“Configuration in the center, open to the right and left”
I am not in a position to be very enthusiastic about this declaration of a cycle,” João Bosco Mota Amaral, former President of the Assembly of the Republic and founder of the PSD in the Azores, told DN, after being asked whether he coalition sees the next parliamentary elections, between social democrats and centrists, the so-called Democratic Alliance, as a cycle that is being closed.
“The Democratic Alliance between Francisco Sá Carneiro [fundador do PSD] and the CDS, at the time with professors Freitas do Amaral and Adelino Amaro da Costa, also took with it the reformers and the first ecologists, who were from the PPM [Partido Popular Monárquico], by Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles, has nothing to do with the later PPMs,” Mota Amaral emphasizes, adding that “the reformers were prominent activists of the Socialist Party”. “That is why the democratic alliance clearly presented a configuration in the center, open to right and left. I don’t know if you want that now, but I’m also a bit far away from these things, I can’t speak out,” Mota Amaral admits.
The history of the PSD begins in 1969, with the birth of the liberal wing, when Francisco Sá Carneiro and Francisco Pinto Balsemão joined the lists of the National Union, when they began to “fight for the political democratization of society”, according to the PSD website. However, it was only after April 25, 1974 that the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), on May 6 of that year, took shape, by the same hands of Sá Carneiro and Pinto Balsemão. “A center-left party, with a social democratic character, based on the principles of Freedom, Equality and Solidarity,” according to the PSD page. In 2024 it will be 50 years ago.
“The PSD has always been a social party. Sá Carneiro even presented her as a social democrat in an interview he gave to Jaime Gama for the newspaper República, and the PSD only did not continue with that acronym from the beginning, because posters of the PSD appeared on the eve of its foundation of an Independent Social Democratic Party, which subsequently never went ahead, never appeared, and the issue of this designation was taken up by this group of people, who we do not know exactly who they were, never showed any sign of life again after that. What is certain is that the PSD, the Social Democratic Party, had to present itself as the People’s Democratic Party,” Mota Amaral explains.
‘The CDS headquarters is robbed in the aftermath of the first demonstration’
The CDS was founded with great trust, in an environment of freedom and democracy, and in a short time this environment was corrupted, fell into crisis and disappeared after September 28. [de 1974]”, recalls DN José Ribeiro e Castro, who is not one of the party’s founders but joined a week later.
The CDS, like the PSD and the Carnation Revolution itself, was born in 1974, under the leadership of Diogo Freitas do Amaral and Adelino Amaro da Costa. It will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary on July 19 next year. In these fifty years, it was one of the parties in the governance arc – more precisely seven times, as current party chairman Nuno Melo DN recalls -, in coalitions with the PS and PSD, in the first constitutional governments.
“September 28 is not as important a date as March 11 would be in 1975. But it is a date that marks, shall we say, the beginning of the revolutionary process. [Processo Revolucionário em Curso ou PREC]. And shortly after that date, on November 4, the CDS headquarters were robbed and destroyed in the aftermath of the party’s first meeting in Lisbon,” recalls José Ribeiro e Castro, adding “that it was not a CDS meeting , but a Centrist meeting. Youth meeting.” ‘In Teatro São Luís this meeting is boycotted by the extreme left and therefore a series of incidents begins in the center of Lisbon. We began to experience what the difficult times of the PREC must have been like for the CDS. We were a buffer for the democratic parties, in short, we would have difficulties at the Crystal Palace Congress in January 1975, then a new attack and destruction of the CDS headquarters on March 11, 1975, and then the high-density crossing of the PREC,” he recalls .
If on the one hand the beginning of the CDS was a fun process for “a twenty-year-old boy,” Ribeiro e Castro confesses, on the other hand “it was a time when one of the goals of the extreme left was to destroy the CDS. That’s why we were a target to hit. And it was ultimately always in this spirit that the CDS asserted itself and made its difference, always as its own, non-socialist brand,” he concludes.
The CDS left the General Assembly of the Republic on January 30, 2022, after failing to elect deputies in the parliamentary elections. Now the Democratic Alliance is preparing to restore the coalition with the PSD – for the elections scheduled for March 10, 2024.
Source: DN
