Dozens of PAN activists, People-Animals-Nature, presented this Saturday, November 1st, their disaffiliation from the party. Among those leaving are activists, mayors and national and regional leaders, including former deputy Bebiana Cunha, who confirmed to the Lusa agency that she had left the party she helped to build.
“When there is no longer ideological coherence, it makes no sense to continue. The PAN distorted its ideology. In 2011 we talked about ‘Giving value to values’, bringing ethics to politics. This project failed. Today, quantity seems more important than quality”, stated Bebiana Cunha.
The former deputy, who joined the PAN in 2011 and led the parliamentary group in 2021, stressed that the decision “was not taken lightly”. The word that best summarizes the feeling among those leaving, he said, is “disillusionment”.
“We see the party moving away from its ideology, forming coalitions without coherence and losing the ethical focus that distinguished it. There is a lack of self-criticism. There is a denial of reality and a lack of analysis regarding the loss of representation”, he lamented, to Lusa.
The departures come just a few months after an open letter, released in July, in which former leaders asked for internal reflection and warned against the departure from “founding values”. Among the 35 signatories were names such as Anabela Castro, Nuno Pires, Miguel Queirós and Carolina Pia.
In a new statement released today – signed by five former militants, including Bebiana Cunha and Miguel Queirós -, the signatories state that “PAN is no longer what it was: the only platform where causes and committed activism have ever converged into an organized political structure”.
According to Lusa, subscribers also remember that The party’s elective congress, scheduled for May 2025, has not yet taken place, which they consider places the PAN “in a situation of statutory illegality”.
The choice of World Vegan Day to announce the departure was, according to former activists, symbolic. “This is a collective, ethical and symbolic disaffiliation, which aims to call for the reconstruction of truly horizontal, empathetic and democratic political spaces”, the note reads.
In response, the PAN leadership also reacted in a statementensuring that “the party has registered a constant increase in new memberships” and minimizing the impact of departures.
“The now formalized disaffiliations concern members who have been away from active party life for months or years. Some of these people even supported competing candidacies in the last elections, which violates the statutes. This is just the natural closure of a personal and political cycle”, reads the management’s response.