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Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos was just a 10-year-old boy. Adolfo Mesquita Nunes, already a young man of 21 years. It was in 1998 that the telenovela began on the CDS-PP that since then, and continues today, episode after episode, without seeing an end in sight, much less a happy ending. Today, the two are the new protagonists of this eternal Christian Democratic series. The time of the long knives has returned and today a meeting (by videoconference) of the National Council is scheduled to dictate the near future of the party.
Manuel Monteiro and Paulo Portas were 36 years old at the time. It was in 1998 when the two starred in one of the most explosive interruptions in the life of the Portuguese party. Portas was with Monteiro since the early 1990s, helping him – and being director of O Independente – to ascend, in 1992, to the leadership of the CDS. In 1995, Portas left journalism and went into politics, something he had sworn he would never do. He and Monteiro are MPs elected by CDS, Portas by Aveiro and Monteiro by Lisbon. It seemed an indissoluble friendship between two young Turks eager to turn a party around that Kavakism had almost reduced to insignificance.
And they did. Putting the CDS’s historical pro-European heritage in the drawer, and also rehearsing a nationalist and insurance discourse -of which Chega is now a radical version-, Monteiro & Portas led the party from five deputies (in 1991) to 15 (in 1995). And everything was going very well, much better than the two had predicted. But it did not last long.
“We have to be able to rescue all these people, heal all these wounds and show that CDS is an alternative that no one else can replace.”
At the end of 1997, the CDS-PP had a bad result in the municipalities and Monteiro resigned. Paulo Portas decided then that the time had come to take the leadership of the party. In theory, he would be Monteiro’s heir. But the official line of official succession of mountaineering would, in the end, be led by María José Nogueira Pinto (1952-2011). At the 16th CDS congress, in Braga, on March 21 and 22, 1998, Paulo Portas won the leadership of the party by defeating the Monteiro line.
Today, after 23 years, the aftershocks of that earthquake are still felt in the CDS-PP. All subsequent internal conflicts have echoes of that fracture. And even days ago Nuno Melo recognized it, in an interview Renascença / Público spoke of the need for his party to “symbolically heal the wounds of 1998”, “a time when the CDS showed an extraordinary frieze of people who really marked the difference”. “.” We must be able to rescue all these people, heal all these wounds and show that the CDS is an alternative that no one else can replace, “having the certainty that” this is much clearer today because of the political-party reconfiguration ongoing “, with the CDS-PP now having the Liberal Initiative on its left and” on the right a very static right “, that of Chega.
A “double digit” problem
Today, 23 years after the original breakup, Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos stars on the Monteiro side of the story and Adolfo Mesquita Nunes on the Porto side. Monteiro and Portas, for their part, remain behind the scenes. Monteiro was out of the CDS from 2003 to 2020, and when he returned to leadership he supported the rise of Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos to leadership.
Paulo Portas, in turn, is with Adolfo Mesquita Nunes. On the night of the presidential elections, he led the way that Adolfo would later take when he pointed out that André Ventura’s result meant that for the first time in Portuguese democratic history there was “a populist of the extreme right or extreme right, depending on the day” with a “two-digit” result (11.9%). And that, he stressed, is “a new fact that should not be devalued and that represents a serious problem for the PSD, and even more so for the CDSThe growth of Chega revealed in the presidential elections has been precisely one of the main arguments in which Mesquita Nunes has maintained the urgent need for an elective congress in the party that removes the current leader and puts him in his place.
“The consolidation of the new right-wing parties, which confirmed these presidential elections, only reinforces the speed of the erosion of the CDS: a party that does not set the agenda, that does not anticipate, that does not transmit the message, that does not affirm itself as a alternative, which is not listened to or taken into account, who seems resigned to move towards irrelevance, ”he wrote in El Observador. And in the same article, he considered that “the survival crisis that the CDS is going through today will not be able to be resolved in that direction.”
Remembering the past in 2005
What happens in the CDS-PP refers to the year in which Portas resigned from the party leadership, 2005 (because he could not avoid the absolute majority of the PS). His official successor would be Telmo Correia (today parliamentary leader). But José Ribeiro e Castro got in the way and, surprising everyone and everything, went ahead.
He served it for two years, at the same time he was an MEP, which contributed a lot to his wear. Furthermore, neither Portas nor Portismo led the 2005 defeat well. In 2007, Portas ran for office again, beating Ribeiro e Castro by 75% in direct elections. In 2011 he would return the party to power in a new coalition with the PSD. The party then had 24 deputies.
The similarities with 2005 are related to the fact that goalkeeping now does not conform to the victory of Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos (against goalkeeper João Almeida) at the congress held in Aveiro in January 2020 (just as it does not conform to the Ribeiro e Castro victory in 2005). Portas still controlled his immediate succession, in 2016, with the rise of Assunção Cristas, but the fact that in 2019 the legislatures reduced the party from 18 to five deputies, returning to the insignificance of cavaquismo, dictated his fate – and the impossibility of maintain portism. control of the situation, which he is now trying to regain.
The party leader today convened the National Council with a single and supposed purpose: to vote a motion of confidence in his leadership that would put an end once and for all to the talks in the first congresses. Adolfo Mesquita Nunes and his troops intend, in turn, for the party to now call for this congress, asserting itself as a candidate for the leadership. However, a procedural question remains to be resolved that is not of minor importance.
The vote will be secret. Mesquita Nunes demanded and will even have a secret vote in the National Council. This was decided by the party’s Jurisdiction Council, this Friday night, which gave reason to the criticism of the leadership headed by Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos.
This means that a computer solution will have to be found to allow this anonymous vote, since – pandemic obligate – The meeting will be by videoconference.
The leadership said that motions of confidence are always voted with the arm in the air (in Parliament, for example) and that secret votes are only foreseen when people are elected (this is not the case). This argument was not presented by the Council of Jurisdiction.
Therefore, the day promises to be very long in the party that Freitas do Amaral and Adelino Amaro da Costa founded in 1974.
