“I believe a candidacy is in poor shape when its supporters think it can only win if others drop out. This suggests that those saying so are already losing,” stated the candidate backed by the PCP.
In remarks to the Lusa agency during a visit to the Alqueva Center near the dam sharing the same name, located between the municipalities of Portel in the Évora district and Moura in the Beja district, António Filipe deemed it “obvious” that “candidacies either stand on their own value or they do not.”
“And my candidacy stands on its own, regardless of who the other candidates are,” he emphasized, ensuring his participation in the elections until the end.
Questioned by Lusa, the PCP-supported candidate for the presidential elections on January 18 of next year was responding to an interview given to Público/Renascença by the PS parliamentary leader, Eurico Brilhante Dias.
The newspaper reported that Eurico Brilhante Dias challenges António Filipe to leave the electoral race to support António José Seguro, the PS-backed candidate.
The socialist parliamentary leader expressed his belief that there could still be presidential candidate withdrawals before the election day, recalling that the PCP had previously withdrawn its candidate days before an election.
“None of those situations is comparable to the current one, but I am flattered by the importance being attributed to my candidacy,” the communist candidate quipped to Lusa.
António Filipe noted that Eurico Brilhante Dias “is not the first personality from the Socialist Party area to make such an appeal,” yet the decision on any withdrawal is settled: “I reaffirm that it is absolutely out of the question.”
The PCP-backed presidential candidate also stated that he would not consider “appealing for the withdrawal of other candidacies to enhance” his own, as “candidacies should assert themselves not by the dropout of others.”
Nonetheless, he opposed, if the PS parliamentary leader “believes that the candidate he supports can only win if others withdraw, then he can appeal to the withdrawal of candidates politically closer to him, namely Dr. Marques Mendes [and] Admiral Gouveia e Melo.”
“I do not see the logic in appealing for the withdrawal of my candidacy, which is further from António José Seguro’s candidacy than others, which mainly target the so-called center electorate and want everything to remain mostly unchanged concerning how the country has been governed in recent decades,” he argued.
During this trip to Alentejo, after visiting the Alqueva Center, which provides visitors with information about the Alqueva project who flock annually to the dam area, the candidate is set to head to the Beja district to have lunch with supporters in Moura, visit the Museum of Cante Alentejano in Serpa, and participate in a public session in Castro Verde.
Regarding the Alqueva project, António Filipe recalled his involvement, as a deputy in the Assembly of the Republic, in this “decades-long struggle of the Portuguese people” and the “demand by the people of this region for the dam’s construction,” which has had impacts on Alqueva, “some positive, others probably not so,” such as “super-intensive crops that have negative consequences for the soil.”
