Em remarks delivered via phone during a visit to several Brazilian cities since Friday, Marques Mendes announced a commitment for his presidential campaign.
“As President of the Republic, if elected, I will introduce an innovation in the role of the President. And what is this innovation? It is the creation of open presidencies abroad, among the communities,” he stated.
The candidate for the presidency, supported by the PSD, emphasized that these open presidencies have been common throughout the 50 years of democracy, but “no one” has done them abroad.
“The primary goal is principled. Portugal is not just a territory. Portugal is a territory and a nation. And in that nation are the 10 million Portuguese who live in the European territory, as well as the four, five, or six million Portuguese living in communities around the world. It’s important to give attention to both,” he explained.
According to Marques Mendes, “there are no first-class and second-class Portuguese,” making it crucial to establish open presidencies within communities, serving a “practical objective” of providing greater attention and sensitivity to the diaspora.
“It opens an opportunity for a simpler, more direct, and effective relationship between communities and the Portuguese political power, highlighting the possibility for several issues, which sometimes linger without decision and sometimes sit forgotten in a drawer, to become part of the political agenda, the media agenda, and thus be reflected upon and decided,” he explained.
With this initiative, the head of state would “create conditions for the Government and parties to enhance their relationship with the communities and help resolve their problems,” argued the candidate.
“There is a third and final goal, which is to help give more media visibility to the Portuguese communities, which today have little visibility in Portugal. And they need it because remarkable things happen in these Portuguese communities,” he added.
Marques Mendes, who visited Santos, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, shared a very positive assessment of the visit, which he said could not have gone better.
“These presidential elections are about people, not parties, and people in Brazil, in a very special way, as in other European countries, know two things about me, which are not self-praise but observations. It was I who, in the 1990s, created RTP Internacional,” he said.
He also noted that he was reminded “several times” he had negotiated, as the PSD’s parliamentary leader in 1997, a constitutional revision, granting Portuguese citizens living abroad the right to vote in presidential elections, which was previously not possible.
