“The majority of the AD and Liberal Initiative electorate voted for António José Seguro”.
The phrase is from centrist Diogo Feio, delivered this Monday on SIC-N, in comment on the result of the second round of the presidential elections. As much as it may cost the leaders of the PSD, CDS-PP and IL, what he says cannot be contested: to obtain a percentage of almost 67%, the elected it needed a large part of the votes from the center-right and even the right.
This is demonstrated, beyond mere arithmetic, by the provisional analysis published by political scientist Pedro Magalhães on Twitter/X: 77% of those who voted for Marques Mendes in the first round put their crosses in Seguro in the second; the same is true for 58% of those who had wanted to see the Liberal Initiative candidate in Belém and 58% of those who had not attended the first round.
Also 68% of those who say they voted AD in the last legislative elections, as well as 80% of those who voted for parties other than the PS and Chega and — which is noteworthy — 59% of those who had abstained on that occasion, chose the former general secretary of the Socialist Party in the second round.
In other words, a very large majority made it clear that, to avoid the victory of the far-right candidate, they do not mind voting for someone who is from a political area with which in general (or at least in recent times, it is worth remembering that just four years ago, in 2022, the PS had an absolute majority) they do not identify with or even against which — in the case of voters associated with the IL candidate, a party that talks about “socialism” as if it were a disease worse than leprosy — they define themselves politically.
And this majority of voters from the center-right and “liberal” right (with quotation marks, yes) did so despite the signals given to them by the leader of the PSD and the government coalition and by senior figures from the current CDS-PP, as well as by the holder of real power in IL (thanks to the 900 thousand votes he collected in the first round), João Cotrim Figueiredo.
Montenegro, let us remember, stated that “the political space of the PSD” was not represented in the second round, so he was not going to take a position between two candidates — who, despite having been insulted and even slandered by Ventura many times (let us remember that he placed him on a poster alongside José Sócrates, who is on trial for several crimes, as representative of “50 years of corruption” and called the PSD he led a “political prostitute”), he said, without making any qualitative distinction, such as “the candidate who represents the political space to the left of the PSD” and “the candidate who represents the political space to the right of the PSD”. In other words, the Prime Minister made it known that he didn’t care if he won Ventura, who calls him everything, or Seguro, and that he might even draw pictures in the bulletin.
CDS-PP deputy Paulo Núncio, in a performance worthy of the president of Chega’s bench (or Ventura himself), shouted in parliament against those who (in the case of the signatories of the Manifesto of non-socialists for Seguro) presented the second round of the presidential elections as a choice between democratic values and their opposite, showing where their heart is pointing: “It was just what was missing that the only legitimate and democratic vote was the vote for the candidate of the Socialist Party.”
Cotrim Figueiredo was a little louder; Unlike Marques Mendes and Gouveia e Melo, he always avoided saying that he was going to vote for Seguro (but he didn’t vote for Ventura), ending up stating, a week before the election, that the choice was “between moving backwards and standing still, which is a horrible thing” and that he understood very well who was going to vote blank or abstain”, but that he personally preferred “standing still rather than moving backwards”. This attitude is so blasé given what was at stake — for Cotrim, “going backwards” is nothing that deserves an enthusiastic rejection — it did not, fortunately, infect the majority of his voters (although 29%, as seen in the analysis published by Pedro Magalhães, thought that going backwards is better, voting for Ventura, and 12% who did the same, voting blank or null).
We can, of course, consider that the majority of voters from Marques Mendes/AD and Cotrim/IL voted for Seguro not to — as the aforementioned Manifesto of the non-socialists for Seguro defended — preserve the principles of the liberal democratic regime and reject the hate speech, divisive, populist, racist and slanderous, of Chega, but for tactical reasons: if the choice was between giving strength to someone who assumes he wants to be the leader of the right and swallow PSD and IL, and a social democrat from PS, better elect the second, which is very far from wanting to destroy these two parties and presents itself as a pole of “moderation”.
But this, which was certainly the reason for several declared support for Seguro — that of a tactical position — and which we would expect from the prime minister (perhaps one day we will understand what went through Montenegro’s mind to put itself so willingly in the position of being defeated in these presidential elections — is it just, as Marcelo would say, a “rural” obstinacy, or is it, in fact, a radical in disguise?), is not at all the case of the majority of voters who crossed the border of their political area to elect the former general secretary of the PS.
Most voters don’t move based on tactics, much less when it’s raining heavily. What made people leave their homes to vote for Seguro, a man who would never arouse wild passions and whom many would not even remember until recently, was not the calculation about party chess but the repugnance they feel for André Ventura and his theater of the grotesque.
There are still many people — and will remain so — who value liberal democracy as we know it (imperfect, certainly, but so generous in its promise of equality) and for whom, contrary to what happens with an ink changer like Luís Montenegro, it really isn’t. We can disagree, and we do, on many things, but here, as in 2022 when the possibility of an opening from the PSD to Chega was foreshadowed (because Rui Rio did not clearly rule out this hypothesis), a red line rose, high and magnificent. It was really beautiful, Portugal.
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