The campaign comes to an end and there was a lack of… “vocabulary” (with surprises and disappointments)

The campaign for Sunday’s presidential elections ends this Friday. What were the disappointments and biggest surprises of these two weeks?

The majority of candidates will concentrate their last actions in the Lisbon region, this Friday, with one last opportunity to alleviate the “lack of vocabulary” that has been felt in these two weeks.

The criticism is made by the journalist Maria Flor Pedrosoon the Antena 1 program. “I think it’s one of the political campaigns, which I remember following, where less vocabulary was used. The words were always the same and there was a lot of the same things going around”, he considered.

“This final phase of the official campaign proved, once again, that campaigns serve to change, to alter and to influence the direction of voting“, he added.

On Observador radio, Bruno Vieira Amaral agrees that this campaign “changed things”, exemplifying the fact that we went into the campaign as “Marques Mendes was almost taken for granted in the second round and, at this moment, it would be a surprise if he was there”.

“The opposite happened with António José Seguro”he added, in the program, praising the Socialist’s “error-free” campaign.

“The negative surprise of the campaign is Marques Mendes (…) had a bad campaign. On the contrary, António José Seguro had a growing campaign”, he concluded.

Regarding successful campaigns, Maria Flor Pedroso highlighted, on another frequency, Jorge Pinto, who “not even the political bubble almost knew and today everyone knows who he is”.

The journalist highlights the fact that these moments served to “reveal the personality of the candidates and people who we thought were one thing and, after all, were another”.

In these 14 days he talked about withdrawal of two of the candidates mentioned above: and . But… no.

Both cases will have been influenced by the polls carried out: on the one hand, with Seguro growing alone on the left, Jorge Pinto even called for a union around the socialist to avoid a victory for the right; on the other, with Marques Mendes in decline, Cotrim de Figueiredo has called for his withdrawal, as a way of ensuring that the second round will not have André Ventura and António José Seguro on the voting ballots.

The RTP journalist acknowledged that “the official phase of the campaign was very marked by polls and tracking polls”, with the candidates constantly focused on the numbers.