Nuno Melo is visibly tired when, at the end of the first day of the EPP Congress, he sits down in the multipurpose Ahoy, in Rotterdam, to have a coffee. He heads to the cafeteria, but he doesn’t even have that much luck. They are no longer useful and it is not even worth going against Dutch rigor. It’s Murphy’s Law about to change its name to CDS Law.

Being a hybrid Melo, half MEP, half president of the CDS, requires a “major effort”, since he always travels between Lisbon, Brussels and Famalicão, not to mention “decentralized meetings” in other parts of the country.

“I have been leading not only from Brussels, but also in Portugal,” says the CDS leader. And it is to Portugal, to Luís Montenegro’s PSD, that he sends the first message in conversation with the Observer: “The CDS goes only to the voting in the European and that does not change with the change of leader”.

Melo gets excited as soon as he starts talking about the CDS, which he insists on remembering is a “founding party of the EPP”. Lest there be any doubt that this is a sign to the coalition partner of many battles, he immediately adds: “The PSD is not a founder. We are“.

The president of the CDS says that the result of the direct PSD does not change anything in the script he designed for the party: “I had good relations with Jorge Moreira da Silva as I have with Luís Montenegro.” Despite this good relationship, this does not change the strategy that he defined when he was elected, even in the Rio era. “The last result in legislative it forces the CDS to demonstrate at the polls that it has its own political weight”.

Melo says that an “isolated candidacy” is what his “will” is and what “from a strategic point of view must happen”, reiterating that it is inevitable that the CDS will make “this test of life in the first national elections” . circle”. He is a close the door to an agreement pre-election campaign with the PSD of Montenegro, which naturally is also not interested in a coalition in the next European elections.

The president of the CDS, however, leaves a small gap to change his mind if the party deems it appropriate. “Two years to go. Two years in politics is outrageous and we may even have a Congress before the next European elections, so all I am saying is with the caution of someone who is imagining the reality of a party for two years.”

Still on the relationship between the two parties, Nuno Melo says that “PSD and CDS are condemned, even in the current situation, to have good relations”, recalling that there are “more than 40 municipalities that are governed by the two parties and many of the majorities achieved in the local corporations were only achieved by combining both”. The relationship, he comments, “is historical, but it also belongs to the present.”

The president of the CDS then refuses to comment further on the leadership of Luís Montenegro because it would be “inelegant when commenting on options that belong to the militants of the other party.” Even so, he wishes success to the new leader of the PSD, whom he does not see as a competitor in the electoral dispute.

“The important is that the PSD grows and the CDS grows so that, together, in the political space of the right, they can function as a true alternative to a leftist government that is dragging on for a long time.”

Less than two months after being elected, Nuno Melo says that, as he expected, the “political scene in the European Parliament took on a much larger political dimension from the moment the CDS lost its national parliamentary dimension”. Despite this, the main objective of the CDS continues to be, he assumes, the return to the Assembly of the Republic, which guarantees “a daily media space.”

An EPP has “less relevance in governance” and Merkel “is not here”

Regarding the EPP Congress, where he talks to the Observer, Nuno Melo says that “the EPP, being the majority party in the European Parliament, is currently a party with less European relevance if we take governance into account”.

The MEP recalls that “the parties affiliated with the EPP have been losing elections in many countries where they were predominant and, therefore, the EPP currently has less weight in the Government, it still has parliamentary weight, although there is an upward trend in many of these European countries”. Regarding the cycles that could change more favorably for the EPP, Nuno Melo highlights that the Popular Party in Spain is “gaining muscle”.

The president of the CDS comments that “the EPP has a continental dimension, which is led by the French and Germans, and in Germany it lost elections and in France the Gaulists have less than six percent of the votes.”

Nuno Melo says that “it is still relevant that in the panel of heads of government [que ocorreu no primeiro dia de Congresso do PPE] a Greek, a Croat, a Dutchman and the President of the European Parliament, a Maltese. This is relevant in a Europe that is usually treated by the one dominated by the Franco-German axis, but that is not seen in the EPP”.

Nuno Melo also recalls that the great moment of the last Congress was “the closing of Chancellor Angela Merkel, which was what it was in the European Union. And she is not here today.”