Livre spokesman Rui Tavares warned today of the “real risk” of democracy in Portugal being lost and of the need for left-wing parties to mature.
“When the center right thinks that it is bringing the far right into the sphere of power, in an attempt to control it, what happens is that democracies are lost,” said Rui Tavares today, considering that this “is a real risk” for Portugal.
For the Livre spokesman, the country faces “a very narrow path” marked by the “abyss on the right”, whose parties he says are “in a process of autophagy, of internal cannibalization”.
“Let’s imagine what it will be like if the more radicalized right, the extreme right, governs in Portugal,” he challenged, maintaining that this will mean “that after a short time of looking over each other’s shoulders to see who sticks the knife in first, the knife will be stuck in”.
A scenario in which the left-wing parties have to “have a great capacity” to be “mature enough to grow, not only in the polls – and the left needs to grow in the polls, winning over the votes of the center, the right and the undecided – but also the capacity to grow in maturity,” he said.
For the Livre leader, the ‘geringonça’, which was “innovative” in its time, is not enough now, at a time when the country needs “a system that works with the best European practices, which means clearly telling people that we are willing to negotiate a government program together”.
In Rui Tavares’ opinion, the maturity of the left lies in “knowing that it will not govern alone, but with civil society”, opening a national debate on the future of the country, adding “to the Three Ds of April 25 (Democratize, Decolonize, Develop), two others: those of dynamism and dignity”.
A mature left is “a left that is able to speak to the democratic center and right,” he explained, considering that these two wings of politics will “have to talk to each other” in order to respond to the mechanisms that require a two-thirds majority.
In the “democratic renewal” he advocates, Rui Tavares admits the creation of a national compensation circle or a commitment to systems similar to those in Denmark or Brazil, in which “the parties run alone but declare their willingness to form a parliamentary majority and for the count to be made jointly for the purposes of determining mandates”.
A system that “makes it possible to identify, isolate and hive off the extreme right, because the right will have to make a choice” and clarify, before the elections, whether “this extreme right is with them or not”, he said, stressing that “the people have to know”.
Rui Tavares was speaking in Caldas da Rainha, where today he attended the presentation of the head of the Livre party list for the Leiria district, Inês Pires.
Graduated in Biochemistry and Cell Biology, the 28-year-old candidate has been a Livre activist since 2019 and today presented a program with which she intends to respond to the problems in the district, especially with regard to precariousness, housing, health, education, mobility and climate change.
