Left insists right ‘must say whether it will accept left-wing minority’
Critics have already stressed that a lot of pre-election fuss right now centres on a very temporal scenario: ‘will the right accept a left-wing minority government’ (if that is the way voting on March 10 pans out)?
Left wing leader Pedro Nuno Santos has already said PS Socialists would accept a right wing minority government if his party lost the elections, and could not summon up a left wing majority.
But PSD leader Luís Montenegro has repeatedly balked at answering the question, saying only that he is in this fight to win, and become Portugal’s next prime minister.
Yesterday’s ‘leaders’ debate’ on television – fleetingly crashed by climate activists (with some paint thrown) – saw the first half hour focused on this one almost ‘short-term problem’, considering the number of much larger issues stacking up for a new government.
The second half centred on Justice – in the context that two governments have been toppled by recent investigations, later ‘undermined’ by presiding judges (see story to come).
And as commentators have pointed out, this fixation that parties of the left have on who will throw their lot in behind whom ‘if and when’, is really not that important in the wider scheme of things.
What is important is which party has the answers for the problems assailing Portugal right now (principally the chronic lack of accessible housing, ditto health/ education/ justice; the employment issues of the country’s security forces, and the very issue of survival for Portuguese farmers, and so on) – and to this end, the latest polls do indeed put the right well in the lead:
Universidade Católica suggests 35% of the country is behind the PSD-led AD alliance, with only 29% of voters saying they will vote for a return of PS Socialists.
This seems to have goaded the current minister of interior administration – standing as the MP for Braga – into seeing more conspiracies: José Luís Carneiro was the minister who sought to blame police unrest on “extremist movements”; today he has described “hidden negotiations” between AD and ‘other parties’, “challenging the coalition to clarify this weekend whether it will viabilise a PS government”, writes Lusa
According to Carneiro, Pedro Nuno Santos, has already shown that he “puts the interests of the country above party interests“, by committing to making an AD government viable if he doesn’t win the elections or if there is no left-wing majority.
This is “what AD has not yet been able to do, taking refuge in the taboo of waiting for the election results.
“I think it has a duty to the country to explain what it will do if the PS doesn’t win with an absolute majority. That’s what Pedro Nuno Santos asked in the debate and so far he hasn’t had a political answer,” Mr Carneiro lamented, before saying: “I am told that there are some hidden negotiations between the AD parties and other parties regarding the future (…) The Portuguese have the right to know what is being negotiated behind the scenes.”
All this points to more ‘demonisation’ of CHEGA, arguably the furthest-right right wing party in these elections, and one with a fairly healthy percentage of national support (roughly 17%), which it has said it will not be using to ‘viabilise’ a PS Socialist government.
CHEGA leader André Ventura has also countered Mr Carneiro’s information, saying there are positively no negotiations ongoing between PSD/ AD and his party, albeit the post-electoral future does indeed suggest a ‘right wing majority’, between AD and CHEGA.
“This means that solutions for governability will have to be found”, he said today.
