Pedro Santana Lopes does not rule out a possible leadership of the presidency of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP), although he has no intention of running for the position.
“I don’t want anyone to think that I’m running for anything, as for the rest, several mayors have put that hypothesis to me and I haven’t closed the door 100%, despite having first said no”, said this Thursday, November 6th, the mayor of Figueira da Foz, in the district of Coimbra.
Faced with this possibility, the mayor, who is now starting his second consecutive term, elected by the PSD/CDS-PP coalition, reiterated that he is not closing the door, but that he has no desire.
“Sincerely [não tenho vontade]I prefer to stay the way I am”, Santana Lopes stressed to journalists, at the end of the Figueira da Foz Chamber session.
The president of the Figueirense municipality said that some mayors in the Center region considered it important that he be the president of the ANMP for the region, an argument to which he was sensitive.
“I didn’t close the door as I would on other hypotheses, in fact”, he admitted, without going into details, noting that he has been approached, although he hopes that “there is someone else”.
In the municipal elections on October 12, the PSD won the largest number of chambers in the municipal elections on Sunday, recovering the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP), which belonged to the PS since 2013, and triumphed in the five most populous municipalities in the country.
The Social Democrats, with their own lists, or in coalitions, won in 136 municipalities against 128 for the PS, when in 2021 they had triumphed in 114, against 149 for the Socialists.