“What happened was a national shame,” said André Ventura, at the end of another meeting with specialists at Infarmed, in Lisbon, about the epidemiological situation in Portugal.


The politician and leader of Chega criticised the “dual criteria”, of banning “public events, some of them cultural and sporting”.


“But we continue to have demonstrations, generally more associated with the left, to whom everything is allowed and to whom nothing is prohibited,” he said, without ever directly referring to the demonstrations against racism.


He said it was a “national shame”, given that “the Portuguese have been confined for months” and then they see images of demonstrations.
“However noble the reasons” of the demonstrations, he said, they cannot “be demanding that the parties, the sectors of the civil and business society comply with rules and that there is another part of society that feels unpunished and without any need to comply to rules”.

On 6 June, thousands of Portuguese took to the streets in demonstrations against racism in some Portuguese cities, in solidarity with other actions of the kind that evoke the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American who died on 25 May in Minneapolis (USA), after a white policeman pressed his knee onto his neck for about eight minutes in a detention operation.


During the demonstrations in Portugal, many wore a mask, but social distancing was far from being fulfilled in many cases.