If, last Sunday, a citizen had woken up from a prolonged coma and turned on the television, he would have concluded that, in the elections that took place that day, no one had lost.
For one reason or another, everyone had won.
I know that many would like to believe that the separation between left and right makes no sense in today’s times.
I confess that I think the opposite, and it is not because of ease of argument. It is for the simple reason that when we all think alike, without references or guidelines, the world will be on a path of unanimity and non-differentiation that deny human nature itself.
As much as it costs me, last Sunday the left did not win the elections.
The winner was a citizen who, with a well-known and never denied path to a social-democratic party, and always positioning himself within its ideology, managed to bring together many citizens from the central and democratic space of Portuguese society and what remains of those who traditionally position themselves to the left.
I also note that he never fell into the temptation that some tried to suggest to him, to weaken his mandate, that he would be a candidate who embodied a republican front to save the regime.
It turns out that, as I said, if the left didn’t win, the right lost the presidential elections.
It is, in fact, an unequivocal lesson from this election that elections, in Portugal, are won by the center. A decades-old teaching that political protagonists sometimes forget.
And, in this defeat of the right, there are several right-wingers.
A certain right that in public refuses to be right and that lost by omission; another, with old scores to settle with democracy, even if he doesn’t say so, lost through action; yet another, because he contested the elections until the end and lost them.
I admit, in fact, that all right-wing parties are beginning a politically interesting period of searching for and creating new protagonists, while they are fighting on the classic stages of social communication, at the launch of books or in conferences and television commentaries.
It will perhaps be an inevitability. An inevitability that the country could do without and that the next elected president will not make performance easier.
Portugal needs tranquility and responsibility, but it does not need hypocrisy or dissimulation.
On March 9, when the new President of the Republic takes office, the left will not have a victory, but the right, the various right-wings, will have a defeat.
Lawyer and manager
Leave a Reply