“I support José Luís Carneiro. As a PS member for 51 years, and as the party’s president, I am pleased that the PS can recharge, with new leadership, the energy weakened by the results of the last elections, to honor its past and become a promising future force,” declared Carlos César on Facebook, ahead of the direct elections taking place on Friday and Saturday.
Carlos César believes the party is now in a position to “continually renew without excluding valuable individuals and act while adjusting the party to the new dimensions and demands that citizens’ motivations and economic and social realities require.”
“I trust that this will be the path the new leadership will take. However, the first challenge will be confirming in the municipal elections that the Socialist Party is the real and constructive alternative to AD,” he wrote.
The PS president also expressed “admiration and personal and party solidarity” for Pedro Nuno Santos, who stepped down from the socialist leadership after the results of the May 18 elections, where the party fell to the third position in parliamentary representation, remaining second in vote numbers.
According to César, Pedro Nuno contested these elections “in a context, both nationally and in Europe, that was particularly adverse for the democratic left.”
The PS president further commented, in the same post, that he was right to “insist that the election of the new party leader proceed with possible anticipation.”
“Since May 18, the party, across all its structures and throughout the territory, has been seeking the reasons for its electoral setback and has shown no tolerance for both quitters and the unapologetic,” he stated.
In this publication, Carlos César references the preface he wrote for a book by José Luís Carneiro, in which he stated that the current candidate for the PS leadership “staying far from those politicians who vocalize everything that comes to mind, and possessing a natural sobriety, has distinguished himself, and continues to do so, by his proximity to people in various roles he has performed.”
“He has a special concern for development policies, reducing inequalities at all levels, and the factors that reinforce trust in democratic institutions. It may seem little, but it’s almost everything a democratic socialist has to navigate with in current times,” he recalled.
