The history of Western democracies is full of deaths and resurrections. Therefore, I always resist issuing death certificates to those in public life, to partisan forces and even less to ideas. Over the last few years, legitimately, of course, among opponents, journalists and commentators (in many cases, accumulating all three conditions), there has been no shortage of people declaring the end of the CDS-PP’s life.
I remember some phrases I heard when Francisco Rodrigues dos Santos and his leadership – as tepid as they were superficial and as erratic as they were childish – put what seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of the centrists. I remember the jubilation underlying analyzes in respectable media outlets and how they contrasted with the rueful treatment given to the crisis that pitted Joacine Katar Moreira and the disciples of Rui Tavares, the electoral catastrophe of Mariana Mortágua or the vexatious defeat of Pedro Nuno Santos when the PS fell to third parliamentary strength.
The decline of the CDS, celebrated by many who relativized its ability to bring together all those who did not believe in socialism light of long periods of the PSD and acting as a buffer for an ultramontane and unrecommended right, was not beneficial for the Portuguese party spectrum. In many moments, in fact, the party of Freitas do Amaral, Lucas Pires, Adriano Moreira, Manuel Monteiro, Paulo Portas, Ribeiro e Castro and Assunção Cristas was the last stronghold for those who did not accept the predisposition of a certain PSD towards ideological capitulation and the renunciation of combat.
With Portas, the CDS managed to be many different things, several of them simultaneously – the party of farming, pensioners and even the fight against subsidization -, but it was, above all, the taxpayer’s party. With this line he was able to bring together people who were not satisfied with a country taken by atavism, in which the social elevator was closed to too many segments of the population and in which advancement through work appeared to be a utopia.
Thanks to the CDS, during my first years as a voter I had the option of delivering my vote, without reservations. It should not be forgotten that the CDS was perhaps the most structured and vehement opposition force to the perfidy of José Sócrates and the permanent pressure exerted by the former prime minister (and by those who today pretend to have never shaken his hand) on democratic institutions, public companies and the media.
During the troika years, the CDS fought – sometimes well, sometimes not so much – for a modicum of proportionality in the efforts required of the Portuguese and it was also through the voices of the Christian Democrats that we heard, on several occasions, that it was necessary to ease the austerity that the coalition led by Passos Coelho was applying after the conclusion of the financial assistance.
Understanding the existential challenge that Nuno Melo and company face, I have difficulty conceiving that the once taxpayer’s party has eclipsed itself, sacrificing its identity and Olympic minimums of strategic autonomy. Everything is pledged thanks to a PSD that neither reforms nor allows it to be reformed, that preserves power through tactics typical of António Costa’s consulate, that lowers the IRS with a timidity comparable to that of Fernando Medina and that, worst of all, still helps to maintain the unseemly additional IMI. Unfortunately for our sins, the party that once defended us from fiscal suffocation is today complicit in maintaining a morally indefensible tax. Almost like a caricature, the taxpayer’s party is today the Mortágua tax party. The CDS survives, that’s for sure. I’m afraid your ideas are not. Let us remember them, therefore, with nostalgia.
Communication consultant