PSD proposes Aguiar Branco president of the AR and Hugo Soares for parliamentary leader | Legislative 2024

Former minister José Pedro Aguiar-Branco will be the PSD candidate for president of the Assembly of the Republic in the 16th legislature and Hugo Soares for the leadership of the social democratic bench, an official party source told Lusa.

José Pedro Aguiar Branco was elected deputy for Viana do Castelo, where he was head of the list for the Democratic Alliance (AD). Hugo Soares led the AD list for Braga and is the party’s general secretary.

According to the Rules of Procedure of the Assembly of the Republic, the election of the president of parliament takes place at the first plenary meeting of the legislature – scheduled for Tuesday – and “the candidate who obtains the absolute majority of the votes of the deputies in full office” is elected. Aguiar-Branco therefore needs 116 deputies.

If elected, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, former Minister of Defense, will succeed the socialist Augusto Santos Silva (who failed the election by the Fora da Europa circle) as the State’s second figure.

Leading the PSD bench, whose elections have not yet been formally scheduled, Hugo Soares is expected to replace Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, who has held the position since July 2022.

The AD won the March 10 elections and the PSD leader was appointed prime minister by the President of the Republic. Luís Montenegro presents his Government on Thursday and the inauguration is scheduled for April 2nd.

In the new parliament, the PSD will have 78 deputies (one more than in the previous legislature), the PS also 78 (42 fewer), Chega increases from 12 to 50 parliamentarians, IL maintains the eight deputies and BE the five that already had, while the PCP drops from six to four. Livre grows from one to four and PAN maintains its only deputy.

The CDS-PP returns to parliament with two deputies, obtained in the AD pre-election coalition (with PSD and PPM), which will total 80 deputies in the Assembly of the Republic.

Aguiar-Branco, the return five years later

José Pedro Correia de Aguiar-Branco was born in 1957, was a deputy between 2005 and 2019, having held the position of Minister of Defense in the Government led by Passos Coelho between 2011 and 2015 and Minister of Justice in the short-lived PSD/CDS-PP Government headed by Pedro Santana Lopes (2003-2004). In the legislative elections on March 10, he was elected deputy for the AD coalition (which brings together PSD, CDS-PP and PPM) as head of the list for Viana do Castelo.

Aguiar-Branco is 66 years old and graduated in Law from the Faculty of Law of the University of Coimbra in 1980, the year in which he began practicing law at the first law firm established in Portugal.

In addition to being a minister in two governments led by the PSD, he was president of the social democratic parliamentary group in the XI Legislature and vice-president of the party from April 2008 to March 2010, during the leadership of Manuela Ferreira Leite.

In 2010, he ran for party leadership against Pedro Passos Coelho and Paulo Rangel, obtaining 3.5% of the votes.

When he left parliament in January 2019 after 14 years, he called for any future changes to the status of deputies to never make them “mere political employees”. “Parliament is a space for comparing projects in an exercise of freedom that should not make us forget that being a deputy is more than a profession, it is not a profession and much less a job”, he stated then.

Already out of the first line of political combat, he supported the current leader of the PSD, Luís Montenegro, in the two candidacies for the party’s presidency and Paulo Rangel in the dispute against Rui Rio and, in recent months, his name has even circulated as a possible head of list from the PSD to the European ones.

Hugo Soares in the place where he was once happy

The current secretary general of the PSD, Hugo Soares, will once again run for the position of parliamentary leader of the social democratic bench, which he held six years ago but for a brief seven months.

Hugo Soares is a native of Braga, born on March 2, 1983 (he turned 41 during the last electoral campaign), and has been the right-hand man of the prime minister-designate, Luís Montenegro, over the last few years and even became taken for granted in the future executive.

President of the Social Democratic Youth between 2012 and 2014, he was a deputy to the Assembly of the Republic between June 2011 and October 2019. As leader of “jota”, he stood out when, at the end of 2013, he was the first subscriber to a referendum with two questions, one about co-adoption and the other about adoption of children by same-sex couples, which was approved in parliament with the votes of the PSD and the abstention of the CDS-PP, but which was later declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in February 2014.

In July 2017, still under the party presidency of Pedro Passos Coelho, he succeeded Montenegro as president of the PSD parliamentary group, becoming, at 34 years old, the youngest leader of the social democratic bench ever. The following year, Passos Coelho did not run again for president of the party following the poor result in the local elections, and Rui Rio won the leadership dispute against Pedro Santana Lopes.

About a month after the elections, Hugo Soares called elections for the bench to which he did not re-run, after Rui Rio expressed his desire to work with another bench leadership, and was succeeded by Fernando Negrão, elected with less than 40 % of bench votes.

In the 2019 legislative elections, Hugo Soares would even be left off the lists of candidates for deputies by decision of the Rio leadership.

Lawyer by profession and business administrator, he returns to the forefront of political life with Montenegro’s victory in the 2022 internal elections and assumes the position of general secretary, being, in practice, the current president’s number two. In the legislative elections on March 10, he was head of the list for Braga.

Since he held the position of president of the bench, five leaders have passed through there: Fernando Negrão, Rui Rio, Adão Silva, Paulo Mota Pinto – he was also replaced a few months after being elected when Montenegro assumed the presidency of the PSD – and Joaquim Miranda Sarmento .

Hugo Soares will, after the election, have to manage a parliamentary group of 78 deputies entirely chosen by the current leadership, but with a challenging parliamentary composition, with the PS having the same number of deputies as the social democrats and Chega rising to the 50.

Only with the two CDS-PP deputies, achieved by the AD pre-election coalition, was it possible to achieve a short electoral majority that will be tested daily in parliament, where not even counting the IL (with eight deputies) this bloc is able to arithmetically overcome the opposition to left, with 91 deputies (not counting the only PAN deputy).