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There are two poles in the PS compared to the presidential ones and, despite the calls of “reserve” from the Prime Minister himself, the conflict is no longer silenced. After the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva, returned on Tuesday to praise Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa and say that Ana Gomes would be a good candidate, but not for the PS, replied the Minister of Infrastructure, Pedro Nuno Santos. this morning firmly and a warning: “Party bodies decide who the PS supports. Punctuation. It is not the Government, it is not a member of the GovernmentIt is the Socialist Party who decides who supports and who stops supporting ”.
But Pedro Nuno Santos – who even said that he would vote for the PCP or BE candidate if the PS supported Marcelo – came out in defense of Ana Gomes. Santos Silva had said: “Is Ana Gomes a good candidate? In my opinion, yes. If Ana Gomes is a good candidate to have the support of the PS? In my opinion, no ”. Now, the Minister of Infrastructure – who was speaking this Wednesday morning after a visit to the Port of Sines – did not like what he heard and suggested that the former Socialist MEP could be considered a candidate for the PS: “People are not for PS do some things once in a while, be candidates, be MEPs, be candidates for the council, be members of the national secretariat and after a moment they turn vilified for not helping them.“
It was the clearest defense of a PS rule against Ana Gomes. And it couldn’t be more enlightening. This, although Pedro Nuno does not mean that he will defend the party’s support for Ana Gomes, by clarifying that his “sense of the vote” will only be revealed “when the party meets to debate the Presidential elections.” That’s where it will decide that it is nowhere else. “
Pedro Nuno Santos had already warned in July, in an interview with RTP, that he would never support a candidate from the right and that he preferred to vote for the candidate of the Bloco de Esquerda or PCP. On the other hand, António Costa had practically launched a re-election of Marcelo months before during a visit by both to Autoeuropa. Other party figures, such as Fernando Medina or Ferro Rodrigues, also expressed their preference for Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
Later, António Costa gave Pedro Nuno Santos an ear in an interview with Expresso at the end of August so that he would not comment on the presidential elections: “Government members must have a special duty to the president, taking into account the relationship that the Government must maintain with the next President, with whom we will have to live for a long time ”.
Pedro Nuno Santos not only did not respect this duty of reserve (in fact, neither did Santos Silva), but he also attacks Costa’s argument by saying that not supporting “the current President of the Republic does not mean contempt, lack of respect, disloyalty ”. He added: “We live in a mature democracy and it was just what people and politicians needed to be upset with each other because they didn’t have the support of this or that. Democracy is like that ”.
The PS will discuss who supports (or not) the presidential candidates in the next National Commission, on October 24. Pedro Nuno Santos has, at the moment, a good part of the structure of the PS with him, which does not mean that it is a device against Costa, since many federations are pedro-nunistas and costistas at the same time. The device does not want to take off from Costa, but Pedro Nuno Santos may be tempted to make a show of force. For now, he left the signal that he will not refrain from taking a position, anticipating that on October 24 he will say who he thinks the PS should support. And this at the same time that he praises Ana Gomes, the candidate that António Costa does not want.
