Former MP leaves PSD, which "agrees" with the far right

“The fundamental principles of a party must be an anchor of identity (…) an anchor that no longer exists in the PSD”. These are the words of Rubina Berardo , who was a member of parliament between 2015 and 2019 and who announced her disaffiliation from the Social Democrats in an opinion piece in the newspaper Expresso . The former member of parliament also accuses the party of “making deals with the far right, riding on populism and confusing immigration policy with the nationality law”.

Concerns about this apparent ideological shift are not new. In 2024, the former MP presented a motion to the PSD-Madeira congress to “exclude the possibility of the PSD entering into collaborations with the far right”. Rubina Berardo describes the Social Democrats as “ a party that, instead of healing the wounds between different social groups (…) incites these differences , by wanting to reopen the Pandora’s box of the strike law”.

He also attacks the party led by Luís Montenegro regarding its communication, accusing it of using the memory of Sá Carneiro, founder of the PSD, as a “merely decorative resource, for citations in speeches, but with no intention of implementing it”. “It is for all these same reasons that today it is impossible for me to continue in a party that is no longer characterised by its social-democratic matrix ”, he concludes in his text in Expresso, which was published on the same day that Chega announced a “principle of understanding” with the Government on immigration.

The former deputy also makes comments about the social-democratic campaign in the last elections, which she says was based “on the creation of a dichotomy between doers versus blockers, questioning the most basic demands for greater transparency in the exercise of public office”.

In the text, Rubina Berardo blames the PSD for “ refusing documentation under the pretext of 'letting politicians work', vilifying electoral acts and the normal functioning of democracy ”, and comments that “this is a film that has already been seen in other latitudes, but was not expected from a national structure”.

Recalling her twenty-year career in the PSD, Rubina Berardo recalls her campaign against the influence and “intolerance” of Alberto João Jardim in Madeira, where she was born, and where she sees special “ absences of pluralism, democratic respect and tolerance ”.

Ten years later, he says that intolerance persists “from the way in which supporters of internal competing lists were purged, to the most recent episode of profound and abject disrespect for the house of Regional Democracy by a leader of the regional government, officially tolerated and justified”.

Pointing out that criticism and plural debate have become “crimes of opinion” within the party , the former deputy says goodbye to the PSD by saying that “between the links to humanist and democratic principles, and the party link to the PSD, I naturally choose the former”.