Gender and the Return of Culture Wars in the Portuguese Parliament

In this timely commentary, Dr. João Ferreira Dias examines how recent parliamentary debates on gender identity in Portugal signal the consolidation of culture-war politics within the legislative arena. Moving beyond the technicalities of legal reform, the analysis shows how competing moral frameworks—centered on “non-negotiable values”—are reshaping political conflict and generating affective polarization. The 20 March 2026 vote reveals a coordinated right-wing effort to reframe gender as a matter of state authority and child protection, while opponents view it as a rollback of rights. Situated within broader debates on populism and cultural backlash, this piece highlights the growing centrality of symbolic politics in contemporary European democracies.

By João Ferreira Dias

Debates on gender identity in Portugal have brought to the fore one of the core logics of contemporary culture wars: the notion of non-negotiable values, rooted in deeply held ethical commitments and/or religious beliefs. Precisely because these values are framed as non-negotiable, they tend to generate what the literature describes as “affective polarization,” thereby intensifying the conditions for culture-war politics.

The Event

On 20 March 2026, Portugal’s right-wing parliamentary parties secured approval in principle for three bills on gender identity, tabled by Chega, CDS-PP, and PSD. All three passed with the support of PSD, Chega, and CDS-PP, while the opposition bloc — Socialist Party (PS), Liberal Initiative, Livre, Communist Party, BE (Left Bloc), PAN (Party of Animals and Nature), and JPP (an Azorian new party) — voted against. A separate Left Bloc proposal was rejected at the same stage. 

What was approved is not yet final law, but it marks a clear attempt to reverse the framework established by Law No. 38/2018, which enshrined self-determination in the legal recognition of gender identity. The core shift is the reintroduction of medical validation for changing name and sex in the civil registry, replacing the current model based on self-identification. In political terms, the vote signals a coordinated right-wing effort to re-medicalize legal gender recognition and to reframe the issue not primarily as a question of individual autonomy, but of state oversight and child protection. 

The CDS-PP bill goes further, proposing to ban puberty blockers and hormonal treatment for minors under 18 when used in the context of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria. Chega’s proposal, meanwhile, explicitly frames the revision in terms of the "protection of children and young people." For supporters, these initiatives are presented as corrective safeguards; for opponents, they represent a rollback of rights, a renewed pathologization of trans identities, and a moral panic translated into lawmaking. 

Crucially, however, the parliamentary vote of 20 March was only a first reading. Approval "in principle" means that the bills now move to committee, where they will be debated and amended in detail before any final overall vote. Only after that stage could a final text proceed to presidential promulgation or constitutional review and, eventually, publication in the Diário da República. The immediate significance, then, is political rather than juridical: the Portuguese right has opened a legislative offensive against the country’s existing gender identity framework, but the legal outcome remains unsettled. 

The Context

For a long time, Portugal was portrayed as a country immune to populism. However, as Zúquete (2022) has shown, contrary to that illusion of "exceptionalism," Portugal has experienced different types of populist solutions, from charismatic military figures to mainstream political actors, especially during the 1990s, when CDS-PP — the Christian-democratic party — began to articulate a low-intensity version of Camus’s "great replacement" thesis.

In fact, to understand this debate and political decision, it is necessary to frame it within a long tradition of culture wars in Portugal. As I argued in my book (Ferreira Dias, 2025), debates on moral values are part of the Portuguese political fabric, as illustrated by the so-called Revolta da Maria da Fonte (Maria da Fonte’s Revolt) in the nineteenth century, a popular uprising against heavy taxation on rural communities and the ban on burials in churches for public-health reasons.

However, the most critical topics of debate in Portugal are colonial memory and national self-esteem, both linked to the myth of the "good colonizer" (v.g. Cardina, 2025; Smith, 2025; Vala, Lopes & Lima, 2008). The so-called "lusotropicalism" produced a form of self-esteem grounded in the myth of colonial exceptionalism, that is, the supposedly distinctive Portuguese capacity to mix with native populations and to produce a mulato community free of racism.

With the emergence of postcolonial and critical studies, and of the Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos, 2016), there emerged a generation of Portuguese academics and activists who questioned those assumptions, giving greater room to the subalternized voices of history.

While this postcolonial, postmodern and critical generation gained space in Portuguese universities, global social changes were also taking place, with the rise of the so-called woke culture and a subsequent global response labelled "cultural backlash" (Norris & Inglehart, 2019).

A widespread paranoia gained ground in Western societies around the idea of "cultural Marxism," helping to consolidate a radical right that claimed to be conservative while often operating in reactionary and illiberal registers, through populist leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán. At the same time, parts of the left became culturally radical, hyper-moralized, and at times susceptible to symbolic forms of historical and social purification (Mounk, 2025; McWhorter, 2021).

The struggle between this "conservative moral majority" and "progressivist morality" has accelerated culture wars. This context, together with the moral panic surrounding globalization, helps explain how Chega rose so quickly in Portugal — a country where cultural backlash, in many respects, arrived before woke culture acquired real social depth.

The Proper Debate

Paulo Núncio is one of the most visible CDS-PP deputies in this debate. He is well known for his ultraconservative positions and his opposition to woke culture. As coauthor of the CDS-PP bill on puberty blockers and hormonal treatment for minors, he is not initiating a new line of intervention but rather reaffirming a longstanding political agenda: for years, he has been one of the clearest exponents of culture-war politics within CDS-PP, and this initiative should be read as one more moment in that broader trajectory. In that sense, the issue of gender is not merely a policy question; it becomes a privileged arena for moral and political confrontation. Núncio has come to personify this agenda: he is the most visible CDS-PP figure in the field of culture-war politics and one of the most politically consequential voices of the Portuguese right on these matters.

What matters here, however, is not only the profile of one deputy, but the wider political grammar at work. The right is increasingly learning that moral conflict mobilizes more effectively than technocratic disagreement. Gender, in this setting, functions as a condensed symbol through which parties can speak about authority, family, childhood, education, and the limits of institutional neutrality.

That is why this debate exceeds the legal content of the bills themselves. At stake is a deeper dispute over who has the authority to name social reality: the individual, the family, the clinic, the school, or the state. Once framed in these terms, the controversy ceases to be a narrow disagreement over administrative procedure and becomes a struggle over moral sovereignty. This is the true grammar of culture wars: not distributive conflict, but symbolic boundary-making.

In Portugal, this grammar is still relatively recent in parliamentary form, but it is no longer marginal. What happened on 20 March 2026 suggests that the Portuguese right now sees legislative action on gender not as an isolated intervention, but as part of a broader attempt to reorganize the national moral agenda. Whether that attempt will prevail in law remains uncertain; that it has already shifted the political center of gravity is much harder to deny.

References 

Applebaum, A. (2021). Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism. Vintage.

Cardina, M. (2025). “Portugal’s legacies of colonialism and decolonization.” Current History, 124(860), 101–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2025.124.860.101

de Sousa Santos, B. (2016). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Routledge.

Ferreira Dias, J. (2025). Guerras culturais: Os ódios que nos incendeiam e como vencê-los. Guerra & Paz.

McWhorter, J. (2021). Woke racism: How a new religion has betrayed Black America. Portfolio.

Mounk, Y. (2025). The identity trap: A story of ideas and power in our time. Penguin Books.

Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595841

Smith, H. (2025). “Many races – one nation: Racial non-discrimination always the cornerstone of Portugal’s overseas policy.” In: C. Roldão, R. Lima, P. Varela, O. Raposo, & A. R. Matias (Eds.), Afroeuropeans: Identities, racism, and resistances (pp. 235–246). Routledge. 

Vala, J.; Lopes, D. & Lima, M. (2008). “Black immigrants in Portugal: Luso-tropicalism and prejudice.” Journal of Social Issues, 64(2), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.00562.x

Zúquete, J. P. (2022). Populismo: Lá fora e cá dentro. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos.