Lisbon, Dec. 8, 2025 (Lusa) - The next Portuguese president will have to be capable of uniting the community and moving from being a secondary figure to "the most prestigious figure in the institutions," according to political scientists interviewed by Lusa.
With just over a month to go before the country's presidential elections, José Adelino Maltez points out that, unlike most races for the presidency in the history of Portuguese democracy, whose outcome was relatively predictable, this time the candidates "are very divided" and, for now, according to the polls, none of them go beyond around 20% of the voting intentions.
"This is a sign that [the next country's president] will face an enormous challenge: to gain more support and be more consensual after being elected, and this is the main challenge for us to have a president of the republic like the one we have had, who is a president who reflects a space of almost acclamation from the political community," he said.
Adelino Maltez stresses that the main challenge for the next President is to move from a "secondary vote" to "the most prestigious figure in the institutions", but emphasises "that nothing is impossible in Portuguese democracy", which has "managed to transform people who were too negatively viewed by the community into a solution of accepted authority".
"The Portuguese community is stronger than it seems, and don't be under the illusion that, in a pluralistic and highly competitive democracy, this fragmentation of confrontation will then prevent the rise. On the contrary, I think it will go well," he says.
Asked whether he thinks that past membership of political parties could be a disadvantage in achieving this broader consensus, Adelino Maltez said that this "has never been a handicap for any other of the country's presidents", stating that even António Ramalho Eanes, at the end of his term of office, "almost announced that he would join a party or found a party".
For his part, political scientist António Costa Pinto believes that it makes no sense to outline the characteristics that would be necessary for the president over the next five years, pointing out that the presidency office is a "single-person body," whose style depends exclusively on the personality chosen by the Portuguese people to fill the position.
Noting that if the next President follows the model of previous heads of state such as Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa or Jorge Sampaio, his main challenge will be to be a "guarantor of the Constitution", Costa Pinto says that attributing characteristics such as "consensus builder" to him only makes sense in a "discursive and electoral dynamic".
"What consensus did President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa achieve between the left and the right, beyond his speeches?" he asks, a point with which Adelino Maltez agrees, considering that the idea of presenting oneself as a "bridge builder" is purely "an election campaign argument".
However, pointing out that in Portugal the head of state has "great latitude for action", António Costa Pinto paints a scenario that he sees as challenging not for the next president, but for the Portuguese semi-presidential regime.
"Imagine the radical right-wing political leader being elected president. The president has broad informal power. To give an example, nowhere in the Constitution does it say that presidents must hand in their party membership cards; there is nothing written that obliges them to do so," he said.
In an allusion to right wing Chega Party leader, André Ventura, the political scientist warned that "if Portugal one day has a president who is also the leader of an electorally dominant party, he will have ample capacity to change the nature" of the Portuguese system.
"This is neither dramatisation nor a threat. It is simply to say that Portugal is far from having experienced all the dimensions of the semi-presidential system," he warns.
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