Envisioning (Future) Democracy Through Protest: What Do Progressive and Reactionary Actors in Portugal Aim to Reshape?

There have been growing studies of protest cultures, actors, events, and repertoires that look into the contexts that allowed patterns to emerge throughout particular episodes. In Portugal, the date marking the Carnation Revolution that ended a dictatorship of four decades, in 1974, and the beginning of Portuguese democracy, is a foundational point for protest culture and dynamics. Agenda-wise, in recent decades, intersections between labour precarity, economic marginalisation, and political alienation, have been the most mobilising topics particularly after the subprime crisis, with austerity coming to the forefront. Nevertheless, the recent emergence of the far-right across the country (as across all Europe), on par with the peripheralised communities, namely racialised and LGBTQI+ minorities, taking centre stage in today’s demonstrations in the country, allowed the emergence of specific repertoires of action that can (re)configure new forms of protest or making politics with implications for democracy. Building on these developments, this paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing research into Portuguese protest cultures and into the state of the Portuguese democracy, part of the broader research project titled “Protest as a Democracy Test: Protest Culture under Transformation and as a Transformative Power” (2025-2027), funded by the Horizon Europe program. Zooming into the Portuguese case-study, the research focuses on the period from 2000 to 2025, during which protests became increasingly diversified. After first characterising some of the main movements and agendas emerging in this period against the backdrop of domestic, European and international dynamics, it discusses the perspectives gauged through discourse and thematic analysis of biographical narrative interviews conducted in late 2025 with 16 actors involved in different capacities in protests from the left and the right-wing, progressive and reactionary movements. With this, the paper seeks to characterise recent protest trends in a way that not only contextualises the country’s socio-historical situation, but also grasps the organisers’ and participants’ perspectives, the social problems that mobilize people in the country, the methods and the strategies adopted by each movement, and, ultimately the future envisioned as a result of their engagement and its implications for democracy(ies).