Mariana Mortágua was a highly polarizing figure since it emerged on the political media stage. He embodied the values of a more progressive left in several dimensions. Woman, lesbian, daughter of a revolutionary, fervent defender of her causes and uncomfortable anti-capitalist with proven evidence in several parliamentary interventions – her participation in the CPI after the fall of BES will have the right to appear in the “best of” of democratic parliamentary history – Mariana has become a kind of pet hate on the right of the political spectrum. And it was with this ballast that he assumed the leadership of the Left Bloc, in 2023, feeding the illusion of some for whom the best way to combat André Ventura’s populist growth would perhaps be to promote the closest thing to an anti-Ventura at the opposite end of the party landscape.
Two and a half years later, the announcement of Mariana Mortágua’s departure marks the absolute failure of a strategy that reduced the Left Bloc to almost political irrelevance and left the party’s future in question. The decline of BE is not Mariana’s exclusive signature. He had already been in freefall ever since he found himself lost in a maze he had plunged into with the Geringonça. But the numbers are implacable: in the electoral tests that its leadership went through, the Bloc lost hundreds of thousands of votes and the place it previously occupied as a useful force on the left of the PS was reduced to one seat in the Portuguese parliament, another in the European one and an almost municipal extinction (one councilor and 15 municipal deputies).
In a particularly adverse political and social atmosphere for the current Left, not only in Portugal but everywhere, Mariana Mortágua’s activist profile became the perfect target for rhetoric. anti-woke dominant. And the idealized opposition to André Ventura resulted in a defeat by KO, admitted this weekend in a letter to party members.
Regardless of the adverse winds, there was a clearly failed strategy and Mariana Mortágua allowed herself to be trapped in the caricature that the right created of her – and which she herself was unwilling or unable to dismantle, entrenching the party in an ideological bubble that became increasingly closed.
The final controversy surrounding his participation in the flotilla heading to Gaza – not because of the legitimacy of the cause, but because of the way in which he left the party without representation in Parliament for so long and without leadership at the start of an important municipal campaign – was just a symbolic farewell announcement for a Mariana that no longer had any margin to save the ship of its leadership.
He leaves with lucidity, recognizing that he failed to decentralize and renew the Bloc, and leaves the party facing an existential dilemma: if it does not rediscover a path that combines ideological firmness with political utility beyond the current identity enclave, the Bloc, which ten years ago was the third political force in the country, risks remaining just a melancholic chapter of the Portuguese left.