The spectacular win last night of former Aljezur Mayor Manuel Marreiros has put a spring into the step of thousands of local voters, who have spent the last few months hearing why ‘Aljezur will never change’ from people who refused to even sign their names to the lists of Renascer – the independent movement headed by Marreiros – “for fear of reprisals if Renascer doesn’t win”.
“I will vote Renascer on the day”, was the popular refrain. “But I am not prepared to put my name on a list, in case it doesn’t win…”
For a foreign resident coming from ‘a democracy’, the retort was always: “You don’t understand; Aljezur is still a dictatorship, we are not a democracy here…”
Last night’s result has changed all that.
Standing in Renascer’s base in the town, next to people whose eyes were glued to a screen giving results, I ventured as the numbers started coming through towards 9pm: “This is a kind of earthquake…” “It IS an earthquake!” The woman next to me was beaming. “I am so happy! I can hardly believe it.”
Happiness was the feeling through the room; infectious happiness. It spread outside to people waiting quietly in the dark; waiting for a result they had been repeatedly told wasn’t going to happen.
Then Manuel Marreiros came up the hill; a smile on his face – the final results on a piece of crumpled paper, and the shout went up. The wait was over. Renascer, whose emblem is a ‘little fish’, was happening. Hugs, the thumping of backs – a mayor ‘reborn’, and a team supporting him of extraordinarily committed people – almost none of them previous local politicians, but all united in the absolute conviction that it is time to put Aljezur back to work.
As Marreiros, 68, told Lusa last night, he would never have bothered returning to local politics if he thought his former borough was in capable hands. But “nothing has been done”, in spite of all the money promised through Europe’s PRR (Plan for Recovery and Resilience) and other funds, to improve the desperate problems of affordable housing or of inadequate educational facilities. Children’s extra-curricular activities have dried up. In short, the borough he left 16 years ago is markedly poorer in so many ways, in spite of having thousands of new foreign residents and associated businesses installed.
Talking on Friday night, in the little outpost of Malhadais (Odeceixe) at Renascer’s final ‘rally’ and hog-roast before the elections, Manuel Marreiros said his movement will not be coming back ‘just for four years’, “there is too much to do! This is not a 9am-5pm job; we have so much to get through; so much work to start. I have told Luís” (one of the younger members of the team) “he may as well move his bed into the town hall, he won’t have time to go backwards and forwards…”
Aljezur is a tiny municipality on the edge of the Algarve, but today it feels like a giant of a community that has broken out of the mould – despite all the obstacles and impediments.
Writing over Facebook this morning, the incoming mayor describes how voting in the parish of Odeceixe was “sadly marred by the conduct of Socialist Party candidates (…) Fifty years after 25 April, we never imagined that freedom could be called into question as it was in Odeceixe,” he says.
“At the door of the polling station, PS candidates led by the parish council president surrounded, pressured and did everything they could to restrict the exercise of freedom of vote.
“The parish council president, tablet in hand, showed people how to vote for the PS, conduct that led someone to file a criminal complaint against him.
“What happened in Odeceixe was very serious – a real attack on freedom.
“More than 50 years ago, hundreds of people were arrested, persecuted and murdered for fighting for freedom, and now a small group of so-called socialists are trying to prevent and restrict the freedom of vote of elderly and other vulnerable people. People who came into politics to destroy the essential values and principles of democracy and healthy coexistence between people.
“They should be ashamed and not even go out on the street, let alone take up any office.
“Over the last four years, I have followed that group in the Odeceixe council, and if their democratic performance was already well (negatively) established, what they did yesterday was proof that, for them, freedom is something dispensable in the personal sphere of others.
“This isn’t about winning or losing – it’s about freedom, and I won’t allow freedom to be compromised – neither mine nor that of others.
“I no longer have the patience to put up with people of such low-level”.
As it was, Odeceixe parish was ‘lost’ to the PS by four votes; 262 to Renascer, 266 to PS. It was one of two parishes that stayed with the PS. The rest, the municipal assemblies/the council bodies (Rogil, Bordeira, Odeceixe and Aljezur) were all won by Renascer.
