University professor and historian José Neves, a former communist militant, argues that the next PCP secretary general will have the challenge of restoring the party’s presence on the ground given the lack of political mobilization of citizens.
Speaking to Lusa, José Neves believes that the choice of an unknown name in the media sphere is not surprising if one considers the profile of the name that earned a “broad consensus” among the members of the Central Committee: a man of the unit, an employee, with popular roots, recognized, inside and outside the PCP, he says, conciliatory capacities and openness.
“We can read here that the main orientation of this choice has to do with the ability of the PCP to restore its presence in society, on the ground, in territories, in companies, in social and cultural environments. And that corresponds with a correct diagnosis,” he considered. José Neves, President of the Institute of Contemporary History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa – coordinator and one of the authors of the anthology of texts PCP 1921-2021, by Tinta da China.
Twenty years after the last internal crisis — which pitted renovators against orthodox in intense debates about PCP identity and the fear of degeneracy — this debate is “obsolete,” the university professor opined.
At the time, in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, the researcher was active in the Portuguese Communist Youth, a time of internal debates on the policy of alliances and what line the party should take to assert itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Today “that doesn’t exist”, especially after seeing the communist general secretary, Jerónimo de Sousa, take the initiative in 2015 to give terms of governance to a minority PS, he stressed.
For José Neves, the causes of the PCP’s loss of influence – electorally and socially – do not lie in a communication problem, they cannot be solved with “magic solutions”, nor do they depend on “more or less media” figures.
“The problem facing the PCP is not only getting the message across effectively. The challenges that arise are the shortcomings in the political mobilization of the citizens. For the PCP, this dynamic, created from the bottom up, is from the construction of networking is essential,” he said.
José Neves underlined that “given the political speeches, texts and interventions” of Paulo Raimundo, “it can be concluded that the PCP understands the need to build, strengthen or expand political networks on the ground, associative, social and work-related “.
“From this point of view, it is not a choice limited to the horizon of the next electoral dispute,” he said.
Thus was elected a leader capable of running from scratch, in a scenario of economic and social crisis and political demobilization, exacerbated, among other things, by the wear and tear caused by the alliance that allowed the PS minority to rule. This is exacerbated by the traces left by the pandemic, namely a certain detachment from the basic structure on which the PCP is based, as one top communist leader admitted to Lusa.
Paulo Raimundo, who will be the first leader of a left party in Portugal born after the April 25 revolution [nasceu em 24 de setembro de 1976), tem, além de um perfil com características agregadoras, experiência em tarefas de organização, fazendo atualmente a ligação entre o Secretariado e as organizações regionais do Norte e como responsável, na Comissão Política, pela Direção da Organização Regional de Braga.
Paulo Raimundo tinha 24 anos quando o PCP preparava o XX Congresso, em 2000, num dos momentos mais dramáticos de discussão interna, que culminou em processos disciplinares a altos dirigentes e gerou uma debandada de militantes e simpatizantes.
Nesse Congresso, ficou enterrado o projeto de renovação como o queriam destacados militantes como João Amaral, Egdar Correia, já falecidos, e o histórico Carlos Brito, e foi também nesse Congresso que Paulo Raimundo subiu à Comissão Política do PCP.
José Neves, à altura militante e identificado com o movimento renovador, recorda alguns desses debates internos, na segunda metade dos anos 90 e na preparação do Congresso de 2000, lembrando Paulo Raimundo como “alguém a quem se reconhecia uma capacidade de diálogo e de escuta”.
“Era alguém que, independentemente de as suas posições serem identificadas como opostas às dos renovadores, se reconhecia uma capacidade de diálogo e de escuta, uma vontade de manter as pontes, uma atitude mais reconciliatória”, afirmou.
Raimundo já entra com esse registo conciliatório no Comité Central do PCP em 1996, e na Comissão Política em 2000, acumulando a experiência de tarefas de organização que já tinha tido, enquanto membro do Secretariado da JCP, nos anos 90.
A ascensão deste jovem militante deu-se aliás, sublinha José Neves, durante os mandatos de Carlos Carvalhas como secretário-geral, e numa altura em que o setor intelectual predominava nos organismos de direção executiva.
“E não é um sujeito crispado, era uma pessoa que lidava bem com a crítica interna”, assinala o investigador, que se desfiliou do PCP em 2001.
Source: DN
