Like some Portuguese, I already made my judgment on José Sócrates’ crimes as Prime Minister and after that a long time ago. There was no lack of information about the process, the accusation has irreducible points and even his behavior in the trial these days leaves me little doubt. Have whatever outcome you have.
It was a crude choice that more than 10 years ago (!) it was the regime that would be challenged in a mega-process. This price is paid today at various levels but the invoice is from yesterday.
How many times has it been heard, read and insinuated that those who worked with Socrates and were part of his governments were involved in the same webs, corruption and that they sponsored some of his schemes? That the PS was some kind of gangster party?
It is true that this thesis is accentuated with the arrival of the extreme right in national politics in the last 6 years, but it was born much earlier. Now, apart from those bankers, managers that we all know and people like Manuel Pinho who cannot be said to be from the PS, what does an exhaustive investigation that has existed for so many years at Sócrates tell us? Something that many did not want to be seen and few announce as one of the most relevant political facts of the endless and never-ending ‘Operation Marquis.’ When Socrates did wrong, he always acted alone politically and with no knowledge of his party or whoever was in government with him.
So much evidence collected and not a single wiretap that could, at least, incriminate someone from their governments in the newspapers, so many thought. Nothing.
The abusive sentences here and there, from the street and even from certain commentators on television, had little or no support for reality. Let those who have never worked in a company for a director or general director under whom they came to realize that perhaps that person was not as serious as they thought or even as expected, cast the first stone. At the very least. Then…
Once here, a part of the Public Ministry, which is made up of women and men, as in everything in life, became contaminated. Dominated by this desire to put the regime’s party in check, they managed to invent an operation called ‘Influencer’ to bring down a government.
Let’s just focus on the most relevant after the famous paragraph from the ex-PGR and over the last two years: three judges dictating the same as the criminal investigation court. The conviction that there was no crime and that the preventive detention requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office for two of the defendants in the first phase would not have made any sense.
On April 17, 2024, the same court ruled that the investigation and what was given as evidence were completely discredited. He even went further, ridiculing the form and method of “evidence of crime.” Politicians being politicians, defending the interests of the country in its conception, businesspeople being businesspeople, adding to the need to regulate lobbying and so on.
The Public Prosecutor’s reaction to this entire sentence, which truly put him in check, was similar to that of a thief who was caught stealing.
There was and is more: a former minister and secretary of State illegally wiretapped for more than four years without proof or reason that is known at the end of all this time. The process that has not progressed in two years and in which not even the AD government itself believes anymore, taking advantage and continuing with projects that served as the root of this ‘Influencer’, involving a defendant company that remains as the maximum executor because it is the best for it. Just like yesterday.
Finally and probably more serious than everything else: what this newspaper reported so recently. The Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) failed to wiretap a former prime minister for five years. See: it’s not just about violating the rule of law and respect for the separation of powers here. It is confirmation of an unbridled persecution that culminated in a political coup in 2023.
It could and probably will make a book.
Sócrates did not destroy, much less contaminate the PS during and after the fall, but he created a trauma far beyond his party at the time that has lasted to this day. In all spheres and in the most relevant of all.
A trauma that blinded Portuguese justice and tipped the scales.