The world was marking International Women’s Day when, at the Constitutional Court in Lisbon, with 7600 signatures, the formalization of a new political party, the Nova Direita, began.
Without any embarrassment, Ossanda Liber, a citizen who introduces herself as Luso-Angolan – is the daughter of a reputed Angolan doctor who died recently, who stood out for having assumed the direction of Clínica Girassol, owned by Sonangol, in Luanda for several years. – and Portuguese-French – nationality acquired through marriage –, thus responded to the possibility of coalitions with the extreme right party Chega: “If the Portuguese so wish, yes”.
In his political path, in 2021 he headed the list of the civic movement “Somos Todos Lisboa” to the municipal elections, not having elected any municipal deputy, to then join the also right-wing Alliance, a party founded by Pedro Santana Lopes.
First black woman to lead a right-wing party in Portugal, says in the manifest which states that “the collective interest prevails over political quarrels”, as if the gathering of 7600 signatures for the formalization of the Nova Direita did not mean, in itself, a political act.
If Ossanda Liber attended the International Women’s Day march organized by the March 8th Movement in conjunction with the Feminist Strike, I have doubts; if she was present at the march organized by the Democratic Movement of Women, it seems more unlikely to me. But who made a point of using the 8th of March to put on his agenda that she was the new key to open the door to the right to immigrants and emigrants, there he did.
The question that leads me to this article is to what extent does it make sense for a black woman to present a right-wing political proposal to the community based in Portugal, originally from or with origins in Portuguese-speaking African countries, as a response to the problems and expectations of this permanently forgotten community.
On the 25th of February I was able to witness, during the march of the movement fair lifethe number of associations and collectives that, moving from the margins to the center, claimed rights as basic as the right to work or the right to housing, claims that are more than three decades old.
The fact is that 2023 marks exactly 30 years of Decree-Law 163/93 of May 7th that established the PER – Special Rehousing Plan, which emerged after the Open Presidency of Mário Soares in which he confronted the then head of the Government, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, with the social and humanitarian emergency that was experienced in thousands of illegally built neighborhoods, today, due to the imposition of political correctness, called self-construction neighborhoods.
PER was assumed to be the first post-Estado Novo housing program, putting the former Sal Operations in a corner. Assuming itself as a response to a housing problem, time came to prove that it was not, or it was not for the housing crisis to be the predominant theme of the current political agenda.
The fact is that in 2023 the Afro-descendant community continues to grapple with the exact same problems as in 1993, without apparently anything having changed; this not to travel further in history, until that year of 1444, in Lagos, in which, as the chronicler of the Kingdom of Portugal Gomes Eanes Zurara would describe, under the order of Infante Dom Henrique, the first great disembarkation of African slaves.
And with this the question: how can an ideologically right-wing party bridge the invisibility of communities with which, and in its ideology, the State does not prioritize the establishment of the Social Contract? What model of the liberal right responds to thousands of non-electables like miss or Mister Self Made Person, to whom the social elevator bars any access other than -1? And no, I’m not referring to access to the garages, I’m really referring to the restricted circulation in the basement.
The New Right and its leader fail to realize that the father of liberalism, John Locke, was a British man concerned with finding ideological justification for the colonization of the Americas, for the seizure and capitalization of lands that until then belonged to small farmers, to find justification legal for the right to bear arms, in short, with a market economy strategy that never helped the most disadvantaged, but rather legitimized force, occupation, colonization and capitalism.
Is it a black woman leading yet another old New Right that communities confined to marginal places need?