One of the lighter moments in the campaign underway to select a new President of the Republic has taken place in Leiria this weekend with the equivalent of a ‘Screaming Lord Sutch’ for Portugal officially presenting his bid.
Manuel João Vieira has done this before (in 2011 and 2016). It is a process that requires at least 7500 signatures which he gathered recently.
The musician/ artist/ actor/ teacher and businessman believes the country needs a lot more love and attention. With this in mind, his promises to the electorate include’ a Ferrari for every Portuguese citizen’, €1000 per month for every Portuguese child born ‘to double the population’ and taps flowing freely with red wine.
Joining the race a little late in the day (television debates are already being held with the main candidates), the clue to this bid is in the slogan: “I will only give up if I am elected”.
This is the ‘loony bid’, in other words – an option for people who want to exercise their vote but don’t see any of the other candidates encapsulating what they hope for in a president.
That said, the polls are truly stirring up a hornet’s nest. From tipping the ‘non political candidate’, former naval admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo, in the very early days, they have gone from suggesting the PSD choice (and longtime political commentator) Luís Marques Mendes is in the lead to suddenly proclaiming the country ‘divided’ between André Ventura, leader of extreme right CHEGA, and the former admiral (who only a couple of weeks ago was portrayed as starting to lose momentum in this contest).
While the former admiral continues to insist he really isn’t interested in the polls, André Ventura seems to be so carried along by them that he is already saying he wants to revise the powers of the presidency should he be successful.
“If we want to take the role of president seriously, and justify the salary that we pay, and on what we spend on the presidency of the Republic, then the president has to have concrete and real powers”, Ventura told Lusa.
The reality is that these powers could only come from parliament, and it seems unlikely that Ventura would manage to swing that level of approval, even if he was sitting in Belém Palace. But his ambitions may come back to bite him, so to speak: “André Ventura defends that it is important to elect, for the first time, a head of state ‘outside the PS-PSD party system’ which for the last 50 years of democracy has made pacts over health, finances, banks, “in everything that is the public sector and has public influence”, writes SIC – not pointing out that the former admiral also fits this profile, and he does not want to revise the Constitution and amass greater powers.
For now, the country is being subjected to regular ‘television debates’ which commentators – and some of the candidates themselves – say have imparted very little.
What does seem certain is that Manuel João Vieira won’t be taking part in any of them – and thus we won’t be able to understand how the red wine was going to make its way into the mains water system (nor how households were going to be able to continue running appliances like washing machines and dish washers). Vieira however stresses that “absurdity is already part of political campaigns” (and few will disagree with him there).
“I want to be more absurd than Donald duck Trump”, he told SIC recently – but hopefully not quite as rude.
Source material: SIC/ Expresso
