At the age of 28, the Portuguese deputy Mariana Mortágua made the step into the international press for her impressive management as a spokeswoman for the economy. And at 36, at the weekend he assumes the leadership of a Left Bloc in very low hours, after being the third political force in Portugal until a year and a half ago. After the catastrophe of the January 2022 elections of the formations to the left of the socialists, and while the Portuguese Communist Party continues to be locked in immobility, the ideological space is entrusted to the star deputy. Mortágua has denounced that she suffers fierce persecution because of her status as a lesbian, because of her ideology, because she is the daughter of a revolutionary and because she annoys the powers that be.
The rise to fame of the deputy, twin sister of another Bloc parliamentarian, Joana Mortágua, took place in 2015, in two specific sessions of the commission of inquiry into the bankruptcy of one of the financial institutions of lineage, the EspÃrito Santo Bank ( BES), intervened by the Bank of Portugal. Even the former president of the BES and the main piece to beat for Mariana Mortágua, Ricardo Salgado, would later say that he studies the cases well and has “important and objective analytical qualities”, according to the newspaper Público.
There were more deputies who did a relevant job of clarifying the excesses of the Lusitanian financial collapse. Perhaps Mortágua’s was more profound, but the key to success lay in her ability as a communicator, to go beyond the stupor of numbers and financial engineering, with two viral thrusts. The first went to Zeinal Bava, former CEO of Portugal Telecom, for years almost a national pride, the Cristiano Ronaldo of business, as the Portuguese executive awarded worldwide. Faced with the cascade of evasions about the hole in the company due to the investments in the BES well, the deputy concluded that “it is a bit of an amateur for someone who won so many awards for best CEO of the year and best CEO of Europe and surroundings, don’t you think?”
To Ricardo Salgado, he attacked him with an appeal to his legendary nickname in acronym, that of “DDT, Dono Disto Todo, amo de toto esto”. “The master of all this happened to be the victim of all this”, Mariana Mortágua quipped at the bet of the former president of the bank to present himself as a victim of the decisions of the Bank of Portugal, without having anything to do with the ruin of his empire.
A possible front of criticism for the new coordinator of the Bloc lies in the family issue, since after the brutal fall in 2022, from 19 to 5 seats, she and her twin sister went on to represent 40% of the parliamentary group. Both have politics in their DNA. The father, Camilo Mortágua, was a revolutionary who participated in actions against the dictatorship, such as the hijacking of the liner Santa MarÃa in 1961 by Portuguese and Galician exiles and emigrants. They wanted to denounce the regimes of Salazar and Franco worldwide and reach Angola to spread the revolt. They ended up as asylum seekers in Brazil.
Mortágua alluded to the father’s trajectory in April on the television program in which he participated, when he reported that he suffered from the campaign of persecution. He related it to his family tree, the “apparent gift” of disturbing the powerful, ideology and the condition of being a lesbian. In this way, she publicly revealed her homosexuality, in an intervention in which she reacted to the dismissal of the third complaint against her in a year for alleged irregularities.
Mortágua is the third leader of the Bloc, after the charismatic economist Francisco Louçã and the actress Catarina Martins, who for a time shared the position with João Semedo. Martins led the party to an all-time high in 2015 of 19 MPs and 10.2% of the vote, a few tenths above Louçã’s ceiling. But in 2022 came the defeat of 4.4%, the worst result in 20 years.
The Bloc’s situation is extremely precarious, in bankruptcy, and it is necessary to see how Mortágua is shaken up. Yes, the conditions for opposition are favorable, with the Socialist Government very affected and the other parliamentary groups out of control, with the exception of the far-right Chega.
