“I believe the Bloco needs a change. I hope this Convention is the convention of change. I’m sure it’s the convention BE needs right now,” stated Mariana Mortágua at the entrance of the 14th National Convention, held at the Casal Vistoso pavilion in Lisbon.
The coordinator, who announced in October that she would not seek re-election for the position she has held since 2023, acknowledged mistakes during her term but considered that “most likely they were not decisive for something much larger than us,” which is “the powerful advance of the right and its ideas.”
“If you ask me if my leadership and my mandate were able to combat this advance of the far-right, no, they were not,” she acknowledged.
In this context, Mortágua considered that the party “needs to change, needs to reflect, and this convention serves that purpose.”
In addition to BE, the entire left, which “is very fragile today,” has to “reflect, think, and openly discuss what it did well, what it did wrong, the context in which it lives, and what are the conditions for the change Portugal needs.”
In Mortágua’s view, “the left has to go to the debate of ideas.”
“We are losing the battle of ideas. The ideological battle even. The right has a very strong ideological power in Portugal today. And the left has to go to that fight,” she considered.
