LUSA 02/04/2025

Lusa - Business News - Portugal: Fomer PSD leader promises 'ambition, ethics' if elected president

Lisbon, Feb. 3 2025 (Lusa) - Luís Marques Mendes, a former leader of Portugal's governing centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD), has said that as a candidate in the country's presidential elections he will offer "ambition, stability and ethics" in comments made during last regular Sunday-night stint on television, after announcing his intention to stand.

"I made this decision because I think, after reflection, after listening to many people, that I could be useful to the country," Marques Mendes said in his political commentator slot on the private SIC television channel about his decision to run for Portugal's president in the elections due to take place early next year. "That's always been my criterion. And above all there are two or three concerns that I have: ambition, stability and ethics."

Marques Mendes, a member of the current president's Council of State, his top advisory panel, tooks his leave of his commentary slot on SIC's evening new bulletin, four days before he is due to formally unveil his candidacy for the 2026 presidential elections, at an event on Thursday in Fafe, in the district of Braga.

While emphasising that he would not anticipate his speech on Thursday, he said that as a presidential candidate he would defend political stability: "We can't spend our lives in political crises, we can't spend our lives in dissolutions and early elections."

That was a reference to the fact that the current president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, another former PSD leader, has twice dissolved parliament before the end of its term - the last time when the governing Socialist Party continued to have a majority.

Marques Mendes added that in order to increase stability in this way, "we need to have some capacity to build bridges."

He also promised to "introduce the issue of ethics into political life much more forcefully" - saying that he had made difficult decisions in this area with which "almost no-one in the party agreed" when he led the PSD between 2005 and 2007.

"Today we have to go much further, but much further," he said. "A large part of the Portuguese people are a little fed up with politicians, with the political class. This is not good for democracy. 

"It can't be solved with populism," he went on. "It's solved by making a greater appeal to ethics and deepening and developing a set of decisions so that people can trust again."

According to Marques Mendes, alongside these two causes, Portugal also needs ambition, because it is "a country that is compliant, resigned, it even seems depressed, it seems accommodating" - and he proposes to combat if he is elected head of state. 

"We have this disease of low ambition," he reiterated.

 

IEL/ARO // ARO.

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