Fabian Figueiredo will become parliamentary leader of the Left Bloc

This Wednesday, the BE Political Commission put forward the name of Fabian Figueiredo as leader in the next legislature, a name that the parliamentary group will vote on after the creation of the parliament, an official source in the party told Lusa.

Fabian Figueiredo should therefore fill the seat left by Pedro Filipe Soares, who announced last December that he would no longer run for office and would leave parliament at the end of the legislature.

The meeting of the BE Political Committee decided this Wednesday to appoint Fabian Figueiredo as leader of the parliamentary bench, who was elected in second place in Sunday’s legislative elections on the Lisbon lists.

Fabian Figueiredo had already replaced Pedro Filipe Soares as deputy in 2021 when he took paternity leave, marking the 35-year-old Bloc leader’s half-wheel debut.

With a degree in sociology, the elected deputy was already at the head of the party list in the Loures Chamber.

According to preliminary results, and even without taking into account the mandates of the two emigration constituencies, the BU has 4.46%, having about 274 thousand votes, having managed to elect the same number of deputies.

After the elections, the BE leader asked the PS, PCP, Livre and PAN to meet (they had already agreed) to analyze the election results, which “changed the political face of the country”, and discuss convergences “in opposition to the parties of the right”. wing of the government” and in building an alternative.

In Sunday’s elections, the BE failed to break away from the right and win back deputies in Aveiro, Braga, Santarem or Faro, despite increasing its vote by some 30,000 votes and retaining the same five mandates, establishing itself as a fifth political force.

While maintaining an equal distribution of mandates across the constituencies of Lisbon (two), Porto (two) and Setubal (one), the new parliamentary group has a new MEP, Marisa Matias, and a full debut, Fabian Figueiredo (who has already been elected as an MEP). on a replacement basis), as well as the content of Mariana Mortagua, José Soeiro and Joana Mortagua.

Mariana Mortagua arrived at these legislative elections less than a year earlier than the BE leadership, and throughout the campaign she was clear about the goals she pursued: the removal of the right from power, the integration of the left majority, the return of lost deputies in 2022. and grow electorally after defeat in the last elections.

Of these goals, she managed to achieve only one – to gain more votes than in 2022, about 30 thousand, which the party coordinator considered “evidence of enormous resistance” from the blockers.

In 2022, BU won 4.4% with 244,596 votes and the same five MPs.