The Constitutional Court indicated this Tuesday, December 23, that it did not admit the candidacies for the presidential elections of Joana Amaral Dias, Ricardo Sousa and José Cardoso, after failing to correct irregularities that had been identified within the stipulated deadline.
Last Friday, the Constitutional Court (TC) indicated in a ruling that it had admitted 11 candidacies for the presidential elections, while three others – Joana Amaral Dias, Ricardo Sousa and José Cardoso – had been notified to correct, within two days, irregularities that had been identified.
In a ruling released today, the TC highlights that, after that period, none of the three applications remedied the irregularities in question.
In the case of Joana Amaral Dias, the TC indicates that “she did not gather the missing documents”, namely the certificate of original Portuguese nationality and the “document proving that she enjoys all civil and political rights”, nor did she “present declarations of proposition and respective voter certificates, in terms of completing a legal minimum of 7,500 valid declarations”.
According to the TC, of the 7,500 signatures legally required to run for President of the Republic, Joana Amaral Dias only presented 1,575 valid ones.
José Cardoso, former member of the IL and founder of the Liberal Social Party (PLS), was also unable to gather the necessary 7,500 signatures, having only delivered 7,265 that met the legal criteria, that is, that were “regularly instructed, duly signed and with the subscriber’s registration certificate in the electoral register”.
The same happened with Ricardo Sousa, who only presented 3,761 valid signatures.
There are thus 11 candidates for the presidential elections: Gouveia e Melo, Marques Mendes, António Filipe, Catarina Martins, António José Seguro, Humberto Correia, André Pestana, Jorge Pinto, Cotrim Figueiredo, André Ventura and the painter and musician Manuel João Vieira.
These are the presidential elections with the most candidates in the history of Portuguese democracy. Until now, the most disputed had been in 2016, with ten candidates.
The first round of the presidential elections takes place on January 18.