The IL leadership candidates played a “ping pong” this Saturday in the latter part of the first day of the convention, with Carla Castro’s list talking about “the smell of change” and Rui Rocha focusing on the country.
The tone was set by Carla Castro’s nominee for vice president, Paulo Carmona.
“It smells like change in this pavilion, it’s clear that the members want their party back, it smells like change,” he said.
Rui Rocha then used the available time on his list, starting with answering internal questions about nuclear financing and separation of powers, but focusing the political message on the answers the IL needs to give to the country.
“Out there, there are the Portuguese who want solutions for a stagnant country (…) And we, at IL, are not abandoning the Portuguese. We have solutions for the country and that is why we are going to fight,” he assured.
After a short intervention by the third leadership candidate, José Cardoso, who rejected the spirit of jubilation and said that the IL’s big struggle is “political literacy”, Carla Castro also volunteered to speak and new criticism of Rui’s list Rock behind to leave.
“We can’t want to say we are decentralizers in the morning, but in the afternoon we decide things in a cabinet, we can’t come out with union speeches and then come out aggressively to attack each other,” he charged.
The candidate left an appeal and a promise: “Tomorrow [domingo] vote for the M list and I guarantee that if I am a leader I will be a union leader and not a faction leader”.
With little time on the clock, Rui Rocha asked to speak again to guarantee that he would not speak again about IL’s internal funding, because the party elections “will decide something very important”, which is also the future of the country.
These interventions showed, through applause and boos, the division between the members present at the VII Convention of the IL and who will elect the party’s fourth president on Sunday.
However, some of the 2,300 registered members participate in the main assembly remotely and it is not enough to evaluate the hall’s ‘palmometer’ to anticipate the outcome of these elections.
The VII Convention of the Liberal Initiative takes place between today and Sunday in Lisbon’s congress center and will elect the successor to João Cotrim Figueiredo in the leadership of the party, who went from one to eight deputies in the last legislature.
In the first electoral convention in IL history (established in 2017), Rui Rocha and Carla Castro, both delegates and members of the outgoing board, and National Councilor José Cardoso compete for the presidency of the executive committee.
Source: DN
