The conservative Luís Montenegro will try to survive in the coming months as Prime Minister of Portugal at the head of a resistance Government, with his hard core of the party in key political positions and equipped, so he can be seen to maintain his “no means 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 prior to 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 before the media as during the convulsive constituent session of Parliament on Tuesday and Wednesday. In it, Chega, the ultra Ventura party, failed to force him to negotiate the right-wing alliance for which he has been clamoring since election night. The conservatives managed to resolve the blockade thanks to the specific support of the socialists, with whom they agreed to take turns, with two years for each, at the head of the presidency of Parliament.
This line of “no means no” to Chega is reinforced by the appointment of Pedro Duarte as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs. This is a key portfolio for an executive, a coalition of the PSD of Montenegro and the tiny CDS of Nuno Melo, which has 80 of the 230 seats and barely has the capacity to attract at most another nine votes, from the liberals. and the animalist PAN deputy.
In charge of the crucial negotiations with the other parties, both to try to save the Government and to stage an alleged victim status in case the path towards new elections is consolidated, Duarte has already made his position clear in the campaign. Not only did he reject the pacts with Chega, but he also went further than Montenegro. He even defended that if the socialists came first, which ultimately did not happen due to a narrow difference, the conservatives should let them govern. This position contrasted with that of the party’s cadres, led by former Prime Minister Passos Coelho, who defended the alliance with the ultra André Ventura.
Furthermore, 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 litmus test of 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 last Wednesday by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, just when the legal deadline to call them opened. Madeira will return to the polls, after the resignation in January of the regional president, the conservative Miguel Alburquerque, for having been accused in a broad anti-corruption operation led by the Prosecutor’s Office, which, however, the investigating judge later left to almost nothing.
Alburquerque’s firm determination to run again, after having just been re-elected as president of the PSD of the archipelago, creates a rather grotesque situation. And it gets worse, furthermore, because there is no sign that in this great conservative fiefdom there could be an alternative majority to that of the right. These were clearly imposed in Madeira in the parliamentary elections of March 10, with a moderate erosion of the conservatives, which still represented three times the national average
Alburquerque appears as the favorite, although there is an expectation that he may have more difficulties to be re-elected than in September, when the animalist party PAN gave the conservative coalition of PSD and CDS the vote that was missing to have an absolute majority. . Everything turns so that Chega, which has just obtained a great result in Madeira, can capitalize on the institutional crisis with its cleansing speech against traditional politics. On the other hand, the classic two-party system, through in this case the PSD, as happened in the whole of Portugal with the Socialist Party, appears incapable of offering an image of regeneration.
However, everything indicates that in addition to the peculiar situation of the region, the old caciquil fiefdom of Alberto João Jardim, who governed for 37 years until Alburquerque succeeded him in 2015, will also weigh on the evolution of national politics, in a legislature which began this week adversely for Chega. But in the current chaotic phase of Portuguese politics, two months is a long time and the stage could turn several times.
