CHEGA’s André Ventura believes PM ‘running scared’
The two ‘populist’ candidates for the Presidency of the Republic to whom the prime minister alluded yesterday have both hit back at his attempts to pull in voters for PSD candidate Luís Marques Mendes.
CHEGA leader André Ventura says Montenegro shows he is ‘afraid’ that Ventura will make it through to the second round (as polls have been predicting for weeks, if not months), while Henrique Gouveia e Melo believes Montenegro is actually trying to influence voters.
Speaking to reporters during a visit today to the Delta factory in Campo Maior, the former Chief of Staff of the Navy stressed that if elected President of the Republic, he will have a “constructive and institutional relationship” with the government, but that does not mean the prime minister can “condition the Portuguese to choose a president that he thinks suits him.”
“I think the prime minister was wrong, because we must not forget that, even as president of the PSD, he is still a prime minister. He cannot dissociate the two things. And he will have to live with the future President of the Republic, whoever that may be,” warned the former admiral.
As for being populist, Gouveia e Melo returned to the self-description he has always used: he is ‘in the political centre, a defender of a social economy”.
“Portugal needs a president who is an arbiter of the system, who is balanced. Being a puppet of a government is not good for the system, not least because the government does not even have an absolute majority,” he added.
In the former military man’s viewpoint there are “two candidates from the system” in the race for Belém: one who wants to be president “to help the government” (Luís Marques Mendes), and another who wants to be president “to oppose the government in some way” (António José Seguro).
“A President of the Republic must be balanced and independent, but that independence is perfectly called into question, because what we have are truly partisan candidates,” he said – stressing that “neither (Marques Mendes, nor Seguro) can get the full support of their parties” (which could be why this contest has been so ‘open’ from the outset…)
“The prime minister can call me whatever he wants”, Gouveia e Melo concluded. “But I am not what he calls me, because I have never been a populist, and you journalists know very well that I say things, and adopt an attitude that has nothing to do with populism. I don’t say the easy things,” he said.
“In my whole life, if I hadn’t been moderate and balanced, there might have been many accidents throughout my career (…) I had to make very difficult decisions on many occasions. And the most obvious proof, although I don’t want to keep talking about it, was what happened during the pandemic” (when Gouveia e Melo coordinated the vaccination programme).
Source: LUSA
