On what CHEGA leader André Ventura has labelled an “historic day” for his party (due to the approval of a ban on burqas in public spaces), it is also a day in which a former political ally has written an excoriating piece about him, accusing Ventura of being everything from a “narcissistic predator”, to a man with “a destructive autocratic impulse”, which “makes him impossible to become a responsible leader”.
Historian and university professor, Mithá Ribeiro was one of the founders of CHEGA and consequently close to Ventura in the party’s early years.
According to the text he has written in Observador today, it was the fact that André Ventura left Ribeiro out of the shadow-government he has put together that propelled the latter’s exit from the party, and subsequent excoriating opinion article.
“Fulfilling the first duty imposed by the political programme approved by the National Council of Sagres (2021) proved impossible for a narcissistic leader, as it forced him to decentralise CHEGA from his person (individual) and refocus it on a universal and abstract civilisational value (collective),” writes the man responsible for CHEGA’s political programme.
Mithá Ribeiro says that “the needle of collective responsibility never moved” at CHEGA, which for activists and supporters was nothing more than “André’s party.”
“André Ventura is too intelligent not to understand, after four years, that he is the first and main traitor to the political essence formally established by his own party, but his inability to view the environment without a narcissistic filter drives him on an insane crusade against the collective subject,” Ribeiro continues, accusing his former ally of a “destructive autocratic impulse (…) a personality trait that makes him impossible to become a responsible leader.”
This drive – Ribeiro adds – “feeds depressing, morally dissolving and socially damaging personal interdependencies in the hard core of its power in the case of government”.
In the article, entitled “The 7 Deadly Sins of the Narcissistic Predator,” Mithá Ribeiro warns that “handing over power to a politician with such a psychological profile is like building a concrete wall against the social use of reason, and heading towards the paradise of the ignorant.”
“The mysteries of CHEGA never leaving the Boss’s restricted bubble of issues, and the impossibility of attracting competent citizens, who abound in the right-wing political field, but only function in contexts of respect and appreciation for their existential autonomy and knowledge, are being dispelled,” he continues.
Mithá Ribeiro says that André Ventura “changed Portugal forever by opening the doors of freedom to the right,” but insists: “his toxic personality poisons what he himself sowed in a right that can no longer allow itself to be childish, primitive, immoral, irrational, irresponsible (or) submissive to a master.”
CHEGA’s parliamentary group announced the resignation of Mithá Ribeiro on September 22, without revealing the reasons for his decision.
The following week, Mithá Ribeiro announced his withdrawal from the ‘race’ for mayor of Pombal (in the municipal elections held last Sunday).
Mithá Ribeiro was elected MP for CHEGA in the last three parliaments (15th, 16th and 17th legislatures), always for the Leiria constituency. He was reappointed as secretary of the Assembly of the Republic in June, after the legislative elections in May.
Source material: LUSA
