Goodbye, until your return

Politics makes no sense without parties. But there are parties that no longer make sense to us. And when the reasons for belonging to a party seem to disappear, it is our duty to leave. Therefore, to say goodbye to the Social Democratic Party, I decided to write this text after handing in my membership card at the National Headquarters.

Ronald Reagan used to say that he hadn't left the Democratic Party, but that the Democratic Party had left him. I can't complain about being surprised by this outcome, like Reagan, because the party hasn't changed much since I joined. I can complain more about having joined a party expecting it to go back to being what it is now only in history books. In part, because the motivations for my membership were more emotional than rational. My grandfather was elected as a member of the PPD/PSD in the first local elections held in Cascais and it is the party that most of my family has always voted for. Even before I took a political stance, it was already my party. When I was 14, I sent my first application to join the JSD, which must have been stored away in some electronic drawer. It was already a sign of a party that operates as a restricted group, in which people need to be nominated by someone they trust and don't have a chance if they don't fit into a "logic" or a "project". In this logic, we are valued by who we know and by the order of arrival, more than by the desire to serve our community. I didn't know it, but I was already coming into contact with the problems that lead to this departure.

When I finally joined the party, at the age of 21, I had fewer illusions. At the age of 19, I had participated in a local government campaign by a group of independent citizens supported by small parties in Cascais, against the PSD, which was in power. I felt the lack of democratic culture that still characterises our local and national politics. However, I chose to believe that these tactics went against the historical identity of the PSD and that they had to be combated within the party I sympathised with.

Those vices had nothing to do with the national PSD with which I had become politicized. Professional vote-getters meant nothing to someone who had grown up watching Passos Coelho say “to hell with the elections”. People focused on colonizing the state apparatus with activists made no sense to someone who had grown accustomed to seeing a party with figures like Jorge Moreira da Silva, Carlos Moedas or Miguel Poiares Maduro, who did not need politics to survive and who did not participate in it to strengthen the party machine. In Cascais, my hometown and that of some of the activists who most inspired me to pick up a registration form, like Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Francisco Pinto Balsemão and Joaquim Ferreira do Amaral, the strength of the apparatus grew as the quality of the policies and politicians diminished. Worse, we were witnessing a disappointment in the expectations of the electorate, which in 2001 had brought António Capucho to power and which were dashed when he was replaced by Carlos Carreiras. They had defeated the Socialist Party and José Luís Judas's plan for the unregulated and unsustainable development of the municipality. They had been elected to fulfil their humanist and environmentalist credentials, in the tradition of Carlos Pimenta. To govern first for the people and not for their own interests. And to ensure the preservation of the historic close relationship between the people of Cascais and nature. But from 2011 onwards, they governed for immediate gain, on the back of megalomaniac construction projects that increasingly threaten the municipality's identity and quality of life.

Cascais has become a case study of the type of PSD that is disappointing the Portuguese and that, therefore, is moving away from its majority nature. It is this triumph of the apparatus over merit, of resistance in the trenches of intrigue over the presentation of concrete results, that explains why, after 24 years in power in Cascais, and after having had names of the quality of Joana Balsemão, Filipa Roseta or Ricardo Baptista Leite, the PSD is now presenting its local mayor as a candidate. Just as in Madeira, in Cascais, the PSD is a cynical occupant of power who governs to perpetuate itself and only then to serve. It colonizes the public institutions of militants from all over the country, multiplying municipal companies and using high taxes to keep the municipality in a permanent state of celebration, in a festival of wastefulness that goes unnoticed because in Cascais there is really a lot of money. It is confusing to see my local council being used to build a gigantic bag of votes within the national PSD, where activists from all corners of the country are hired to ensure control of district and municipal councils. Talking to businesspeople who feel that life will be easier for their businesses if they become activists. Seeing capable council employees being undervalued or dismissed because they do not align themselves. A party that has created an amorphous council, where only 43% of the people voted in the last local elections. Anyone who attends council or municipal assembly meetings can only feel ashamed of the lack of respect that a representative of Sá Carneiro's party has for his opponents and his voters. I reiterate that this does not mean that Cascais is facing an apocalyptic scenario and that the PSD has done everything wrong. I just want to say that the time has come to demand more than the minimum from politicians. Stop turning a blind eye to everything unacceptable that is happening in our party politics just because the results are not horrible. We have to be more than mediocre.

I would like to remind you that we are talking about a party that spent 16 of the first 25 years of democracy in government, with two absolute majorities in between, and only 9 of the following 25 with governmental responsibilities. This is no coincidence. The PSD, with this type of protagonist and way of exercising its functions, has wasted its reserves of credibility, promising things it cannot deliver and presenting candidates who do not live up to its history. It has ceased to be the party of good men of the land and has become a party closed in on itself. It has even left its name, its symbol and its colours aside. I have witnessed this process closely, some would say too closely to criticise it, but I would say close enough to really understand it.

If we do not rise up against its degeneration in a democracy, we invite its enemies to grow. Faced with a PSD that no longer defends what Sá Carneiro, Balsemão and Magalhães Mota defended, and which therefore does not defend what I defend, the only option left for me to do is to leave. But I am not leaving because I have given up. I am leaving to seek to serve my land. With a candidacy that dignifies its size and its history. The fifth largest municipality in the country cannot be treated as a fiefdom, regardless of the party. It is hard for me because of what I love about the institution and because of all the friends I have made along the way. I could not end without sending them all a hug, for having made me better and for being with me until the end (and even after). It was an honour to be a member of the PSD. And it is with a great sense of responsibility that I leave, taking with me on this adventure members who are much older than me, who have taught me what the PSD once was and what it has stopped being. The strength of those who fought for this party when they wanted to silence it and who now feel silenced is much of what motivates this decision. I believe that we will once again come together around the principles that first attracted many and then millions.