When Luís Montenegro humiliated José Manuel Bolieiro and Paulo Nascimento Cabral by placing the Azorean candidate in a discreditable position on the European Parliament list, the PSD-Azores reacted mildly. With the candidate elected, the matter was forgotten when the Azorean Social Democrats should have punched the national leader in the face.
Now, Montenegro’s government is once again humiliating the regional coalition. To make matters worse, it is also humiliating the citizens of the Azores by making them pay more for trips to the mainland whenever the airlines charge more than 600 euros. If the model was a disgrace, it has become a humiliating yoke for our pockets.
At the time of the dispute over the list for the European elections, I wrote that we were in danger of witnessing the birth of yet another centrist in Lisbon, with the aggravating factor that he was less prepared than António Costa.
Time shows that Montenegro’s government is just as centralist as Costa’s, made worse by the fact that it has insensitive, unprepared, and incompetent people in its ministries, as has now been confirmed.
This time, the absurd measure of the ceiling has the signature of the bumbling Minister of Infrastructure, Miguel Pinto Luz, the same one who sold TAP at a bargain price and who will rightly be the center of ridicule at the PS Regional Congress.
It seems like bad luck for the Azores: the previous ministers of the same portfolio, the Socialists Pedro Nuno Santos and João Galamba, left a trail of mediocrity in this process, which lasted almost a decade and was based on a ruinous and highly bureaucratic model.
On the other hand, Pinto Luz is showing enormous arrogance by deciding on the ceiling without waiting for the working group’s conclusions and without giving the Azorean government a say. If the working group members, including the Azores’ representative, had any shame, they would all have resigned.
The governor wants to protect the lazy treasury, but he harms the residents of the Azores.
This is what you call a ruler who is not fit to hold office because those who govern have an obligation to solve people’s problems and not to make them miserable.
When he announced his intention a few months ago, we warned on these pages: “Minister Miguel Pinto Luz seems to be just as baffled as his previous counterparts, as he has not come up with any solution, except to continue the covert subsidization of airlines, imposing a ceiling of 600 euros, with the justification that 95% of tickets sold are below that amount. This is a nonsense argument, because it continues to allow carriers to rob the state coffers and keeps the burden of the model on passengers. The minister should ask how many tickets are sold ABOVE 134 euros, because this is where the plundering is. What the minister is proposing isn’t a solution, it’s laziness on the part of the state, which is trying to clean its hands of the scam, but continues to harm citizens and make business easier for carriers.”
The screw-up is done, but it’s important that all the parties in the regional parliament unite in vehement protest and demand that the Assembly of the Republic restore legality and common sense to the Montenegro government’s absurd and overbearing measure.
Laxity is the centralists’ most incredible friend.
These people must be brought into line.

Osvaldo Cabral
Editorial Diário dos Açores 29-09-2024

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).