All the candidates running today for the position of President of the Republic of Portugal know what they are going for.
The President of the Portuguese Republic is the nation’s supreme magistrate. He is the representative of all of us wherever he is. He is the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces with all that that implies at a time when a new war seems to be knocking on our door.
The future President of the Republic is asked to represent us with distinction, politely, with a sense of State, firmly, but with moderation.
The future President of the Republic will be a pivot in the relationship with other national institutions. You must save your words, moderate them, with restraint, so that when you want to use them, you will be listened to with respect. Your relationship with the Government must have a good dose of diplomacy, common sense and emotional balance.
In everyday life or in major crises that may occur, the country will look to the future President of the Republic as the guarantor of the Constitution, of our sovereignty, the defender of our interests in the national territory and abroad. It will have to be someone who puts balance in the national context, who builds bridges, who de-dramatizes when situations get out of control. That defends national interests, without jeopardizing the priorities of other States, their representation, the peculiar interests that each country has in its own context.
The next President of the Republic will have to evaluate the laws presented to him carefully, with balance, perceiving their legal quality.
The next President of the Republic requires an emotional coldness, a rigorous knowledge of our History, a vast and solid culture that does not leave Portugal poorly represented, whether in major international forums or in the most hidden and modest Portuguese village.
As always happens, the President of the Portuguese Republic, once elected, is someone above the political parties. Who speaks to them and listens to them as representatives of the various political-party sensibilities that permeate the national whole. You should not, and cannot, take sides. It must maintain a healthy distance, listen to them patiently, reduce exaggerations, shape interests, seek with everyone’s help a healthy national unity that puts the national interest ahead of partisan pettiness and avarice.
The next President of the Portuguese Republic requires life experience, a rigorous and distant knowledge of the last decades of the country’s History, an experience of the world around us. Education and culture cannot be missing from the presidential role.
All of this comes in relation to what we have seen in recent days from congressman and presidential candidate André Ventura.
Misplaced references to Salazar from those who probably do not know and, certainly, did not experience the delay and suffering that Salazar’s dictatorship caused in Portugal during the period of his “government”.
Ventura’s excesses that the country witnessed at the end of the State Budget discussion did not just embarrass Parliament. They discredit the entire country and remove credibility from parliamentary representation.
There is a strange childishness when a deputy, in this case a presidential candidate, expresses himself by throwing papers in the air like any misbehaving student. Everything cannot be counted on to win votes. Some decorum is needed, a little more restraint. A greater priority to the country’s real problems, instead of an attitude of bad theater, verbal exaggerations, senseless and inappropriate attitudes in a national Parliament.
There is, despite everything, on the European extreme right, represented by Marine Le Pen in France, or Alice Weidel, from the AfD, in Germany, greater solidity in arguments, more sensible political argumentation, whether or not you agree with their ideas. There is less “circus” and a more sustainable notion of the political project they defend. In other words, less clowning.
The future presidential choice that Portugal will make must take care of the aspects described above. This is vital so that the future presidential role does not go down the drain.
Journalist
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