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So it’s not a return to politics, it’s just civic engagement, right? There are few things more political than coordinating an election campaign.
Yes, I think that when people say go back to politics, people start to think that they are going to start being candidates for this and that. This return is not going to happen, what motivates me here is the need not to leave the space for the presidential candidacy of Ana Gomes empty. And after asking for help with this task, there was only one possible answer, which was to say ‘yes’. And then you can say that there are such temptations, because this is a form of civic participation. I have lived alternating Portugal and abroad since 2005 and now, being here, I cannot be insensitive, adding that we live in a moment in which people have to mobilize so that certain diseases and certain risks that our society goes through do not grow at the same time. point of being able to even question its democratic functioning.
When presenting the candidacy, Ana Gomes said that an internal debate in the PS about the presidential candidates was missing and that everything was centered on a single head. Should there be primaries or an internal referendum to decide on this support?
In PS I have seen all the people defend all positions and their opposite. Personally, I do not sympathize with closed primaries within parties. In any case, what I defend for the parties in general is the model that António Costa used in his candidacy for secretary general, which are the primaries open to supporters. If closed, they easily turn into device wars without any meaning.
But, should it happen, open to supporters deciding on support for this candidacy?
There is no tradition in the parties and the PS to take the presidential elections as a matter of party. The PS has already had all kinds of relations with the presidentials: a general secretary who has suspended himself in order not to support the party’s candidate, a candidate supported by the party, has already had situations in which he had no candidates proposed by the party. match. So I don’t think there is a pattern where the PS can now be said to behave in or out of the pattern. What seems wrong to me and that, clearly, without subterfuge, I do not agree, is a strategy in which the majority party of the Portuguese left says that the presidential elections do not interest us and are a secondary issue.
Is that what António Costa is doing?
The direct election of a president under a semi-presidential regime is not only the work of the socialists in Portugal, but has to do with a special meaning of the presidential function. The direct election of the President of the Republic aims to give legitimacy to this unipersonal body that is a moderator between powers, which makes our equilibrium system, the famous control and balances. And in which it is important that there is a great participation. I see with great concern that in the last presidential elections more than half of the Portuguese have not voted. Therefore, the largest Portuguese party, whether or not it supports a presidential candidate, should not say that presidential elections are secondary in the democratic system.
Is António Costa showing that they are secondary?
Until a while ago it was, from now on we’ll see.
