Miguel A. Lopes / LUSA
The head of the Democratic Alliance (AD) list for the European elections, Sebastião Bugalho
In a television interview, the now AD candidate assured that he “didn’t like” being a politician. And always vote blank.
The Democratic Alliance surprised most voters and analysts when it chose Sebastião Bugalho to lead the list for this year’s European elections.
Last week, when he spoke for the first time at a political event, he presented his main ideas: a united and larger-scale Europe, a reinforced commitment to support Ukraine, and left warnings about threats to the continent’s security.
“We want to make the future of Europe a story worth telling our children.”
“I’m here because I believe in Europe. Fight with me.”
But his speech about Europe, more specifically about the European Union, was not always like this.
In 2016, in a conversation with Fernando Alvim on Canal Q, the now candidate for MEP, at the time invited as a columnist for the newspaper i, had a perspective anti-European Union.
The context was the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union: the day after the referendum, then Prime Minister David Cameron resigned. “European leaders didn’t give him enough things to stay. You Europeans behaved badly towards the English“.
He warned that, at that stage, Europe was “led by a lawyer (Wolfgang Schäuble) and by a chemical engineer (Angela Merkel). What charisma is this?“, He asked.
He went to History to say that Winston Churchill was “more European than any Europeanist today. This Europe they talk about does not exist.”
He went further to say: European Union is a “disaster” and that it is “Europe’s biggest enemy”, predicting that the entity would “implode inside”.
“What they want in Brussels is for you to think that, to defend Europe, you have to defend the European Union. But Europe’s biggest enemy is the European Union. Being skeptical against the European Union is not being extremist. If you can create problems with the Greek communists and the English conservativesthe problem is not the people. You need to be a little bad“, he justified.
AND didn’t seem at all geared towards a political career.
Firstly, because politicians, like everyone else, have a “limited view” of reality.
He even left Alvim a challenge: “Tell me a political campaign that was based on truth. Tell me an election that was made based on true facts, that fulfilled all its promises.”
And assured that always vote blank: “I don’t vote for any Portuguese political party. After a month in political journalism, I knew the parties too well to believe them“.
Afterwards, because he assured that “I didn’t like it at all” to enter politics. “At least, with these parties, no“, he warned.
In the midst of this context, against the European Union and against politicians, he will now be… MEP, as Ricardo Araújo Pereira said at SIC. You will work in politics, in the European Parliament, the directly elected legislative body of the European Union.
But he admitted, right at the time, that he identifies with parties of right: “Of course I’m right-wing. The country is left-wing – and I am against it”.
Nuno Teixeira da Silva, ZAP //
