At the September plenary session of the Azorean Regional Parliament, a political declaration was brought up, calling out the total lack of cultural policies demonstrated by the various people who have occupied decision-making positions in culture since 2020.
It highlighted the enormous shortcomings in managing cultural heritage, which has been abandoned without anyone who knows or wants to know how to do anything with it. A sector that keeps good technicians in limbo while spouting speeches without substance or ideas.
In the same political statement, there was talk of investments for cultural agents, which the regional government stubbornly refuses to allocate on time. The money that hasn’t money that hasn’t arrived, but also the strategies that have never been outlined. Trips to book fairs were first canceled and later embedded in the regional director’s cultural life. No wonder bookshops are closing in a region where reading is not valued. Meetings in the audiovisual sector were promoted, encouraged, and consigned to the trash can.
Since 2020, Bolieiro’s government has been promising something for these areas without delivering anything. Economics cannot be blamed.
Once the political statement was read, the assembly members asked to speak. Marta Matos, one of the greatest defenders of the cultural sector, made a commendable comment about the arrogance and shamelessness of a strategy to dismantle and destroy Azorean culture. She urged the politician responsible to apologize to the people of the Azores for everything she has taken away from them in the last four years.
Joaquim Machado began his speech by demonstrating again that he sympathizes with the extremism infecting his party. He talked about Venezuela and state culture in a little comedy sketch that would be perfectly appropriate in McCarthy’s America, where the tape was always the same, and culture was the one that suffered. The coalition deputy, imprisoned in the fifties of the last century, left his message: for him, there’s no need to invest in culture.
Whoever wants to should pay to do theater, write books, and create paintings or sculpture exhibitions where the good things are portrayed, and our land is valued. Anyone who has the nerve to want to be a cultural agent should pay for it out of their own pocket, and if they don’t, there’s no point either,” said the Social Democrat MP. Reading a lot, after all, can make you intelligent enough to listen to a populist speech without any validity and decide not to vote for that party.
Not satisfied with what he had said, the assembly member reaffirmed it in an article of his own, in which he said, and I quote, “I admit that not everyone agrees with a model of cultural funding framed in this way. This is the one I defend”. However, the fact is that he says this as if he were a member of parliament in the third ring of the Chamber, but when he spoke, he was in the front row; he is vice-president of the Legislative Assembly of the Azores and claims to be the proto-leader of the bench. With his speech, Joaquim Machado linked the coalition and the government, especially since no one contradicted what he said.
The even more extreme right-wingers continued their ranting. It was clear from the speeches that followed, on the part of the Liberal Initiative and Mr. Ventura’s party, that the only culture that interests them is that of their navel. To use a popular expression suitable for those who are so fond of them, it’s fair to say that those men opened their mouths a lot but didn’t let any flies in. Instead, they called for total disinvestment
disinvestment in culture by the regional government. No more support. Dismantle the legal regimes. Hand culture over to foreign liberals who want to buy fajãs. Stick books with many letters back in their position as furniture supports, as they were in the time of the other gentleman they liked so much.
The right-wingers who spoke in the Assembly of the Azores on September 12 made their ideology on culture very clear. It is to be extinguished. Those willing to flatter against intelligence and free thought are the only people left. The same assembly members
who the day before had spoken of Vitorino’s importance, of the prize that shall be awarded, and of the cultural causes he defended were categorical in their defense of the absolute destruction of culture in the Azores. Perhaps they lacked the reading skills to know the meaning of hypocrisy.
What is certain is that José Manuel Bolieiro’s regional government still hasn’t paid what it owed to the artists in 2024. It was slow to pay in previous years. It has not presented management policies. It has no vision for cultural heritage, which hasn’t even reached the end of the competition for its head. This government suppressed the prizes for literature, architecture, and other sectors, which the Regional Directorate of Culture once used to award, but now it doesn’t even advertise them.
I would like to appeal to anyone who works in culture, whether in the private or public sector. Culture is under fire. We’re discussing next year’s budget, but none will do much good if the policies don’t change. The assembly members who spoke for the rights of Culture were clear. If it’s up to them, the door will be closed. Get outraged! Or, one day, you won’t even have a voice left.

Alexandra Manes publishes regularly in Azorean newspapers. She is originally from the island of Flores and currently makes her home in Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira, Azores.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).