The passage of time makes some memories less harsh, softens other old attitudes of agreement and, above all, disagreement, becoming shrouded in the fog that each of us creates for ourselves.
Today, looking back at the last fifty years, we know that many of us fiercely criticized decisions made by Presidents of the Republic and, in other cases, applauded them with conviction.
It should be noted, however, that, I dare say, under no circumstances was any Portuguese citizen indifferent to the decisions that successive Presidents of the Republic took.
Between messages to the country, political vetoes, dissolutions of parliament or more or less impactful speeches, the relevance of the President of the Republic cannot be diminished or devalued.
And, since the candidacies are the result of the individual will of the candidates, it seems to me that the main national political actors – the Political Parties –, only out of hypocrisy or political calculation can practice attitudes of distancing or indifference.
But what is at stake today is not the past, it is the future.
The list of presidential candidates is stabilized.
The times of a country divided almost to the millimeter between right and left are no longer ours.
Candidacies marked by life paths that began under dictatorship and asserted themselves at the dawn of democracy are no longer possible.
Now, the challenge is to choose among the citizens/candidates that democracy generated, formed and gave shape to.
For those who over the last few decades have been able, for better or for worse, to take a stand, to put the collective ahead of their immediate interests, or, to put it another way, those who actively exercised citizenship and helped to build our political and constitutional system.
No hypocritical and empty neutralities, nor last-minute discoveries of historical references that were unknown until recently.
For me, I would not like to have as President of the Republic neither someone who asserts himself against the regime and the Constitution, nor someone who has never taken a stand in the face of any challenge facing the country.
I want a President of the Republic with a known political thought, who knows the political system and how it works, who knows its actors and who has no misunderstandings about our European future.
And I want a President who can gather around him a progressive and progressive democratic majority who, as in 1985, knows how to mobilize Christian Democrats, liberals, social democrats, socialists and the diversity of the left, to affirm and continue to build, with tolerance and respect for diversity, democracy in this challenging society of the 21st Century.
This is why I support António José Seguro’s candidacy.
Lawyer and manager