Do we like them?

Do we like Pedro Nuno Santos?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful in what we found and a clear line against the far right, but the record we could open was thin and the TAP inquiry is unresolved.

Pedro Nuno Santos is a Portuguese Socialist, the party's leader from January 2024 until he quit after the May 2025 election, when the party lost ground. He is back as an MP, and he was infrastructure minister before leading the party. That is the arc: a left-leaning party man who rose fast, then came a tough defeat.

The story that follows him is TAP, the state airline. In September 2025 police searched TAP and asked the government for access to his emails and those of a former state secretary, in a probe into a payout to a former executive. The suspected offences listed include mismanagement and abuse of power, but the prosecutors did not say former ministers were targets, and nobody has been charged as far as we found.

He denied it flat out, saying no crime was committed by members of the government or his office. He did admit the episode did not go entirely well, and said the case had already been examined by a parliamentary inquiry. Until the prosecutors finish, that is an allegation hanging in the air, not a finding.

On the harm test, we found nothing nasty in his own words. He called it frightening that a former prime minister had aligned himself with far-right rhetoric, which is a pretty clear line to draw. He also shifted his party's tone on immigration in 2025, which some Socialists called a move towards the right, but that is a policy argument, not hate.

The honest gap is that we could not open much of his record on LGBTQ+ rights, women or the climate, and those pages were blocked to our reader. So this is a lean, not a lock. We would want to see his votes on trans rights and climate before calling it a clean pass.

Lately the chatter is about whether he wants the leadership back, with commentators split on it. That is party politics rather than scandal, and nothing there changes the picture on harm.