The former national advisor of the Liberal Initiative (IL), Nuno Simões de Melo, joined Chega, a party that hopes to help “achieve a historic result” in the parliamentary elections on March 10, 2024, “so that it can definitively to apply. as inevitable in national politics and as the only alternative to socialism and collectivism in Portuguese society”.
Among Simões de Melo’s arguments to join the party founded and led by André Ventura, “so that there is a future of hope for the new generations”, the similarity with Chega’s founding manifesto stands out. A party that, in the words of its new member, “wants less of a state in the economy, which privileges private initiative and individual freedom and which at the same time fights for the preservation of the family (the basic cell of society) and the nation” .
The decision of those who were considered the leader of IL’s conservative wing, the self-proclaimed “classical liberals”, will be announced on social media this Friday, the eve of November 25, after his withdrawal from the party chaired by Rui Rocha took place. takes place on April 25. He was then joined on his way out by twelve other members who expressed regret that IL had “through its actions, options and leadership, allowed itself to be seen as just another left-wing party,” namely because the Liberal delegates had voted in favor and chosen to remembering projects by PS and Bloco de Esquerda on the self-determination of gender identity in children in primary and nursery education.
The choice of November 25 to announce Chega’s membership is justified by Simões de Melo as the day to celebrate the “victory of multiparty democracy over totalitarianism”. The retired colonel, who was IL’s mayoral candidate in Mafra, implicitly criticizes the ‘red lines’ of Rui Rocha’s leadership in relation to Chega, arguing that in a democracy there cannot be ‘children and stepchildren’, as some say not being able to. consider themselves ‘owners of the regime’ and the rest must get their approval in order to exist.” Using the derogatory term that then US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used to describe Donald Trump’s supporters, he defends a democracy “where there are no pariah parties and their voters cannot be considered deplorable”.
Nuno Simões de Melo was a local candidate in Mafra and led a list for the National Council of IL at the last National Convention, which culminated in the election of Rui Rocha as Chairman of the Party’s Executive Committee. The ‘classical liberals’ elected four national councilors, who received about 5% of the vote, and defended the candidacy of deputy Carla Castro to succeed Cotrim Figueiredo. Of the four elected officials, three have already left the party: Simões de Melo, Mariana Nina and Nuno Carrasqueira.
More exits
Nuno Carrasqueira was one of 25 members of IL who announced a wave of withdrawals that would culminate on November 25. In the manifesto “This is not what they promised us”, revealed by Diário de Notícias, they lamented that “a project that could in fact change Portugal has become a caricature of what it proposed in 2019”. For the signatories, which also included former national councilor Diogo Saramago Ferreira and former municipal council candidates Diogo Prates and Fernando Figueiredo, “the proposal that IL defended as crucial in its political action – the ruthless struggle against the PS and socialism and united communism – softened and transfigured, by sheer political calculation.”
According to this group of 25 former members of the IL, who believe that the party has been transformed into a ‘regime party, without character and ambition’, the path the party has taken under the current leadership is ‘the result of giving in to vocal minorities”, “support and appeal to identity causes, in a register” does not include either woke upneither anti-woke up‘, hand in hand with the agendas of the extreme left and the radical left.”
Since the National Convention on January 21 and 22, former members of IL’s executive committees have also left in connection with Carla Castro’s candidacy for leadership. Namely that of Paulo Carmona, who at the beginning of the current term was advisor to the parliamentary group and would have been the party’s deputy if the deputy had succeeded Cotrim Figueiredo, and that of Vicente Ferreira da Silva, also a former advisor to the party. the parliamentary group.
Source: DN
