Three quarters of Portuguese in Cyprus vote for president-elect Seguro

Portugal’s socialist president-elect Antonio Jose Seguro won three quarters of votes cast by Portuguese nationals in Cyprus at the weekend’s presidential election.

In total, Seguro won 12 votes, with right-wing candidate Andre Ventura winning four votes, and two invalid votes being cast.

The weekend’s election was a second-round runoff, with the election’s first round having been held in January. Portugal, like Cyprus, holds runoff elections in its presidential races if no candidate receives more than 50 per cent of the vote in the first round.

In that first round, Seguro had won fewer votes in Cyprus than two of his fellow candidates, amassing just three, compared to Ventura’s six, and centrist candidate Joao Cotrim de Figueiredo’s eight.

However, with Cotrim de Figueiredo having finished in third place overall, it appears that many of his voters in Cyprus transferred to Seguro at the weekend.

The election’s overall picture was only slightly less emphatic than that in Cyprus, with Seguro winning 66.8 per cent of the vote – just shy of 3.5 million votes in total – to Ventura’s 33.2 per cent.

Reacting to his victory, Seguro said that the “response the Portuguese people gave today, their commitment to freedom, democracy, and the future of our country, leaves me naturally moved and proud of our nation”.

He added that he had “promised loyalty and institutional cooperation with the government” and that he will “keep my word” on this front, with Portugal a semi-presidential republic in which the government is formed by parliament, but in which the president can either sign off on, or veto laws passed by parliament.

“I will never be a counter-power, but I will be a president who is demanding when it comes to solutions and results,” he said.

Seguro is 63 years old and hails from the town of Penamacor, in Portugal’s east. He entered frontline politics when he was elected to parliament in 1991, and served as a minister without portfolio in the cabinet of then prime minister and now United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres between 1997 and 1999.

He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, before returning to domestic politics in 2001 to rejoin Guterres’ government, serving in post until 2002.

The next major juncture of his career was becoming leader of the Socialist Party in 2011, leading the party to positive results in the 2013 local elections and 2014 European Parliament elections.

However, some in the party believed that the party should have amassed more votes in 2014, and as such, then Lisbon mayor and now European Council President Antonio Costa challenged Seguro for the party’s leadership and won.

He then left frontline politics later in 2014, only returning in July last year when he announced his intention to run for president, before receiving his party’s endorsement on October 19 last year.