The polls could be more encouraging for the PSD, as the PS continues to lead many after the Prime Minister’s resignation, following the Operation Influencer, and the preparation for the parliamentary elections on March 10, 2024 does not seem particularly ideal, but Luís Montenegro hopes to start reversing these difficulties during the 41st Congress of the Social Democrats, which will take place this Saturday.
Although members of Congress were called to the municipal sports complex of the city of Almada to vote on a proposal to revise the statutes, the call was made at the beginning of the summer, when António Costa was preparing to replace Cavaco Silva as prime minister. Although Montenegro governs in a democracy, it knows that it cannot miss the opportunity to give the impression that the PSD is the only alternative to the PS. And above all, it is a better alternative for the Portuguese than what they have known for the past eight years.
“The most important thing is that a wave of hope comes from that pavilion that reaches people’s hearts,” Social Democratic Vice President Margarida Balseiro Lopes told DN. To the message that ‘there are people who want to do politics differently’, an allusion to the sequence of ‘business and affairs’ that escalated to the discovery of envelopes full of money in the office of the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff. “At such an important moment for the country, it is essential to provide an alternative to a process of degradation of political life,” he concludes.
This alternative, which Montenegro will try to convey to the country in its two interventions, at the beginning and end of the work of the 41st Congress, aims “to show a PSD that speaks about the problems in people’s lives ”, emphasizes Secretary General Hugo Soares. , which refers to priorities such as education, in which social democrats defend the need to replace the careers of full-time teachers, the partnership between the social sector and the National Health Service to resolve appointment backlogs, the housing problem and a tax levy that “many friendlier to the middle class and young people leaving the country.”
Without other former leaders besides Manuela Ferreira Leite, but with the guarantee that the National Political Commission will count on the “strengthening” of interventions by former rulers, such as José Luís Arnaut and Nuno Morais Sarmento, another former Social Democratic minister who wants doing. Almada, Miguel Poiares Maduro, says he hopes the 41st Congress “will be an opportunity from the start to demonstrate that the PSD is united in the goal of demonstrating an alternative to the Portuguese.” And more importantly, it remains “the only alternative in terms of governance.”
To this end, Poiares Maduro believes that it is necessary “to show the Portuguese that the PSD has a different view on the exercise of power than the PS”. A message reinforced by Margarida Balseiro Lopes, for whom the main candidates for the post of Secretary General of the PS, José Luís Carneiro and Pedro Nuno Santos, cannot be separated from the bad diagnosis she makes of the administration of António Costa . “Each of them bears maximum responsibility for what happened.”
Structural problems
However, among the Social Democrats there are people who do not forget the mistakes made by the party leadership in recent times and are concerned about the election scenarios three and a half months before the parliamentary elections. For Luís Tavares Bravo, president of the Barreiro PSD council, it is necessary that the Almada meeting comes out with a “message from the party president to the country” that is more precise and astute than so far. “There is a mobilizing message missing that the PS has led us to moral bankruptcy after three financial bankruptcies,” says the economist, who hopes that the party will “heal the wounds opened with the Troika” and also to to broaden horizons. “We have stopped talking about what we want the country to do in the next ten years,” he laments.
Former Social Democratic MP André Pardal also points to “three structural problems” that Montenegro must overcome to return the PSD to the power it lost in 2015. Considering that it has become a “monothematic party”, focused on the right accounts and tax reduction, and limited to responding to “90% of the areas that interest people”, it reiterates that “the PSD has closed itself in and does not attract quality people”, which is reflected in the absence of a “government shadow”. ” with “credible people who know people”.
Among those closest to the PSD leader, there is a common voice that it is still too early to propose future ministers, especially since the eventual government of Luís Montenegro will always be determined by agreements to be negotiated with other parties Closed. And even the liberal initiative will necessarily differ from the ‘routine’ agreements with the CDS.
Arrival at the room
Also on the stage of the municipal sports complex of the city of Almada will be the ‘elephant in the room’ called Chega, who is benefiting from increasingly favorable polls, which complicate the balance of power with a PSD that refuses management agreements with André Ventura’s party.
“We should not become too depressed or too enthusiastic about the polls,” emphasizes Cristiano Cabrita, vice-president of the Albufeira Chamber and member of the PSD’s National Political Commission. At a time when Chega claims leadership in voting intentions in the Algarve, it points to responsibility for the way António Costa’s executives “repeatedly failed the region”.
For his part, Poiares Maduro responds that the real elephant in the room “is what the PS does not want to be seen,” normalizing “a certain way of governing with ethically and politically reprehensible behavior.”
Source: DN
