The former coordinator of the Left Bloc (BE), Catarina Martins, announced on Wednesday her candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic, citing a “political space that was not filled” and stating that “António José Seguro does not want to be a left-wing candidate.”
“I presented my candidacy very confident that there is a political space unfilled by anyone, and I believed it was important to fill it. It is a political space for those who do not resign themselves to the country’s abandonment,” she said in an interview with CNN Portugal.
The leftist also stressed the need for someone who “does not remain in a kind of sad or nostalgic relinquishment of the past” and who “seeks out the strengths within this country to reinvent ourselves,” suggesting that “sometimes, politics is distracted by everything except what pertains to people’s lives.”
When questioned about the candidacy of the former general secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Catarina Martins recalled that António José Seguro “believes he did everything right when he agreed with Passos Coelho to cut salaries, hospitals, and schools when the country was most fragile and needed someone to defend it.”
Moreover, she pointed out that Seguro “said he does not feel comfortable with words like ‘Left'” and “cannot repeat what would be the legacy of the Socialist Party.”
“António José Seguro ended up in these elections saying, ‘I am the useless vote. The Left can vote for me, knowing I will not say anything Left.’ This leaves us with a void, and I believe the Left cannot afford to be absent,” she asserted.
Catarina Martins argued that a President of the Republic “has the responsibility to draw attention to the debates the country needs to have” and emphasized that there are “two problems in politics” in Portugal.
“One is indecency, the degradation of democracy, the savagery of shouting, the desire to divide society, not bringing solutions, only problems. The other is the fact that politics only talks about itself and not about people’s lives,” she explained, stressing that to solve these problems, it is necessary to have someone who can “bring people together to solve concrete problems.”
Catarina Martins rejected the notion that her candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic might divide left-wing voters and argued that “António José Seguro does not want to be a left-wing candidate.”
“I thought long and hard, and the worst thing the Left could do would be not to be present in these presidential elections,” she insisted.
When asked if it would be a personal defeat to be behind Jorge Pinto, a candidate supported by Livre, the former coordinator of the Left Bloc replied: “I have a lot of respect for all the candidates and all political spaces, but I am not here to assert a party space. I genuinely believe it is necessary to have a President of the Republic in Portugal capable of uniting people.”
The presidential elections are scheduled for January 18, featuring candidates such as Catarina Martins, Luís Marques Mendes, António José Seguro, João Cotrim Figueiredo, Jorge Pinto, António Filipe, and Henrique Gouveia e Melo.
The presidential elections on January 18 have over a dozen candidates, with eight going to debate. Notícias ao Minuto recalls who they are and what they have already said in the race to Belém.
