Former PSD president Luis Filipe Menezes warned Luís Montenegro this Monday that he must “worry about a substantial recovery” of the electorate that votes for the Liberal Initiative and Chega, otherwise it will be “very difficult” for that party to return to government to become.

In Vila Nova de Gaia, in the Porto district, on the sidelines of a meeting of the Clube dos Pensadores, the former leader of the PSD believed that as a “politician” the Prime Minister “deserves all the points” because he knew how to “many controversies” surrounding the executive power, but that the continuity of the PS in government is also due to the lack of an alternative.

“[Luís Montenegro] You have to worry about the reality: until you substantially regain the electorate that currently votes for the Liberal Initiative (IL) and Chega, it will be very difficult to achieve the leadership of a majority that allows you to form a government become,” he said. Menezes was asked about the advice he would give to the current president of the PSD.

According to the former president of the Vila Nova de Gaia City Council: “Dr. Montenegro should think about how to oppose the PS in the first place and expose what is wrong with the PS.”

“Somehow, here or there, not always in the way I would like, I think it has more or less fulfilled that role,” he reflected.

Meneses therefore warned that Luís Montenegro should pay attention to the voters who vote for IL and Chega: “These voters for IL and Chega, the majority of them were voters for the PSD and CDS, so it is a matter of trying to vote again. “Identify them with the party, many of them are young. I think there is a significant part of the youth who vote for IL. It is necessary to find a speech that grabs them, that excites and mobilizes them,” he said.

“This is the big challenge for every PSD leader in the next two years until the parliamentary elections,” he stressed.

Luis Filipe Meneses also believed that if there were a right-wing alternative to the PS that would provide guarantees of stability, the actions of the President of the Republic would be different, although he recognizes the ability of the current Prime Minister to manage crises .

‘I must confess that I think the PS, namely the Prime Minister, has managed these controversies well [relacionadas com o Governo]. As a politician, a politician, he deserves the highest marks because there were really a lot of controversies, there were a lot of problems, a lot of the circumstances in the past caused governments to fall, maybe for a lot less, but there was no competence on the part of those governments. who ruled at the time to deal with these circumstances as Doctor António Costa did,” he analyzed.

However, Menezes emphasized that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s options are limited: ‘But what has strongly determined the intervention of the President of the Republic is that he does not believe that the measure of dissolving the Assembly and calling early elections would be taken, because An alternative scenario would arise and in that case the president himself would be at stake and then we would have a regime crisis,” he explained.

“If guns are pointed at the president for not decomposing, I think the guilty one is not the president, but the one who cannot convince the president that the Portuguese would actually build an alternative,” he defended.

Europeans “don’t matter at all”

Menezes also opined that the 2024 European elections will not affect Luís Montenegro’s government or leadership because “they are not interesting at all”.

“I like to keep my feet on the ground. I think the European elections are not interesting for the Portuguese, they are a mixture of a penalty vote and the tiriricas that exist,” said the former mayor of Vila Nova of Gaia. .

At the end of the session, Luís Filipe Menezes, speaking to journalists, emphasized that only if there were “something extraordinary” for the PS or PSD, those elections would be relevant: “If the PS came out of these elections with 20% come, I think that the President of the Republic should take measures, or if the PSD emerged from these elections with 20%, PSD activists should take measures,” he explained.

“I think none of this will happen, that there will be more or less balanced results,” he said, arguing that local elections are becoming increasingly relevant.

“The local elections are much more important for the PSD than the European elections, because with this dominance that the PS has had for almost twenty years, plus the fact that it won the last three local elections, they consolidated a model that Portugal had never experienced . Where there was a majority in government, there was another in local authorities and that was a balance,” he explained.

Luís Filipe Menezes believed that “the enormous concentration of power in one party in local and central power is not at all healthy for democracy” and therefore, he argued, “the PSD must be able to do everything it can to” the 2025 round to win. local elections.

Still in the upcoming local elections, when asked again if he would run again for the Gaia Chamber, Luís Filipe Menezes answered no, but left a warning for the future: “I said a long time ago that that I no longer had an active political life. that I had no intention of holding managerial, elective positions in the future. That is still my intention today, I have not changed my mind yet,” he said.

“Always and never are cursed words, but that is not my intention at this time. Only time will tell whether I will change my mind or not,” he warned.