As Portugal’s annual internal security report – the Relatório Anual de Segurança Interna, or RASI 2025 – lands on desks in Lisbon, it paints a picture that should make even the most optimistic progressive blush. Hate crimes jumped 6.7% last year to 449 recorded incidents. Online extremism and youth radicalisation are flagged as prime drivers.
Portugal’s domestic intelligence service, the Serviço de Informações de Segurança (SIS) – the country’s main agency for countering internal threats such as terrorism and radicalisation – has repeatedly warned of a rising climate of insecurity specifically targeting the Jewish community. Meanwhile, Portugal’s criminal investigation police, the Polícia Judiciária, has noted a clear worsening of antisemitic acts, including vandalism at symbolic Jewish sites such as the Sinagoga do Porto.
One might be forgiven for thinking this is the work of hooded neo-Nazis lurking in the shadows. Far from it. The most glaring cases bear the fingerprints of a radical-left rhetoric that has gone mainstream in academia, media and activist circles.
Take the ordeal of Bar Harel, an Israeli-Jewish PhD student at the University of Coimbra. After October 7, 2023, Harel endured swastika graffiti, stickers declaring “Zionists should carry a certificate to prove they’re human” and “Beware of Zionists”, posters demanding his expulsion, doxxing, physical assault for daring to display an Israeli flag, and death threats telling him “your family deserves a second Holocaust”. University authorities waved it all away as “freedom of expression” or mere “figures of speech”.
When Harel sought help, the student ombudsman suggested he needed psychiatric treatment. Portugal’s national Ombudsman eventually delivered a scathing rebuke in early 2026, accusing the university of “grave” passivity and ordering it to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. By then Harel had already fled the country in September 2025 under security alerts from Israeli and American embassies. The campus and city, meanwhile, remained littered with posters glorifying Hezbollah and Hamas figures – acts that Portuguese law technically criminalises as terrorist propaganda, yet somehow escape enforcement.
The irony is almost poetic. Coimbra, cradle of one of Europe’s oldest universities, now echoes the 1930s playbook: dismiss antisemitism as isolated excess while courting the very ideologies that thrive on it.
Nor is the hostility confined to lecture halls. In the run-up to Eurovision 2026, Portuguese public broadcaster RTP workers and over 1,100 artists – including local figures – issued open letters demanding a boycott of Israel’s participation in the Festival da Canção. Framed as a noble stand against “genocide” and “normalisation”, the campaign perfectly illustrates how anti-Israel activism has become the socially acceptable face of antisemitism. While Portugal’s far-left parties and their fellow travellers cheer these boycotts as “moral responsibility”, the RASI report quietly documents the real-world consequences: a measurable rise in threats, online incitement and physical intimidation against Jews who have nothing to do with Israeli policy.
The pattern is unmistakable. Far-left discourse – from university corridors to cultural manifestos – has mainstreamed the idea that Jews are fair game if they refuse to disavow Israel. The same parties that lecture about “punching up” at power structures suddenly discover nuance when the targets are Jewish students, synagogues or cultural events. Meanwhile, the rest of Portuguese society watches in polite silence, comforted by the old national myth of tolerance and the Sephardic “golden visa” narrative.
RASI 2025 is not alarmist propaganda; it is official data. The SIS warnings are not Zionist conspiracy theories; they are intelligence assessments. And the victims – a harassed PhD student forced to abandon his doctorate, a community watching its synagogues defaced – are not abstract statistics. They are the human cost of a political culture that has decided certain hatreds are progressive.
Portugal has long prided itself on being a safe haven. The question now is whether its far-left guardians will allow it to remain one – or whether the 1930s whispers in Coimbra and the boycott brigades at RTP are merely the opening act of something far darker. The RASI numbers reveal a growing unease.
Sofia Afonso Ferreira is the Executive Director of StandWithUs Portugal.
She currently divides her time between Lisbon and Tel Aviv while working on a book about the war in the Middle East.
