The next presidential elections are still a long way off, and current politicians are discussing whether there will be parliamentary elections sooner, but last week a first pre-candidate for Belém emerged: a businessman who wants to be on the (not long) list of independent candidates for the presidency. If the self-proclaimed candidacy is accepted and Tim Vieira even makes it to the ballot, it will not be an unprecedented case. But it’s a rare case.
The ten presidential elections of the Portuguese democracy so far have 54 candidates – effectively, who even contested the election. In the vast majority of cases, candidatures were supported by parties with parliamentary seats or politicians with a long career, who were advancing on the margins of the parties. Along the way, there are two major exceptions to this pattern: Fernando Nobre, in 2011; and Antonio Sampaio da Novoa, in 2016.
But these are the accounts of the “first division” of presidential candidacies. Outside of this framework, there have been announcements of pre-candidates for all tastes over the past 47 years. Most got no further than that: there were those who tried to get 7,500 signatures and failed, those who didn’t even try but campaigned anyway, those who appeared in the bulletins but didn’t vote. And then there are those who passed the test of the Constitutional Court (TC), who became repeaters, who garnered more than 180,000 votes.
Try Belém and stay out of the Constitutional Court
The constitution states that “candidates for President of the Republic are proposed by a minimum of 7,500 and a maximum of 15,000 citizens entitled to vote”. And it is here that a large portion of “outsiders” candidatures for the presidency have come across. Military personnel, civil servants, teachers, entrepreneurs, engineers, the unemployed – the list of those who have publicly pre-applied but have fallen on the doorstep of the TC is about two dozen. In 2006, for example, seven candidates were excluded by the Constitutional Court because they did not meet the legal requirements. And it is not necessary to go further back than the last election, in 2021, to find an example of that, when the TC concluded a month before the election that the candidate who came first on the ballots (military Eduardo Baptista), did not meet the required requirements: of the 7500 necessary applications it presented… 11 and six were validated.
There are exceptions to this route. And a significant portion of that took place in 2016, in the most competitive presidential election ever, with ten candidacies validated by the TC, six of them outside the parliamentary party cadre. A serious case among “outsider” presidential candidates is Vitorino Silva – better known as Tino de Rans – who was in sixth place in 2016 with 152,094 votes (and who would repeat the presidential candidacy in 2021). A feat beaten only by José Manuel Coelho, who five years earlier, posing as a protest candidate, obtained 189 thousand votes. Yet both had an earlier political path. Even outside the list of main candidates, names without a political career are a rarity. The exception that proves the rule: Jorge Sequeira, a psychologist and motivational speaker who ran for office in the 2016 election, where he ran with about 13,000 votes.
From ‘statute’ to symbolic protest
What moves a citizen to progress to a presidential candidacy, necessarily a large-scale effort at all levels, including financial? “There can be objectives on the most diverse levels. The presidential election confers great status, on a political level, on a social level, in terms of prominence, local image, even on a business level”, emphasizes Paula do Espírito Santo, a researcher at the Higher Institute of Social and Political Sciences (ISCSP) of the University of Lisbon, pointing to even pre-candidate who, more than present themselves to the elections “and appear on the ballot paper, a protest position, abandon the logic of what is the traditional system and deconstruct the logic of the political system”. In short, “finding in the campaign space a springboard to achieve a different kind of goal that sometimes only has a symbolic meaning, of rising up, moving with the status quo. It ends up becoming a bit of the category of protest candidates, who know that they don’t have an elective effect, but act on a civic level, of deconstruction, of reflection.”. An example of this are the candidacy announcements of Manuel João Vieira, singer of Ena Pá 2000, to Belém. Never made effective, but with pre-campaign actions and press conferences on the way – like the one he did in 2005, then complained about the “lack of sportsmanship” of the TC, which five years earlier had refused the 7500 signatures for the simple circumstance … of “they all belonged to the same person”. A repeat of what Mário Viegas had done ten years earlier, announcing a presidential candidacy that even had pre-campaign actions (under the slogan “No Europe! Never Portugal!”), but was not intended to be more than a satire.
Source: DN
