The revelation is made in the book by Público journalist Ana Sá Lopes about the current leader of the PS, “In the head of Pedro Nuno Santos”, adding that the order, published on June 29, 2022 and revoked the following day by order of the first -minister, it was known to ANA in advance [Aeroportos de Portugal]the Order of Engineers and the mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas.
At the time, writes the journalist, Pedro Nuno – the name he has always been known for in the PS – did not want to leave the Government, “because he considered that ‘his socialist people’ would not think that was a good idea”.
To this end, the current leader of the PS presented himself with a scene that the journalist describes as one of “self-humiliation, rarely recorded in the annals of Portuguese politics” and “a painful act of contrition”, in which Pedro Nuno assumes “a relevant failure”, which he attributes to his impulsiveness, to “the desire to want to achieve, to want to achieve”.
The publication of the order is, in the journalist’s opinion, much more serious than the case of compensation to former TAP administrator Alexandra Reis and was the “point of no return” in the relationship between António Costa and Pedro Nuno Santos.
The book has the merit of systematizing information about the new general secretary of the PS, not only his personal journey but also his political and ideological thinking on the most diverse topics, the struggles within the party to which he joined in 1991, at 14 years (the same age as António Costa when he in turn joined the PS), support for it and the rupture between them and their government experience, with emphasis on TAP (“the almost fatal poison”) and the contraption.
Going back to his college days — Pedro Nuno Santos has a degree in Economics from the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão (ISEG) — the journalist emphasizes that it was there that he established friendships with a politically heterogeneous circle of close friends, none of them from the PS. The exception is Duarte Cordeiro, António Costa’s current Minister of the Environment.
It was from this time that his solid friendship with José Gusmão, also an economist and now leader of the Bloco de Esquerda and deputy to the European Parliament (in college he was a member of the PCP), dates back to this time.
In this context, the journalist highlights Pedro Nuno’s thoughts on Europe, of whose institutional design he has always been critical, as well as the liberal economy, two issues that he included in several of the motions with which he ran for leadership in the PS structures. .
Defining him as “deeply Europeanist”, Ana Sá Lopes cites the motion of the then young candidate leader for the Aveiro Federation in 2012.
It is there that he defends “a democratic federalism for the European Union”, a political union “built from the European Parliament” to change “this Europe”, linking the “debate on the future of the EU’s economic and institutional architecture” to the “debate on the future of the European socialist movement”.
Pedro Nuno has also always been very critical of the so-called “third way” – the name given to the current of democratic socialism created by the British Tony Blair and accompanied, at the national level, by António Guterres and José Sócrates – as he considers it to be a “shell of neoliberalism “, which led to “a setback of social democracy”.
Regarding the subsequent career of Pedro Nuno Santos, already a member of António Costa’s governments, the journalist points out that he was never his dauphin and that the rupture between them unfolds over several episodes.
The Batalha Congress, in 2018, was the first of these. António Costa then ended up saying that he had not yet put in “the papers for reform” in view of the comprehensive terms of the motion defended by the then Secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs
The disagreement regarding the presidential elections in 2020 – Pedro Nuno defended that the PS should have an autonomous candidacy, against the support for Marcelo that some socialists already expressed – was another of these episodes. Pedro Nuno ended up publicly supporting Ana Gomes.
The discussions in the Council of Ministers also helped to degrade the relationship: “it seems that they were not pretty scenes to see”, writes Ana Sá Lopes, commenting that Pedro Nuno, “if he were to be appointed prime minister, he would hate, for Of course, there would be a second Pedro Nuno in the raffle.”
As for the economic program that, today, the candidate for prime minister is presenting to the country, Ana Sá Lopes says that its roots are in the motion of the Batalha Congress, in which the defense of State intervention in the creation of innovation in the economy.
This role is defined by himself as a “collective mission” between the State and the private sector: in essence, says the journalist, “another formula for public-private partnerships”.
As for the current candidacy and support of Francisco Assis, which many considered strange due to the divergence of positions within the PS, the journalist bases it on their friendship, cemented “in common adversity” and the fact that they are both outside the “universe of elected representatives of António Costa”.
Ana Sá Lopes’ book is part of a trilogy published by Zigurate, and which also includes identical titles by journalists about the leaders of the PSD, Luís Montenegro, and Chega, André Ventura, which will be on sale at the beginning of February.