“They are very comfortable and they even like it, they liked it,” he said in an interview with Lusa following the September 14 elections, adding that his list, New Hope, “is coordinating” a meeting with Macau Government officials “to engage in dialogue and deepen professional relations with those entities.”
‘I have always remained neutral in order to fulfil my role as a lawmaker supervising government action, but I believe so,” he added. The number of votes for Pereira Coutinho’s list has been steadily increasing since 2005 – when he was first elected lawmaker – but this year it almost doubled, in percentage terms, compared with four years ago.
The New Hope ticket, backed by the Macau Civil Servants Association (ATFPM, which Coutinho has chaired since 1998), obtained 43,367 votes (26.73 per cent of the direct votes), against 18,232 votes (13.8 per cent) four years earlier, securing three seats in the local legislature, up from two in 2021.
The United Citizens Association, the second most voted list but traditionally the strongest, supported by the Fujian community and linked to businessman Chan Meng Kam, trailed by 13,903 votes, almost nine percentage points behind the winning list, though it also elected three lawmakers.
The remaining four lists each elected two lawmakers, which together with the first two account for 14 directly elected seats, to be joined by 12 indirectly elected and seven more appointed by the Chief Executive, who will take office in the 8th Legislative Assembly starting on 16 October.
“This is a miracle. I, being Portuguese, able to speak Chinese, being accepted by them and defeating all competitors—this is something that will go down in Macau’s history,” he said.
Asked whether the result may have been influenced by the strong campaign of the Government and its leader, Sam Hou Fai, encouraging voting among civil servants—New Hope’s electoral base, which accounts for almost ten per cent of registered voters—Pereira Coutinho replied that “it has nothing to do with the Chief Executive.”
Instead, he stressed the importance of the voting facilities offered this year to civil servants, either through flexible hours or the provision of transport, which on 14 September was free of charge.
Coutinho acknowledged that his list’s performance was surprising, but attributed it to the power of social media, the merit of his platform and the work carried out among a special electorate: the 68,600 employees of Macau’s six gaming concessionaires.
“I have a photo with 127,000 ‘likes’ on my Facebook page, 127,000. And from there I started to think: ‘after all, we may have a lifeline, which is social media,’” he explained.
The campaign has brought a new urgency to Pereira Coutinho’s list: “we are now investing in hiring more social media staff to edit content and interventions in the Legislative Assembly,” he announced.
Alongside social media, José Pereira Coutinho pointed to another factor that contributed to the victory. He is convinced that the work carried out in recent years with gaming concessionaire workers also bore important fruit.
“We got many votes [from employees] of the six gaming concessionaires. Because people don’t know what we’ve been doing in recent years,” he said.
“You know, during the last typhoon, casino workers were trapped, with no rest, for 30 hours, no overtime pay, unable to go home. Don’t they have families? All of this together, it is clear that they had to vote for us, because we showed work,” he argued.
The result achieved a week ago brings with it “a huge responsibility,” the lawmaker admitted. “Even today I was thinking, how are we going to manage to keep those 43,000 votes,” he confessed.
“It will indeed be sad if we cannot rise to the challenge. […] The campaign period [for the 2029 elections] started today. Today. Today we have to start working for four years from now. And that is how we achieve these results,” he said.
However, he also acknowledged, “it will not be easy.” “Satisfying 43,000 people, maintaining high levels of public support requires more and more and millions of services to be provided to citizens, and this is at the top of our priorities.”
Platform with Lusa
