Legislative 2022: 89,113 votes, no deputy elected. Legislative 2019: 221,774 votes, five delegates. Regional members in Madeira in 2019: 8,246 votes, three alternates. Regional Members of Madeira in 2015: 17,489 votes, seven delegates. Municipalities of 2021: 74,869 votes, 31 elected.
Municipalities of 2017: 134,099 votes, 41 elected. European 2019: 205,111 votes, one MEP. European 2009: 208,057 votes, two MEPs.
The data leaves no doubt. Centrists have lost votes in every election. And even in the polls, there seems to be no sign of recovery. Aximage’s most recent study for the DN, JN, and TSF places the CDS with 1.1% of voting intent – a value lower than the 1.60% obtained in the 2022 legislation that would see the removal of the CDS from the Assembly of the Republic dictated after 46 years of parliamentary life.
In Madeira, the CDS is also far from the “thin” 5.76% of 2019. Polls place the party at values close to 1%.
Towards the second national cycle of decline [o primeiro aconteceu entre 1980 e 1987: o CDS passou de 46 para 4 deputados] the party of Freitas do Amaral, Lucas Pires, Adriano Moreira, Manuel Monteiro, Ribeiro e Castro, Portas and Assunção Cristas, sank at the hand of Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos.
After this period of “taxi party” – between 1987 and 1991 – there was a period of recovery between 1995 and 2011, but in 2015 the centrist storm returned: 24 deputies elected in 2011, 18 in 2015, five in 2019 and zero in January 2022.
Which CDS?
Nuno Melo does not want a “CDS in distress”, nor “a CDS with an outstretched hand”, but he does not rule out the possibility of a PSD/CDS coalition for the Europeans of 2024 – which would not be a novelty at all. In the last 30 years, this alliance has happened three times: 1999, 2004 and 2014.
“In general terms, all right-wing coalitions [em legislativas] votes do not seem to add to what the PSD alone can achieve,” concludes the study on voting behavior conducted by the Center for Studies and Opinion Polls and by the Research Center of the Institute of Political Studies of the Catholic University of Portugal.
The reading that is made of parliamentary elections may not be so linear when European elections are at stake. Over the past three decades, the PSD has achieved better results in coalition with the CDS than alone.
“It would be a two-in-one. Better for the PSD and good for the CDS,” a central source refers to DN.
The idea even comes close to the words of Nuno Melo who, in an interview with DN, defended a political alternative to a center-right government that “necessarily includes the PSD, the CDS and the IL” and that “wants to prepare the party”. so that they gain muscle, remarry society and be read by voters as useful and important, bringing back those who voted CDS and voted Chega or IL in the last election.
The centrist leader’s arguments for party waters segregation follow two simplistic lines.
In the case of IL, the explanation is this: “I have no doubt that some people who voted for the CDS, looking at the Liberal Initiative, thought that the Liberal Initiative was a kind of modern CDS (…) The truth is that, apart from the billboards that are good, in everything else – excepted in the market in which the IL does not innovate, because it says nothing that the CDS did not say before, as the liberals have always had it in the CDS – the IL is much closer to the Bloco de Esquerda”.
In Chega’s case, Nuno Melo asks CDS voters that “maybe they turned their vote over to Chega in the last election, that they realize it has nothing to do with the CDS. A conservative party is not. A conservative that’s not party, it’s coffee talk”. And let them reflect on the fact that Ventura “confessed that evangelicals are a very important presence in Chega today” and that “one of the main political goals” is to integrate “the entire evangelical community in the near future.”
Doubts about growth
But will the CDS be able to reinvent itself and can the Europeans be the first step?
Riccardo Marchi, researcher at the Center for International Studies at ISCTE-IUL, doubts this will happen and gives three reasons. First: “Nuno Melo’s performance showed nothing special and it does not look like he will succeed in the near future. The speech was limited to claiming the classic DNA of that right wing (liberal-conservative, Christian- democratic personalist), even pushing for differentiation from the anti-Cheva right wing, in a strategy that promotes Chega more than the restoration of the CDS”.
The second reason lies in the fact that “possibly” Nuno Melo “is very busy internally structuring a party that, having lost its parliamentary representation, with all that that means in terms of public funding, must face a serious crisis. going through in terms of maintenance of the structure, from securing cadres to whom it is no longer possible to distribute (or promise to distribute) interesting incentives, to taking advantage of the local autarkic structure that, despite everything, still resists offers as a solid starting point for a new beginning”.
The third reason why Marchi sees no “great opportunity” for the CDS in Europe lies in the right’s “campaign issues” which will be “the rapprochement between the PP’s Populares and the ECR’s Conservatives. [Reformistas e Conservadores Europeus]against the background of the federal project, the war between Russia and Ukraine, immigration, the green agenda”.
Translated: “In this scenario, the PSD will lead the themes, whose line Paulo Rangel is part of the federalist PP wing, unavailable for alliances with the ECR, and it will be Chega who, on the one hand, ideally supports the PP -ECR axis, which however has the problem of being integrated into R&D [Identidade e Democracia] excluded from this axis and on the other hand will be accused of belonging to the group of pro-Russian sovereignists (with the French from the RN, the Italians from the League and the Germans from the AfD), who in fact have always and truly Atlantic, philo-American, western, pro-Ukrainian”.
Conclusion? “The debate will be so heated about federalism/anti-federalism, West/Russia, immigration, popular conservatives, etc. defends the researcher from the Center for International Studies at ISCTE-IUL.
Paula do Espírito Santo, professor and researcher at ISCSP/UL, understands that “the reaffirmation of the CDS-PP option in the European Parliament must be one of the main bets of the party, as an engine and political springboard, under penalty of loss this electoral test, does not definitively restore political space in the national parliament”.
That is to say, the “CDS-PP will be able to revive itself once it succeeds in presenting itself publicly as a solid and cohesive party, not fragmented, an essential aspect that will largely prevent the devaluation of the party motivated, at the last parliamentary elections”.
The sympathy of former enough leaders
Nuno Afonso, former leader of Chega, who confesses “great sympathy” for the CDS and “for its current president”, does not believe “that the CDS situation is reversible, even if there is support from the PSD and a new coalition” .
And the explanation is simple: “Doing the same thing, with the same people, is not reinvention”.
But there is the possibility, he believes, of “some growth (…) with everyone united and working” because “besides Nuno Melo there are people of great value and credibility such as Telmo Correia, Cecília Meireles, João Almeida “.
Ana Moisão, former leader of Chega, not only praised the “party that lacks democracy throughout its history and for the great political figures that compose it and are missed in the national political debate”, but believes that the fall is justified was due to the fact that IL had included the “more liberal electorate of the Adolfo Mesquita Nunes wing” and Chega had gone after the “more conservative electorate of the Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos wing”.
Also contributing to this, he understands, is “the fact” that the CDS “has been unable to break away from the image of a bourgeois and elitist party, unable to attract the masses, especially the younger, making it “very difficult for her to continue as one of the main political forces after the emergence of the two new right-wing parties”.
“Unless a rabbit is pulled out of the hat at the last minute, or one of the new right-wing parties turns out to be a huge disappointment to their voters, I honestly think, and with great regret, that the European elections will not change anything the current situation of the party,” he says.
For Jaime Nogueira Pinto, historian and political scientist, “the problem of the CDS-PP is parallel to that of the PSD: the CDS-PP has or had a space – the space of the conservative right, whose values, like it or not, are God, Fatherland, Family, Freedom”.
And the solution, as in the PSD, he defends, involves showing differentiation “in values, principles and political positions” and breaking “a climate of left-wing hegemony (…) throughout the electoral range, and even the ” centrão”.
Source: DN
