Main candidates have blanked plan for televised debates
Portugal’s president is doing his best to ‘incentivise’ citizens to vote in the European elections on June 9, following the main parties fielding candidates refusing point blank to take part in televised debates.
The decision by the PS and PSD has inflamed smaller parties, which have railed about a perceived “attack on democracy”, and basic ‘bad faith’.
The official reason for blanking the debates has been that they detract from street campaigning. But leader of Iniciativa Liberal Rui Rocha claims this is simply a ruse: the PS and PSD want to “hide their candidates” from scrutiny, and from people seeing the merit, for example, of candidates fielded by smaller parties.
With regard to CHEGA, Rui Rocha told journalists at the Alentejo agricultural fair Ovibeja that this party also would normally have complained, but this time “it has an interest in keeping its candidate hidden because he is sympathetic to the Putin regime and the regime in Russia”.
Bizarrely, a rural agricultural fair in southern Portugal acted as a magnet last week to the country’s movers and shakers – all of them only too ready to say what was on their minds.
In president Marcelo’s case, it was that many citizens might not have voting on their minds – because the European elections fall over another of Portugal’s famous ‘long weekends’.
He told reporters thronging around him against the backdrop of a sheep-shearing demonstration: “I’m going to vote early, a week in advance, and I would advise many Portuguese to do so because there’s that long weekend on the 9th…” in which people may “have their lives scheduled” and find it “more difficult” to vote.
The president’s exhortations were just the latest of a conveyor belt of reminders and entreaties to voters to ‘take the European elections seriously’. The problem, in Portugal’s case, is the timing: nationals have had their fill of elections/ political upheaval and ‘promises’. It is almost certainly safe to say that enthusiasm for elections is not riding high.
