Presidential elections: Sampaio da Nóvoa denies having raised expectations without clarifying whether he is a candidate

Former presidential candidate António Sampaio da Nóvoa today refused to discuss a potential candidacy for Belém, without clarifying whether he is considering it, and stressed that he never harbored "any expectations."

“I didn’t make any statement about that [presidential elections], I didn’t have any expectations and I came here to talk only about Education,” responded António Sampaio da Nóvoa, in statements to journalists, on the sidelines of the World Symposium of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), organized at Lusófona University, in Lisbon.

Faced with journalists' insistence on a possible presidential candidacy, or on when and if he would speak on the topic, Sampaio da Nóvoa simply repeated several times that he was at that conference to "talk about Education," his scientific area of expertise.

When asked whether the race to Belém was not even an issue, he responded, again, that “the issue is Education.”

“The subject is Education, which I came here to talk about, I came to deal with this, I came to work on this, I'm not going to make any statements about anything,” he replied.

When asked whether, by not ruling out a candidacy outright, he meant he was considering it, António Sampaio da Nóvoa repeated: "I'm not here to make any statement about anything else."

Recently, the former secretary-general of the PS Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, and the leader and former deputy of the BE Joana Mortágua expressed their public support for a possible re-candidacy of António Sampaio da Nóvoa in Belém, at a time when the official candidates are Luís Marques Mendes, António José Seguro, Henrique Gouveia e Melo and António Filipe.

António Sampaio da Nóvoa was born in December 1954, in Valença, in the district of Viana do Castelo, and holds a PhD in Educational Sciences from the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1986) and a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne (2006).

The retired academic was a consultant on education matters for the Civil House of the President of the Republic Jorge Sampaio between 1996 and 1999 and between 2006 and 2013 he was Rector of the University of Lisbon, leading the merger process of the University of Lisbon and the Technical University of Lisbon.

In 2012, he presided over the celebrations of Portugal Day, Camões Day and the Portuguese Communities Day.

He was an independent candidate in the 2016 presidential elections, in which he received 22.88% of the votes, coming in second place, behind Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa with 52%.

From April 2018 to November 2021, he was the Permanent Representative of Portugal to UNESCO.