Voting in Portugal’s presidential elections has already begun (more than 218,000 voters are enrolled for early voting today) – but the outcome in what will almost certainly only be a ‘first ballot’ next Sunday is still very much up in the air.
Latest polls put the PS candidate António José Seguro ‘in the lead’ with 20.8% of voting intentions, closely trailed by João Cotrim de Figeiredo (Iniciativa Liberal) with 20.1%, André Ventura (CHEGA) with 19.8% and Henrique Gouveia e Melo (independent) with 17.4%.
The government’s preferred candidate – indeed the candidate underpinning the government’s sense of popularity – Luís Marques Mendes, (with 15.7%), appears to have fallen solidly back into 5th place – albeit he himself believes the polls are massively mistaken.
What is ‘curious’ for people watching this quite vitriolic of presidential ‘races’ is the fact that 100 ‘personalities’ in the centre-right of the nation’s politics (mainly people from the PSD party that leads the AD coalition government) have published a manifesto, supporting not Luís Marques Mendes but Henrique Gouveia e Melo – the man Marques Mendes has said, time and again, is not politically equipped for the job.
Why would these personalities be seen to be ‘turning’ on their party’s / parties’ choice of candidate?
This is the interesting part: they see in Gouveia e Melo a figure not only who has “a sense of statehood and the gravitas necessary to represent Portugal in accordance with the respect, dignity and honour that our history demands” but someone who “due to his career (in the military) has the potential to be transversal to society as a whole (…) equidistant from all parties and independent of any corporate or sectoral interests”.
That last attribute is ‘key’: it blows through what the signatories refer to as “the diminishing of hope and confidence in politics and its main actors”.
This has always been the former admiral’s ‘allure’: that he is not part of the system (not even in the way that CHEGA leader André Ventura is – within it but trying always to agitate and bring things down).
Say the manifesto’s extremely well-known signatories (including former members of governments/ former mayors) “in the presidential elections on (January) 18, we must be able to choose the candidate who best suits the needs facing Portugal.
“We need a President of the Republic who, through their knowledge and professional experience, has the right profile for the times we live in; who is deeply knowledgeable about global geopolitics, a staunch Europeanist and a democrat capable of helping to drive the reforms that the regime and society so badly need.”
Current times require “courageous and forthright attitudes in the genuine defence of the country’s best interests (…)” especially in view of the “complex global political and military situation” – and against the backdrop of “notorious discontent over the degradation of the quality of representative democracy”.
Signatories of this manifesto (intensely irritating for a government backing Luís Marques Mendes) include former PSD MPs Adão Silva, Isabel Meireles, Manuela Aguiar, Mónica Quintela and Paulo Mota Pinto, former regional governor of Madeira Alberto João Jardim and former PSD ministers Ângelo Correia, António Capucho, David Justino, Fernando Negrão, Henrique Chaves, Carmona Rodrigues and Miguel Cadilhe. There are also a number of CDS signatories.
Source: ZAP/ LUSA
