The presidential candidate Henrique Gouveia e Melo stated on Monday that it is false that an alleged intervention by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa in his candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic influenced his decision to run.
“A news report claimed that the President played a decisive role in my decision, and that is not true,” said the admiral in the “Grande Entrevista” on RTP, referring to an article published by the Lusa agency on Sunday, November 9, titled “Presidential Elections: Gouveia e Melo reveals Marcelo’s attempt to stop him led to his candidacy”.
“This news report is based on a book that was written, an interview book, and there’s nothing like checking the interview. And in that interview, I don’t say that, so it’s a false claim attributed to me,” he emphasized.
In the book, Gouveia e Melo recalled during the interview an October 2024 article from Expresso titled “Admiral wants two more submarines to stay in the Navy and abandon Belém”. “It was that article that made me set my course. Because when I read it, I was really upset,” can be read in the excerpt, meanwhile pre-published by Gouveia e Melo’s candidacy [which you can read in full here].
During the interview on Monday, when questioned about whether he has or had the conviction that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa tried to prevent his candidacy in any way, Gouveia e Melo replied that, to him, this conviction is “petty politics”. “It was not this conviction that made me decide one way or another, and that issue is a problem of the past for me,” he said.
Regarding the controversy, Gouveia e Melo clarified that his response “does not concern the content of the article. It concerns the title of the article”. “Because the article’s title suggested I was blackmailing the government, which was a very ugly thing attributed to me that I did not like,” he explained.
“At that moment, I also felt I couldn’t continue to perform my duties normally within the Defense, because attributing to the military chief that he is blackmailing the government to stay in the Armed Forces is, I believe, a very serious issue that could not go unchallenged,” he added.
In this context, he used the expression “upset”: “It left me angry, essentially angry,” he stressed.
It is worth remembering, however, that on Sunday night, in an interview with CNN, the admiral attributed the use of this expression to another situation involving the President of the Republic. “The fact that I was really upset has to do with a statement the President made at my inauguration,” he said in that conversation, without specifying what Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had said on the occasion.
Confronted with the first paragraph of the article in Expresso from 2024, Gouveia e Melo referred to the last three words of that sentence: “Expresso found out”.
“But where and from whom did Expresso find out?” he questioned. “Are those statements mine? They are not,” he stated firmly.
The President of the Republic has also commented on the matter, denying having given any interview where he expressed his opinion on Gouveia e Melo’s candidacy for Belém.
“There is no interview. In my words, commenting on who is chief, who is not, who should or should not be chief of the Armed Forces, and commenting on who should or should not be a presidential candidate,” he also guaranteed on Sunday.
To which Gouveia e Melo commented: “Expresso should clarify this with the President of the Republic. It was not me who wrote the article. It was not me who alleged that the President of the Republic had said that.”
The presidential candidate Henrique Gouveia e Melo accuses the Lusa agency of publishing a false news about the motivation for his candidacy. The news agency, in turn, denies the accusations. Meanwhile, the admiral has already made a point of pre-publishing the relevant pages.
Carolina Pereira Soares | 19:22 – 10/11/2025
