With a wave of the far right in Europe approaching, the mayor is calling for moderation.

LISSABON, Portugal - On a warm evening, as the sounds of a fado singer in a dark bar where oiled fingers slide between platters of olives and the legs of wine glasses echo through ancient limestone streets filled with late-night tourists from around the world, it's easy to forget that this ancient capital is in political crisis.

In contrast to London, Amsterdam or Paris, Lisbon, which has evolved over nearly 3,000 years into a modern city with a cosmopolitan population and international visitors, has not had to face the hostility of far-right populists blaming foreigners and minorities for the city's problems. Elections here were held without politicians calling for a dictatorship that ruled''Portugal from the Great Depression until the 1970s. However, things have changed. The wave of right-wing populism sweeping Europe's democracies is finally hitting its western shore, and preventing it from affecting Portugal will be a difficult "struggle", said Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas. "We have seen examples in countries like the US and Brazil where societies undergo radical changes and disintegrate. It does lead to division on both sides, and in themselves these problems are difficult to fix," Moedas, a 53-year-old slender man with dense but graying hair, said in a wide-ranging interview with HuffPost last month. "Until now, Portugal has been an example of moderation, but now we have to fight to maintain that. "

All this''The hilly city, where one in four Portuguese live, is littered with billboards for the first far-right party to make a name for itself since the country restored democracy less than 50 years ago. The party is called Chega - the Portuguese word for "enough" - and it is based on a promise to "purge" the nation of political elites. Its leader is a charismatic former sports commentator who became famous for ignoring fines for telling racist stereotypes about Portugal's tiny Roma minority. After winning the first round of parliamentary elections in 2019, Chega won 12 of 230 seats in the 2022 elections. The party is now preparing to increase its influence during the upcoming early elections, which have been scheduled in''as a result of a high-profile corruption scandal in the country. Although the leader of the left-leaning Centrist Party was not directly implicated, national prosecutors have accused some senior government officials of corrupt deals with foreign energy companies, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister António Costa. Chega's party is heavily marketing its anti-establishment and anti-corruption message ahead of the March 10 elections, and its popularity has grown slightly in the past four weeks. Right-wing forces around the world have recently achieved significant victories.

Libertarian fire Miley Javier in Argentina, who allied with former U.S. President Donald Trump and former Brazilian leader Jair''Bolsonaro, won election to the presidency last month with the most votes in the history of Union America. A few days later, a right-wing party led by Geert Wilders of the Netherlands won the largest share of seats in Parliament with a pledge to end immigration and ban Muslims, who make up about 5% of the Dutch population, from practicing their religion. In Slovakia, Robert Fico, previously ousted as prime minister because of his links to the murder of an investigative journalist and his fiancée, returned to power in October by teaming up with the country's far-right party. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who finished second in the last two presidential elections and is competitive in a third, came to''Lisbon late last month to hold a press conference in support of Chega. It was the latest attempt by the European populist flank to reassert its presence in Portugal after Chega held a summit in Lisbon in April, attended by Bolsonaro himself.

Economic revitalization and housing issues

Moedas is a member of the centrist Social Democratic Party, the second-largest bloc in Parliament and the traditional opposition to the centrist Socialists. But he said both parties face challenges in dealing with far-right extremists whose inflammatory rhetoric spreads quickly on social media, where algorithms privilege scandalous postings over more''balanced or practical dialogues. Even Portugal's leftist parties complain about the fact that Chega's ascendancy is based on its members' ability to use "hate speech to mobilize their supporters. "

Portugal's economic recovery from its 2011 debt crisis has been spectacular. Portugal's solvency has served as a similar model for balancing the fiscal discipline expected of other euro users such as Germany and the generous welfare state demanded by Portuguese voters. Has Portugal remained the poorest country in Western Europe, with 1 in 5 reporting that they cannot afford to pay their heating bills in the winter in a survey conducted before the sharp rise in the price of''energy in recent years. However, annual surveys have shown that there are more optimists than pessimists about the direction of the economy.

Failure prophecies currently dominate, according to most Portuguese adults, who sometimes feel the economy has worsened since the start of 2022. Portugal finds itself in "choppy waters," as Bloomberg recently described it. Economic growth, which exceeded that of other European economies after the COVID-19 pandemic, has begun to slow and factories are producing less. Inflation is slowing, but the cost of living in Portugal has risen more in the past year than the continent's average in all categories of official statistics. This restriction hits workers with below average wages in''a rich country where half of workers earn less than €1000 a month and average wages have barely increased by 5% over the past two decades.

As 90% of Portuguese will tell you, housing costs are out of control. The Socialist government's solution is to stop attracting rich foreigners to buy all apartments by eliminating tax breaks and so-called "golden visas" for real estate investors. So far, these policy changes have failed to curb demand, with foreign buyers accounting for 65% of new sales. Foreign buyers bring wealth to the city, Moedas said, and the incentives offered to attract them to Portugal have made Lisbon''competitive with Spain's larger cities such as Barcelona and Madrid. According to the Social Democrat leader, the housing problem lies in affordability, not demand. His administration is spending hundreds of millions of euros from the European Union to build and renovate apartments with subsidized rents. So far, the mayor says, the city is completing up to 40 new or renovated units every two weeks. The initial €560 million ($600 million) grant was used to build apartments for low-income residents who paid a modest €10 a month rent. Now the city is focused on creating apartments with rents of €200 to €300 a month for teachers, nurses and other professionals unable to afford housing in''Lisbon.

"You can have a great city of innovation, but if there is no social network and social security for people, you create friction and problems," Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas said. This is not only an example of what is possible when pragmatists in different parties work together, Moedas said, but also an example of the kind of social policies that can actually help people and render populists' messages of destruction useless. "We are building municipal housing for middle-class people," he said. "There has never been this level of investment in the last 20 or 30 years." But Portugal is still not building homes fast enough to meet demand. The number of building permits for new homes in 2022 was 15,207, about two''times less than is required to meet the need for new housing by the population each year, according to a study by Caixa Bank of Spain from September 2023. The cost of building materials, meanwhile, has risen by almost 10%. House prices are likely to rise by another 9% next year. Rents in Lisbon are climbing so high that the city has overtaken Singapore to top the list of real estate markets with the sharpest rental growth.

Moedas said his administration is working to digitalize the permitting process, which he described as "too slow and bureaucratic," and is launching a program in which the city will provide a plot of land to a group of people who want to build collectively occupied cooperative''housing complex. However, he also said the city makes up for the high prices by offering services such as free public transportation for students and seniors. "You have to invest more in social programs than in everything else because the city depends on people living with dignity. If they don't live with dignity, then the city doesn't work," he said. "You can have a great city of innovation, but if there is no social network and no social welfare for people, you create friction and problems. "

Democratic experiences and leadership challenges

Established by the Phoenicians centuries before the founding ofRome, Lisbon emerged from centuries of rule by Muslim and Catholic theocrats to become the center of a global''an empire controlling key ports and territories along the trade routes of South America, Africa and Asia. Like Germany and Italy, Portugal lost its towering democracy during the Great Depression, which was replaced by a fascist dictatorship. Because Portugal remained neutral during World War II, the regime, which continued to fight its own brutal wars for the colonies' independence, held power until the 1970s. Only at the end of that decade, when the colonies became sovereign states, did Lisbon hold its first truly open elections.

Today, the city is a popular tourist destination because of its music and cuisine, and an LGBTQ+-friendly country where it is known for bold''humanitarian approach to social problems, such as the 2001 law that decriminalized drug use and led to a decline in drug-related diseases. It's far from perfect. But parties like Chega, whose youth groups openly vaunt former dictator António Salazar, "just want to destroy the system," Moedas said. "That's easy," he said. But it is difficult to be a moderate politician who gives a fair assessment of opposing viewpoints and takes the time to listen to different opinions and propose solutions to specific problems," Moedas paused. "The difficulty is to be a moderate politician. "