Strength is forged in struggle. This is what Francisco Sá Carneiro said in a statement widely quoted by all the social democratic leaders of recent decades, with the possible exception of one or two, more concerned with the color of the orange than its content. Strength is forged in the actions, measures, and convictions with which politics is carried out, whether party or government.
The Azores are living in times that call for strength and a fight, perhaps more than ever since the region’s autonomy. I say this because I can see that the archipelago is sometimes divided and extreme and heading for a crisis of ideas and finances, which is already here but will worsen. 
A clear example is the rowdy way parliamentary work is handled, with swearing, shouting, and childish whining. Anyone who knows the House, which belongs to the people first and foremost, cannot be happy with what they see.
Some are trying to boil water, but the pot has long since spilled. The sharpest tongues say this is why Parliament was recently installed with an automatic external defibrillator. Things are increasingly unfit for heart attacks.
José Manuel Bolieiro, in the same wave of greeting as his colleagues and friends in Madeira and Lisbon, is a man who has secured teams, opportunities, and places of power for those closest to him. He has done so with theatrical poise, with the vice presidency nipping at his heels, but he has managed to cement his position, publicly consecrated with victory in 2024. Along the way, just like Albuquerque, he has sanitized internal opposition and promoted a culture of persecution in the public administration. Bolieiro, in the purest neoliberal tradition of his orange school, is not particularly fond of state services. Everything would already be privatized for him and those closest to him, and the government would only serve to occupy appointed technical experts and trips to Hawaii.
This has been the case with health issues, which were already very fragile after a pandemic and in the wake of an archipelago with many difficulties in providing services. It got worse with the entry of a private hospital and the fire in the secretariat’s offices and the regional directorate, made literally by the flames that engulfed the public building in Ponta Delgada. Clélio Meneses and Tato Borges can tell you that.
The SATA legend continues to be written, with political appointments without proven professional experience and with a narrative of wastefulness that ignores the precious service that the public company should continue to provide. For the PSD and their
neoliberal colleagues, it is crucial to create a discrediting campaign that makes people ask for SATA to be privatized. Then we’ll all have to complain about delays, expensive meals and lost suitcases. Then it will be too late. As it has already been used for many services. Lisbon airport, for example. And when was the last time a CTT (postal service) package arrived at your home on time? There’s a lot more I could say about the privatization of public administration in the Azores.
When we discuss the comparisons between Bolieiro, Montenegro, and Albuquerque, we must not forget the purges, inside and outside the party, for the sake of an alternative reality that they want to build, where they will be kings and masters, unopposed. We can’t help but remember the cycles of dismissals, removals, and legal proceedings that have taken place in the Regional Directorate for Culture in recent years. Professionals with proven track records left to join people who may be human, very nice, but know as much about culture as Bolieiro knows about Mandarin. The purges, for political or personal reasons, were not exclusive to Culture. In health, education, finance, and so many other offices, there are dozens of cases of people who, just like in Madeira or, more recently, in Lisbon, were placed on shelves and in cupboards to be forgotten because they disagreed with the party line. In the environment, the raid was such that no director was left to tell the story. In agriculture, the work was allegedly done in families. In fisheries, there wasn’t even a decent hook left in that secretariat.
There are reports—and there are many—of meetings in which strategies for the Azores were discussed ideologically

lines of continuity with the previous government and where regional secretaries and directors said that it couldn’t be like that because the party had to show disagreement with the previous legislature. The PSD, and the CDS itself, consider it more important to defend their own than to defend the Azoreans.
We know that Bolieiro, like his friends in Madeira and Lisbon, would like to end all this. For the current PSD, in a not dissimilar vein to his colleagues in the Liberal Initiative and in Mr. Ventura’s party, the important thing would be to create as many private
number of private opportunities to put militants and sympathizers there.
Then it doesn’t matter if a consultation costs three hundred euros. They get in for free because they are friends.
Just as it was denounced in Funchal and the capital, it’s essential to denounce it here, too. José Manuel Bolieiro and his executive hate the public sector. And that’s why it’s not hard to understand why they also hate a good part of the Azores archipelago.

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)