Pedro Nuno Santos, the new socialist phoenix

Never has politics encouraged resurrections as much as in these hectic times. The latest entry into the phoenix club is the Portuguese Pedro Nuno Santos (São João da Madeira, 46 years old), elevated last weekend as a candidate for prime minister and leader of the Socialist Party at a congress in Lisbon, which began as that of trauma and ended up being that of hope before the elections of March 10. A scenario that Santos could not imagine a year ago, when he began his journey through the desert after having resigned as Minister of Infrastructure and Housing for having authorized a compensation of half a million euros to an administrator of the TAP airline, which took a few months to hold another public office and become Secretary of State for the Treasury.

Pedro Nuno Santos then maintained a tense relationship with the Prime Minister, António Costa, which had forced him to publicly rectify a strategic decision for the country that he had made on his own: the choice of the location of the new Lisbon airport, pending for some time. 54 years. Santos approved a decree on the location that barely lasted 24 hours and forced him to hold a public atonement ceremony for the error. He was, therefore, a weakened politician who seemed doomed to decline when Costa allowed the creation of a commission of inquiry into the public management of the TAP company, under the tutelage of Santos, who had defended its nationalization to save it from bankruptcy. .

The first sign that there was no political burial was his seven-hour appearance at that commission. He found the balance between humility and confidence, in the same way that he proudly proclaims himself as the son of a successful businessman and grandson of a shoemaker. He recognized his mistakes as a minister and vindicated his desire to move forward. Conscious or not, that was the first act of his campaign to win the leadership of the PS. When he announced his candidacy for the party primaries, after Costa's unexpected resignation due to an investigation into energy projects still pending to be clarified, Pedro Nuno Santos had transformed his weakness into strength. “We are the result of our scars,” he said.

In the opinion of Francisco Vale César, who directed his campaign for the primaries, “presenting himself in this way humanizes him.” The distance from the political front line has allowed him to “reflect on everything that had gone well and what had gone not so well, he was able to analyze the mistakes he had made so as not to repeat them again,” says Vale César, who met him in in 2000, when both were studying at the Higher Institute of Economics and Management of the University of Lisbon and he was part of his team at the head of the Socialist Youth between 2004 and 2008.

With the mantra that only people who act make mistakes, Pedro Nuno Santos appeared at the congress with a speech that went beyond vindicating Costa's legacy. His own ideas for the development of the country include some implicit criticism of past decisions, such as the distribution of public funds to please everyone. Instead, he defends the selection of strategic sectors to support from the State with the aim of transforming an economy that is distinguished by low wages and low added value. But the most innovative proposal in his speech, which combined the classic recipes of social democracy with reformism, is aimed at the financing of Social Security. “The economy is undergoing profound transformation. Automation, robotization and artificial intelligence have enormous potential to increase productivity, but they come with challenges. In this process, many highly lucrative sectors, but with few workers, stop contributing to the Social Security system as much as they could and should,” he explained.

Alexandra Leitão, the coordinator of the political motion that Pedro Nuno Santos brought to congress, clarifies that “it is not about taxing robots.” “It is about finding a way so that contributions to Social Security are in line with the changes in the labor market and creating justice in the system, so that companies that have more labor are not penalized more than those that They can do without workers,” explains Leitão. It is a path that the European Commission has begun to study and that was also debated in the Toledo Pact, in Spain. “We have to find a more equitable model to finance social contributions without putting technology companies that have a lot of added value at risk,” says Leitão, a former minister.

Elected in primaries with 60% of the votes, Pedro Nuno Santos tries to move away from the image of a radical leftist, which accompanies him as a promoter of the alliance between all the forces of the left that allowed António Costa to take office in 2015. despite not being the most voted list. His charisma, which is not even questioned by critics, is both a virtue and a political defect. “In the next elections,” says Mafalda Anjos, director of the magazine Visão, ““It has two difficulties: attracting the vote from the center and the useful vote from the left.”

Although the socialists are still digesting the November political crisis that left them without the second absolute majority in their history in the middle of their term, their new leader gave up licking his wounds in public and focused on the future. He is the first general secretary of the PS who was born after the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and claims for his generation the opportunity to advance in the spirit of April 25, when a military coup overthrew the longest dictatorship in Europe. western. “April is not only past, it is also what we still have to do.”

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