On November 28th, at eleven in the morning,  the employee of André Ventura’s party in the Azores asked to speak.  He wanted to make a statement in the Regional Parliament before the special vote on the budget for the Autonomous Region of the Azores.  It was a sunny and rainy day, revealing the current situation in our archipelago and an increasingly frighteningly mediocre Regional Assembly. Much of this mediocrity lies with Mr. Ventura’s political party and from the mouths of those who represent it at the regional level. Even if they are not the only ones, as I’ve stated in the past. Things are not going well. These are populist and reactionary times.  Mr. Pacheco is the current main representative of this party, and from him comes a truly frightening stance that some people might classify as crude. I don’t want to get involved in this exchange of unfortunate insults he often promotes. However, it would not be an exaggeration to classify the level of his political interventions as very poor quality. You have to make an effort not to fall into the kind of bickering desired by minds with no capacity to argue except by shouting and insulting. But if you do, you’ll see that the party lacks ideas. The measures defended by the party are just a flash in the pan, creating empty offices and finding excuses to be there, shouting and creating content for the videos they will publish on their social networks. That’s how they win votes because they’ve jumped out of the serious, the dignified, and what qualifies as part of an honorable society.

In the budget debate, Mr. Pacheco made a speech that degraded the quality of our democratic debate, calling the subject expressions that would not be worthy of being said in a discussion of troublemakers, let alone in the house, that should be understood as that of our freedom. A few days earlier, the MP had made a speech full of untruths and sad sentiments about the celebration of November 25, which was later very well dissected by professors Albano Gomes and António Machado.

That’s what they feed on. An imaginary pacifier that gives them encouragement and cures their tantrums, supported by childish phrases that only want to provoke reactions without rationality. Everything that Mr. Pacheco said in the various speeches that followed could well be summed up as a playground conversation in elementary school or in those nurseries they claim to defend but want to control.

So, let’s remember what was at stake. To approve the 2025 budget, the Regional Government of the Azores and the parties that support it were forced to give and take much of it because they didn’t want to listen to the other parties. But they were forced to make an alliance with the kind of parliamentary decadence that those people promote and encourage. The ruling coalition in the Azores has become an important ally in the ongoing destruction of democracy. Such has already been seen in the support given to the issue of child care.

Mr. Pacheco pointed this out, shouting in the most acrimonious manner ever seen in a debate. For his party, childcare centers are an ideological issue. He says the PS (socialist party) has filled them with people from its electorate. He’s not talking about children. For him and his party, children are only there to convince their parents with lies, populism, and shouting. They don’t care if they are promoting the possibility of children going hungry or suffering even more than some already do in their home lives. And let it be said that I remain perplexed by the silence of the Commission for the Protection of Children and Young People on this matter.

For Ventura (the national leader of Chega) and his staff in the Azores, anything goes, including threats, as clear with the quote from Jaime Neves that he uttered during the solemn ceremony of the AD and its partners in of its partners, in Lisbon, during the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, which Montenegro (Portugal’s current Prime-Minister) does not recognize.

Here in the Azores, Mr. Pacheco ended his pantomime regarding the issues of party subsidies, attacking political opponents, the height of his salary as a member of parliament, and the many millions that his party also receives from that parliamentary regiment. It remains to be seen whether the money Chega earns from subsidies will be spent on the people he claims to support, as some parties do, or whether it will line the pockets of the big businessmen who feed them. Perhaps it would be good to go to the famous anti-corruption office and check the affairs of some local companies. Just to check.

I’ll end by noting that Bolieiro (the current President of the Government) missed the chance to prove to us (the electorate) that he’s not there for the sake of power, as he could have negotiated with the PS, which made itself available to do so from an early stage, but preferred to give a pacifier to the Chega party rather than concrete measures for the region; the gull of Duarte Freitas’ speech, given how he really is aware of our dire economic situation (aka public debt) in the Azores; and of Nuno Barata (from the IL political party) who, in his speech, summed up the government “…as a political force who can’t even get the busses to run ontime, but yet they want to go into space. They really do have their heads on the moon.”


Alexandra Manes is from Flores Island but lives in Terceira Island, Azores. She is a regular contributing writer for several Azorean newspapers.

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)