Confirmed this Sunday as the new leader of the Left Bloc – with an internal majority stronger than that of Catarina Martins – Mariana Mortágua has raised the bar on the party’s electoral ambition. However, without mentioning the objectives for the next parliamentary elections – which will not be held until October 2026, when the legislature comes to an end – the new coordinator of the Left Bloc very explicitly defined the objectives for both the next regional elections in Madeira ( next September) and for the next European elections (June 2024). And in both cases the goal is clear: parliamentary representation in Madeira again; and in Europe to keep the party as the third largest force and not to be overtaken by Chega or the Liberal Initiative.
At the conclusion of the XIII BE convention, which took place this weekend at the Casal Vistoso pavilion in Lisbon, Mariana Mortágua said about the party’s electoral ambition regarding the next regional elections: “It will be this force that will vote in the coming months and we have two objectives: the first is to evoke in Madeira the opposition that Miguel Albuquerque fears, the one that is not silent in the face of these interests that the PSD and PS Madeira embrace, an opposition that destroys the lives of Madeirans, poverty , housing, health seriously. This opposition will be the strength of Roberto Almada, in the parliament of Madeira from October,” he said. And as for Europeans, he added: “We will arrive at the European elections with the enthusiasm and determination to be the third force that will overcome enough and the liberal initiative,” he said.
“Whoever suffocates, minimizes or devalues the quagmire created by the absolute majority does not defend democracy, but takes responsibility away from those responsible for weakening it.”
In Madeira’s last regional election, in 2019, BE was ranked 6th (behind PSD, PS, CDS-PP, HPP and CDU), without electing a deputy (Chega, born at that time, was at the bottom of the table) . In the last European elections (also in 2019), the bloc came in 3rd place (a place it wants to keep), behind the PS and the PSD and in electing two MEPs. In the last legislature (January 2022), the party took a massive electoral tumble, falling from 19 deputies to just five and from third largest parliamentary force to 6th, surpassed by Chega, IL and CDU.
“We all know – PS voters better than anyone – how in just over a year it has become clear that an absolute majority is a torment of degradation and instability and a cause of national embarrassment.”
Mortágua tried to cheer up the BE militants. “To our opponents, for whom the left is always a doomed project, they already know us but have not yet seen the power that we will know how to create, reinvent, build, unite,” said the new bloquista leader. He focused his political attacks on the PS, stating: “We all know – PS voters better than anyone – how in just over a year it has become clear that an absolute majority is a torment of degradation and instability and a cause of national embarrassment.” And he warned: “Anyone who suffocates, minimizes or devalues the quagmire created by the absolute majority is not defending democracy, but taking responsibility away from those responsible for weakening it.”
The new leader also took advantage of her dedication speech to say “some personal words” about her father (the anti-fascist fighter Camilo Mortágua) and her twin sister Joana, as she is also a deputy. “We inherited from our father a memory of resistance to the dictatorship,” he said. “I am well aware that today we see some vampires who want to save Salazar’s hatred and that is why they are trying to disgrace this generation that overthrew them in the past,” he said, expressing his pride in people like his father repeated and left thanking them “for finding the beauty of the struggle for freedom” that made “democracy and the honor of being born in a country without tyranny or colonialism” possible. As for her sister Joana, she said she was the one who convinced her to join BE: “Joana isn’t always right, this time she’s right.”
The list led by Mariana Mortágua for the National Bureau (the party’s “parliament”) won 67 of the 80 seats, consolidating the majority it already had (54 seats). The internal opposition list, led by former deputy Pedro Soares, took the remaining 13 places.
Source: DN
