Manuel de Almeida / Lusa
Paulo Portas, former deputy prime minister and former leader of the CDS
Former CDS-PP president Paulo Portas announced this Sunday that he will vote for António José Seguro in the second round of the presidential elections, stating that he will choose the “moderate candidate” and criticizing anyone who sees this as an election between “right and left”.
In your weekly commentary space on TVI, Paulo Portas He began by saying that he will vote for “moderate candidate”, because “he knew very well from the beginning who he would never vote for President of the Republic”.
According to the former president of the CDS-PP. it is up to a head of state “unite the country” and “represent the best of the community”, two characteristics that he did not say he did not recognize in the candidate Andre Venturawho is also leader of Chega.
“It doesn’t seem to me at all that the other candidate, that man who screams a lotif it were for the Presidency of the Republic to unite whatever it was, because he only knows divide, set one against anotherdivide the nation into tribes, races, ethnicities, religious confessions, and This is the opposite of the presidential role”, he criticized.
Despite recognizing “doctrinal differences” with António José Seguroformer general secretary of the PS and supported by the party, the former deputy prime minister explained that the Differences with Chega’s leader “are of a different nature” and they have to do with humanism and the way we look at human beings.
Portas also said that he sees in the candidate supported by the PS a “decent politician”, remembering his role “at a very difficult time for Portugal” and criticizing anyone who sees that in this second round, on February 8, only one election is at stake between left and right.
“For those who say this is an election between the right and the left, this is a big exaggeration“, says Portas. “It is an election between a politician who on the left is perhaps closest to the center and a politician who is to the right of the right and which joins the extremism that is fashionable out there“.
“And therefore, I have no doubt about what the choice is”, summarized the former deputy prime minister of Pedro Passos Coelho.
Paulo Portas is another one of non-socialist personalities who in recent days has expressed his support for António José Seguro.
On Saturday, more than 200 openly “non-socialist” figures launched an open letter in support of the candidate supported by the PS, whose moderation they praise, and stressing that André Ventura does not represent themrejecting “the manifest lack of meaning of the State and the divisionism that the candidate announces by saying right away that does not intend to be the President of all Portuguese“.
Among the signatories are names such as António Lobo Xaviere Miguel Frasquilho, former ministers António Capucho, Miguel Poiares Maduro e Arlindo Cunhathe former PSD mayors Carlos Carreiras and Ricardo Riothe historian José Pacheco Pereira, the footballer Francisca Nazareth, the comedian José Diogo Quintela, and the writers Miguel Esteves CardosoHenrique Raposo, Pedro Mexia, Afonso Reis Cabral, Rita Ferro and Francisco José Viegas.
The signatories of the letter, which at the time of this edition had more than 5800 signatures, consider that Seguro “avoided factionalism or offense in the campaign, and has a political career of moderation, honesty and dignity“, therefore, “even if they are non-socialists, they vote and call for the vote” for the socialist candidate.
