The president of the Social Democrats defended this Thursday that his party led “the four best governments of Portuguese democracy”, in an intervention saying that the PSD still cannot be defined as left or right.
The launch of the book “Sá Carneiro – The Absence of Leadership”, the fifth volume of political texts by the founder of the PSD, took place at the Assembly of the Republic and was attended by the greatest militant of the PSD, Francisco Pinto Balsemão , founder and former prime minister.
Luís Montenegro, who signed the foreword to this book, began by pointing out that, as in the 1970s, the discussion of the PSD’s ideological position remains a subject of discussion and “is never finished”.
“The most important thing in the thought expressed here, which also reflects this premise, is that we are neither a right-wing party nor a left-wing party. We will be a moderate party from the center – centre-right, centre-left, we will cover this area of thought a little bit – and we will always have this discussion within us, it is part of our identity”he claimed.
For Luís Montenegro, more than an ideology, “above all, the PSD has a very strong bond with people, with the people”.
“As Francisco Sá Carneiro said, we are a popular party, it is no coincidence that our first title was the Popular Democratic Party,” he said, defending that the PSD is the party “that deals with the dignity of people, that wants giving every opportunity the opportunity to achieve your goals in life”.
On this point he defended that “at the head” of the state’s duties should be the defense of public schools, since “true democracy is achieved only when everyone has the opportunity to acquire qualifications”.
Linking the late 1970s to the present, Luís Montenegro considered that the major difference between PS and PSD is still “the truly reformist and transformative political line of the Social Democrats”, going so far as to that he has been led by executives from the two sides since 1976.
“The AD governments with Sá Carneiro and Balsemão were much more transformative than the governments of Mário Soares, each in its historical context,” he defended.
The PSD president continued this comparison and later welcomed what had been done by the governments led by Cavaco Silva, between 1985-1995, by Durão Barroso and Santana Lopes – “albeit very limited in time” – and that of Passos Coelho, between 2011 and 2015, considering that they “marked the difference from those who preceded and succeeded them”
“I am extremely proud to be president of the PSD today and look back and see so many leaders and so many qualified people, but see four governments that were the best four governments in Portuguese democracy,” he said, challenging the Portuguese to results of these cadres with those led by the PS.
Analyzing the period since 1995, when the PS ruled for 21 years and the PSD for only seven years, Montenegro once again makes a negative diagnosis of socialist governance, repeating the phrase that has been used several times, that “the engineer António Guterres country left in a quagmire, José Sócrates bankrupt and António Costa is in a cycle of impoverishment that takes us to the heart of Europe”, the only time he referred to the current Prime Minister in his intervention of about half an hour.
“Before that, the IMF had already passed through the hands of the PS twice. This says a lot about what the confidence, hope and ambition we must have in our political project to live up to the history of those who came before us .” and leave future work to continue with the same programmatic principles defined here”he claimed.
The fifth volume of Sá Carneiro’s political texts, edited by the Sá Carneiro Institute and Alêtheia, is devoted to the period of 1977 and 1978, when the founder of the PSD left the leadership of the party for some – hence the title “An Absence of leadership” – before returning to become prime minister until his death in 1980.
Source: DN
