PSD
Ricardo Sousa
“Was it because the party that accepted defeat had the support of the party president and it was not the result he wanted”?
The elections for the presidency of the PSD/Espinho were held on February 28th. Ricardo Sousa wondefeating congresswoman Carolina Marques by just two votes.
But this result was cancelled. The elections for the presidency of the PSD of Espinho will be repeated.
The decision of the District Jurisdiction Council is based on the discrepancy between the number of voters and votes in some of the votes held that day.
Ricardo Sousa presented a resource. The former PSD deputy sees this decision as an attempt to Luís Montenegro “winning at the secretariat” – Carolina Marques, defeated, had the support of Carla Montenegro, wife of the prime minister.
“With enormous stupefaction, we found that non-compliance in a district body election [de Aveiro] is being used to repeat the election for bodies in the Espinho section, which took place without any anomalies”, wrote the leader of the council, in an open letter to his supporters.
“We can’t help but wonder if it was just because the list that accepted defeat had the support of the party president and it was not the result he intended”, adds the jurist.
It’s not unheard of
This is a new episode in the succession of cases against Ricardo Sousa, who has attributed them to a “personal reckoning” by Luís Montenegro.
The first took place in the pre-campaign for the autarchic of 2025, since the jurist was the unanimous choice of local activists to head the list for the Espinho City Council, but he later saw the process brought forward by the national PSD.
This was followed by the indication of Jorge Ratola as an alternative candidate, when he was still deputy of Montenegro, which was announced by the district of Aveiro, already led by Emídio Sousa, at the time Secretary of State for the Environment and now for Communities.
Ricardo Sousa challenged the change first at the party’s national jurisdiction council, without success, and then before the Constitutional Court. This did not prevent Ratola’s candidacy, who ended up being elected to the Chamber in October, but a source linked to the case said that the Court opted for rejection because, “despite having recognized that the process was not the most correct, there was no more time to rectify it” before the elections.
What doesn’t add up
The time has now come to choose the president of the party. Ricardo Sousa ran for a new term against Carolina Marques, who, at 28 years old and with a seat in the Assembly of the Republic since 2024, was the Montenegro’s favorite.
Sousa won by two votes, and Lusa reported at the time that 269 of the 304 activists registered on that structure’s electoral roll attended the municipal polls.
Now that this result is also contested by the party hierarchy, Ricardo Sousa highlights that municipal and district elections had “different urns” e “autonomous voting”, and states: “The non-conformity did not occur for the section bodies [de Espinho]where the total of 269 voters are expressed in the votes cast in the ballot box, and the minutes of the election were even signed by the representatives of the defeated list”.
The district’s recount is that, however, stopped working: given the 269 voters called to choose the Board of the District Assembly, the Permanent Political Committee, the Financial Audit Committee and the Section Delegates, the district jurisdiction council now says that there are three bulletins missing for two of these bodies and two printed forms for another.
Criticizing an objection “Urdu in the most absolute silence, without notifying or listening to the other party, without the possibility of defense or any clarification”, Ricardo Sousa already appealed to the National Jurisdiction Council.
Even “knowing well that the party lives under a simulacrum of democracy”, in this appeal declares that the municipal election is being “victim of unjustified and undue contamination” due to errors that only affect the district – which did not respond to Lusa’s request for clarification – and classifies it as “skills salon” the attempt to confuse two acts as one and to invoke “serious irregularities that are not implemented”.
To conclude his open letter, Ricardo Sousa evokes an old situation: “It is impossible not to remember here an event that occurred 20 years ago, in an election for the Espinho section, in which the then president of the Board, Luís Montenegro, admitted to voting six activists who were not on the electoral roll issued by the party’s competent services – and the ticket it supported won the elections by four votes.”
For the jurist, “the behavioral pattern is the same” and it should not only concern the activists in their municipality: “Whoever lives in this permanent obsession with the PSD of Espinho and with those who legitimately lead it cannot be focused as they should on the difficult problems that the country faces”.
