still keeps its project of a “Lusiada Nation from Acre to Timor.”