Expresso claims one of PM’s former company’s largest clients is major-league PSD donor
As hard as it is to ‘think national’ when the wider world appears to be spinning out of control, Portugal’s ‘legislative election campaign’ is still very much on – with latest opinion polls giving a slight advantage to PS Socialists.
It is not an advantage that would change the status quo in any radical way: parliament would still be ‘deadlocked’, with no main party having a solid working majority, but it highlights the pointlessness of this whole exercise: a kind of desultory game of ping-pong that is not seeing any strokes of brilliance.
The Intercampus poll, conducted for Correio da Manhã, puts PS Socialists on 24.4% of the vote; PSD (AD) on 23%, with CHEGA following up the rear with 14.5%.
Answers to questions posed however show how indecisive the whole process remains: a slight majority favour the Socialists, but a slight majority also prefer that Luís Montenegro stays as prime minister (meaning PS’s Pedro Nuno Santos is not getting through to people as he would like).
The question “who do you think would win if the elections were held today” elicits the overwhelming response that AD would win (54.4%, against 28% for the PS).
Head-to-heads are taking place on national television on most nights, albeit many claim to have given up watching the news as it has been so underwhelming and confusing in recent weeks.
As Intercampus director-general António Salvador stresses, pre-election polls are just opinions, after all. The decisions may only come at the ballot box (in a little more than one month’s time).
Meantime, the seemingly endless investigations into the prime minister’s ‘family business’ Spinumviva that led to this sorry pass continue, with Expresso reporting today that fuel company Joaquim Barros Rodrigues e Filhos paid almost €200,000 to Montenegro’s family business in 2022 and is also one of the PSD’s largest financial backers.
Why is this so much of a problem? Because of perceived conflicts of interest, which the prime minister has been at pains to deny, but which have nonetheless persisted to the extent that they precipitated the motion of confidence which led to the dissolution of parliament, and the calling of snap elections for the third time in three years. ND
Source: SIC Notícias/ Expresso/ Correio da Manhã
