“Everything is more expensive”,
This should be the phrase of the year because it’s the one we’ve heard the most in 2024.
Just go to any of our stores, city centers, or parishes; the complaint is widespread.
But there’s another side we can’t hear: those who can’t go to the stores because they have nothing left at the end of the month.
A few weeks ago, the statistics said that the at-risk-of-poverty rate in the Azores had risen from 31.8% in 2019 to 24.2% today.
It’s a nice figure for political speeches, but we all know that the reality is quite different when you’re on the ground.
The coordinator of the last major study on poverty in Portugal recently considered that the strong dependence on tourism and construction justifies the high poverty rate in the autonomous regions.
University of the Azores professor Fernando Diogo, who has been studying the phenomenon for several years, stresses that “the question of history (and the structurality associated with it) as well as the relationship with the labor market are, in our opinion, determining factors in understanding poverty in the Azores. (Poly)insularity was also touched on, mainly helping to explain the higher incidence of the RSI in the region compared to the rest of the country. The issues of the quality of jobs available, gender inequalities in access to the labor market and educational qualifications are other important factors in explaining the incidence of poverty in the region, considering the data we were able to collect on these areas of social life.”
We wrote here a dozen Christmases ago that there were clear signs in our society, albeit disguised, that there were many families who were hiding the difficulties of their daily lives, starting with the countless children who complained in schools that they didn’t have more than one meal a day at home.
I believe that more than 50% of pupils still make use of school social action, and at the time, it was said that a quarter of the Azorean population lived at risk or below the poverty line.
Has anything changed? It probably has if the statistics are to be believed.
But you only have to talk to social institutions and go to the streets in the busiest cities to see that there are a lot of people asking for help, not to mention the so-called shamed poverty, which is overlooked by the statistics.

The millions that we have buried in the Azorean public companies over so many years, with ruinous and irresponsible management, could have been used to build dozens of schools because education is one of the greatest instruments in the fight against poverty, and more health professionals to respond to the brutality of the waiting lists, especially of patients throughout the islands who are unable to access minimum care, precisely because they are poor.
Five years ago, Pordata announced that there is less purchasing power on the islands, school dropouts are earlier, the population distribution across the territory is uneven, and there isn’t even a hospital on some islands, concluding that this is where we have the poorest people.
For the director of Pordata, Maria João Valente Rosa, “education and poverty somehow go hand in hand” – especially when the figures show that, in the Azores, one in four young people aged 18 to 24 (27.8%) is no longer studying and has not completed secondary education.
“Most of the population on the islands aged 15 and over, as on the mainland, has no more than a 9th grade education. In Madeira, it’s 65%. In the Azores, it’s seven out of ten. The national average is 61%,” the study revealed.
It’s bleak for a region with almost 50 years of self-government.
This Christmas is still not a time of hope for thousands of Azorean families.
It is these families that our leaders should focus on.
Merry Christmas!

Osvaldo Cabral – Christmas 2024 – Diário dos Açores

Date: December 23, 2024Author: Diniz Borges0 Comments

The coalition government has already shown us that it likes to take advantage of quiet times to get the camel through the eye of the needle. After the episode of the segregation of crèches and children, approved during the summer period, there are the cases of December, drowned out by Christmas music.

On December 9, RTP Açores broadcast an allegedly great interview with the current President of the Regional Government. From a sumptuous room in the Palácio da Conceição, Bolieiro sat in an elegant armchair, sprawled out in a deeply decorated to speak to two journalists about the state of our archipelago. Although we find various opinions, comments, and even editorials that try to sell us that it was a very interesting speech, the truth is that anyone who took the time to watch everything that was said will quickly realize that Mr. President lived up to the school of the mythical Stinky Cat rant: he talked, talked, talked, and said nothing.

On the subject of rampant poverty, he shoved his weakest constituents under the carpet. The problems in the schools are the fault of the lazy technical assistants, whom he insinuates use fraudulent dismissals. With SATA, he says there’s no problem; let the taxpayers pay off the debt and let the rest be privatized. He takes advantage of this and privatizes a whole series of public companies. You only have to look at the good examples of CTT or EDP to see that privatization never fails. In health, the new hospital will be dealt with in a few years, perhaps in time for the next regional elections.

It was in the field of embarrassment that Bolieiro gave the most to those who watched his interview. Especially when he reaffirmed his coalition’s umbilical connection to the party of André Ventura’s party. They are the ones the PSD will be counting on in the Azores.

On the island of Terceira, last week’s episode was different. Far more tragic comic, to say the least. On December 10, Artur Lima and António Ventura announced via the local media that they had reached a consensus on three possible names of candidates for the Angra do Heroísmo City Council in the elections. From the outset, transmitting such information in the way it was, at the very least, dubious, not to say questionable, from the point of view of journalistic impartiality. But the plot thickened when, on the same day, it was discovered that the people who had supposedly been proposed not only didn’t know that they had been nominated by the coalition, nor did they have any interest or willingness to head the future list of local politicians.

Rather, what seems to have happened is the work of a magician in a top hat. For many months, António Ventura considered the most likely candidate, used three well-known names in the public square for those who vote in Angra. While people debated the validity of each of the three hypothetical of each of the three hypothetical nominations, public opinion was creating a sudden expectation of change. After all, they would be names that had not been foreseen. The coalition presented the prospect of renewal and a future!

But no. It was just a cheap magic move. Sooner or later, Ventura is expected to announce that he will have to take that dangerous risk and flesh out the manifesto since no one wants to accept the challenge. Does the Secretary of Agriculture want to be seen as a martyr, leaving his current post to the many appointments he has made over the years, to sacrifice himself on behalf of the City Council?

It’s an uncreative palace move that will hopefully pass between the raindrops of December. We live in fearful times when the backroom mechanisms of yesteryear are made public. To understand the choice of a putative mayor, it turns out that the strategy was to confuse public opinion, create chaos, and appear as a soldier of Sebastianism from the mists of the islands. Anyone paying attention will quickly realize that this is not very different from what is happening on the island of Corvo, a neighbor of my native Flores. A warning to navigators. It’s not enough to be able to write to have the right revenue for that small but noble municipality. Let’s be vigilant and vote with dignity. The municipal elections have already begun and with possible amorous intoxication.

Let’s hope we don’t end our meals with a glass of wine and a spoonful of glyphosate.

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)