Carlos César declares support for José Luís Carneiro to lead the PS

The president and interim secretary general of the PS, Carlos César, today declared support for the sole candidacy of José Luís Carneiro for the party leadership, considering that he is able to relaunch the energy of the socialists, weakened by the results of the legislative elections.

“I support José Luís Carneiro. As a PS member for 51 years, and as president of the party, I am pleased that the PS can relaunch, with a new leadership, the energy weakened by the results of the last elections, to honour its past and establish itself as a good promise for the future”, declared Carlos César, on the social network Facebook, before the direct elections that will be held on Friday and Saturday.

For Carlos César, the party is now at the right time to, “successively, renew itself without excluding valuable people and act without ceasing to adjust the party to the new dimensions and demands that citizens’ motivations and economic and social realities require”.

“I trust that this is the path that the new leadership will take. The first challenge, however, will be to confirm in the local elections that the Socialist Party is the real and constructive alternative to the AD,” he wrote.

The president of the PS also has a “word of admiration and party and personal solidarity” for Pedro Nuno Santos, who left the socialist leadership after the results of the elections of May 18, in which the party became the third force in terms of parliamentary representation, while remaining the second in number of votes.

According to César, Pedro Nuno contested these elections “in a situation, both nationally and Europeanly, that was particularly adverse for the democratic left”.

The president of the PS also considered, in the same publication, that he had done well to “insist that the election of the new party leader take place as early as possible”.

“In this period, since May 18th, the party, in all its structures and throughout the territory, has not stopped looking for the reasons for its electoral failure and has shown that it does not compromise with those who have dropped out, just as it does with the unrepentant”, he defended.

In this publication, Carlos César revisits what he wrote in the preface to a book by José Luís Carneiro, a text in which he stated that the current candidate for the leadership of the PS “being far removed from those politicians who vocalize everything that goes through their heads, and possessing a natural sobriety, distinguished himself, and continues to do so, by his closeness to people in the various roles he has performed”.

“There is a special concern with development policies, with reducing inequalities at all levels and with factors that reinforce trust in democratic institutions. It may not seem like much, but it is almost everything that a democratic socialist can navigate in these times,” he recalled.