Montenegro demands CHEGA remove all billboards associating him with José Sócrates
Portugal’s caretaker prime minister Luís Montenegro has filed a lawsuit calling for CHEGA to remove all billboard posters associating him with former PS Socialist leader, José Sócrates.
The lawsuit, in the form of an injunction with the Lisbon Administrative Court, considers the billboards defamatory. Mr Montenegro wants them removed within the next five days.
Confronted with this turn of events , CHEGA leader André Ventura has said he has no intention of removing the posters, suggesting Montenegro has a problem with democracy and freedom of expression.
But for all CHEGA’s bluster, this is not auguring well for the ‘measured, informative’ election campaign that political pundits have said is required. CHEGA’s posters clearly seek to project the impression that the PSD leader is corrupt (as corrupt as José Sócrates is seen to have been, albeit he has not yet been tried in a court of law).
According to SIC, the Lisbon Administrative Court has “invoked the right to a fair hearing”, meaning that André Ventura will now have his chance to address the court before it decides whether or not the offending posters should come down.
These posters are already up in various parts of the country – as have been others devised by CHEGA, for example, suggesting that they (CHEGA) were responsible for the abolition of motorway tolls on former SCUT-highways (when it was in fact a combination of parties that ‘won’ this welcome victory). ND
