The conservative Luís Montenegro will try to survive the coming months as Prime Minister of Portugal at the head of a resistance, with his hard core of the party in the key political positions and equipped, as far as can be seen, to maintain his “no is no” to ally with the extreme right of André Ventura. These are the essential messages from the list of seventeen ministers that Montenegro delivered on Thursday to the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in the last steps before the new stage that will formally begin on Tuesday.
After his audience with Rebelo at the presidential palace in Belém, Montenegro maintained the same line of silence in front of the media as during the turbulent constituent session of Parliament on Tuesday and Wednesday. In this session, Chega, the party of the ultra Ventura, failed to force him to negotiate the right-wing alliance that he has been clamoring for since election night. The conservatives managed to solve the deadlock thanks to the timely support of the socialists, with whom they agreed to take turns, with two years for each, at the head of the presidency of the Parliament.
This line of “no is no” in the Chega is reinforced by the appointment of Pedro Duarte as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. It is a key portfolio for an executive, from the coalition of the PSD of Montenegro and the tiny CDS of Nuno Melo, which has 80 of the 230 seats and is barely guaranteed the ability to drag, at all costs, nine more votes, from the liberals and the deputy from the animalist PAN.
In charge of the crucial negotiations with the other parties, both to try to save the Government and to stage a presumed victim condition in case the road to new elections is consolidated, Duarte already made his position clear in the campaign. Not only did he reject the pacts with the Chega, but he went further than Montenegro. He went so far as to argue that if the Socialists came first, which ultimately did not happen by a narrow margin, the Conservatives should let them govern. This position contrasted with that of the cadres of the party, led by former Prime Minister Passos Coelho, who defended the alliance with the ultra André Ventura.
In addition, the two heavyweights of the new executive are leaders of the highest confidence in Montenegro, the Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmiento, until now parliamentary leader, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paulo Rangel, first vice-president of the party.
The European elections on June 9 will constitute for the new Government the great test prior to the autumn trial by fire for the processing of next year’s budgets. But just two weeks before, on May 26, there will be another electoral contest, that of the early elections in Madeira, only eight months after the previous ones. They were set by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on Wednesday, right when the legal deadline for calling them opened. Madeira will return to the polls, after the resignation in January of the regional president, the conservative Miguel Alburquerque, for having been imputed in a wide operation against corruption led by the Prosecutor’s Office, which, however, the investigating judge left then almost nothing.
Alburquerque’s firm determination to run again, after having just been re-elected as president of the archipelago’s PSD, generates a rather perplexing situation. And it is aggravated, moreover, because there is no glimpse that in this great conservative fiefdom there could be an alternative majority to that of the right. The latter prevailed clearly in Madeira in the March 10 parliamentary elections, with a moderate attrition of the conservatives, which was still three times the national average.
Albuquerque appears as the favorite, although there is the expectation that he may have more difficulty in being re-elected than in September, when the animalist party PAN gave the conservative coalition of PSD and CDS the vote it needed to have a majority absolute Everything is turning so that the Chega, which has just obtained a great result in Madeira, can capitalize on the institutional crisis with its clean-up speech against traditional politics. On the other hand, classic bipartisanship, through in this case the PSD, as happened in Portugal as a whole with the Socialist Party, is unable to offer an image of regeneration.
However, everything indicates that in addition to the peculiar situation of the region, the old caciquistad fief Alberto João Jardim, who ruled for 37 years until Alburquerque succeeded him in 2015, will also weigh on the evolution of national politics, in a legislature that began this week in an adverse way for Chega. But in the current chaotic phase of Lusitanian politics, two months is a long time and the scenario could turn several times.
