“Ideologically, I am a left-wing guy, a person on the left with a strong perspective on the state’s regulatory and distributive intervention in the economic field, and very libertarian on the civil and political rights front.”
These words come from José Manuel Pureza, who defined himself this way in an interview in 2018 during the 11th National Convention of BE, held at the Casal Vistoso pavilion in Lisbon.
Seven years later, at the same location, upon being appointed as the party’s coordinator, he once again advocated for a “bridging left” and promised dialogue in the challenging task of reviving a declining party.
José Manuel Marques da Silva Pureza, born on December 18, 1958, in Coimbra, is 66 years old. He is married with two children and four grandchildren.
Proudly hailing from Coimbra, Pureza grew up as the only child of two teachers and was 15 years old on April 25, 1974.
In his adolescence, he sympathized with the Socialist Left Movement (MES), and at age 28, he participated in the Loures municipal coordinator of Maria de Lourdes Pintassilgo’s campaign. He was an activist in the Union of the Left for Socialist Democracy.
He joined BE when he was 42, about a year after its founding.
In a party born from the merger of several left-leaning tendencies, Pureza — who joined through the influence of his “dear friend,” historian Paulo Varela Gomes — was not part of any of the founding currents: PSR (Revolutionary Socialist Party), UDP (Popular Democratic Union), and Política XXI.
He eventually aligned himself with Miguel Portas’s current, Política XXI, but over time, he believed that division into currents no longer made sense.
As a graduate in Law and a Doctor in Sociology, Pureza is a Full Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra and a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), where he spearheaded the Peace Studies Group.
His advocacy for human rights stood out during his tenure as a parliament member, a position he first held from 2009 to 2011, then from 2015 to 2019, and finally from 2019 to 2022.
During this period, he served as parliamentary leader and vice-president of the Assembly of the Republic. In October this year, he led the BE list for the Coimbra City Hall.
Publicly identifying as Catholic — though he says he does not “flaunt it” — he gained prominence defending the cause of medically assisted dying alongside João Semedo, the BE leader who passed away in 2018.
“I never thought a Catholic could be anything but an activist,” he stated in 2018.
Asked about the fact that the Catholic Church and BE support such opposing causes, and how these two aspects coexist within him, Pureza responded: “Jesus Christ did not die in bed, nor old. He died as he did because the political and religious powers of his time were unable to accept his truly revolutionary message.”
Recently, during the 2024 legislative campaign in Coimbra, Pureza evoked the strength of João Semedo, who, in 2016, already weakened by vocal cord cancer, delivered a surprising speech during Marisa Matias’s presidential campaign.
“In these shadowy times when democracy sees the abyss so close, we must delve deep within ourselves to find the necessary strength for the fight, resisting, but more than that, bringing hope,” he urged.
Known for his sense of humor, the professor, who “still gets nervous” and feels “butterflies in his stomach” before every class, now faces the challenging task of revitalizing BE after the brief leadership of Mariana Mortágua.
