“The Prime Minister doesn’t need to come to Madeira because we have our candidacies more or less consolidated,” stated the head of the Madeiran executive to journalists, on the sidelines of the XII International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions, taking place in Funchal.
“The Prime Minister is campaigning as president of the PSD in some districts of the mainland, but he doesn’t need to come here,” added the PSD/Madeira leader.
When questioned about the statements by the PS Secretary-General, Luis Carneiro, during last week’s election campaign in Machico—where he claimed that “there are still those who hear the socialist name and think something is coming, a kind of bogeyman”—Albuquerque considered it to be “a conversation to justify the Socialist Party’s defeats over the past 50 years.”
Regarding how the election campaign in Madeira has been progressing, the social democrat opined that “it has been going well, the party has been mobilized, it has been united in this campaign.”
He believes the candidates of the PSD/CDS-PP coalition “have run an excellent campaign, positively presenting concrete solutions, avoiding personal disputes.”
The campaign, he described, “hasn’t been very polarized, hasn’t been very radicalized.”
“People are somewhat tired of these election campaigns; they want more clarification than actual noise,” he emphasized.
Referring to today’s opinion poll published in the regional morning newspaper Jornal da Madeira, conducted by Intercampus, which predicts a victory for the PSD/CDS-PP coalition in the Funchal City Council, with the PS remaining the second political force and indicating the entry of JPP and Chega into the council of the main municipality of the autonomous region, Albuquerque argued that it “provides a positive outlook” for the candidacy.
“It’s a good survey to go out into the field and not rest on one’s laurels because when the polls are very good, the tendency is to rest on announced victories that are only effective when the votes are counted,” he maintained.
The XII International Conference on Marine Bioinvasions is a scientific meeting held for about 30 years, every two years, and gathers around 280 congress participants from 40 countries in Funchal to discuss the issue of marine invasions.
