Concept of decent democracy, DD: when the political model is made up of rules of universal procedural democracy that guarantee the real effectiveness of fundamental rights and freedoms. Here’s the formula: DD = EDP1? 49% + EDP2?50%, where EDP1 are elements of popular democracy and EDP2 elements of party democracy.

Decent democracy is achieved in two ways: a) formally, when the constitutional rules comply with the above formula; this is the case in Portugal: the Government and the Assembly have party origins, but there is a counterbalance with the President of the Republic, who is elected by the people outside the political context. In other words, the Portuguese system of government contains comparative elements of effectiveness between popular power and party power. Another material one is that, through historical and civic practice, the EDP2 can be composed of coalition governments with several parties; this is the case in Germany and other European countries.

Looking at the autonomous system in the Azores, it is clear that it is not a decent democracy.

Today’s political and democratic autonomy is old, outdated, sad, and decadent.

The negative trophies of Azorean society are already well known: “demeaning and persistent levels of poverty”, “accelerated demographic ageing and decline”, “structural financial difficulties”, “mediocre results in education and training”, and “inability to converge with the country and the European Union”. To these predicaments we must add other well-known ones that nobody wants to talk about: a total lack of meritocracy in the civil service, which translates into a mediocre, corrupt, slow and incompetent functioning of the public administration; a total lack of functional organization aimed at providing services to the citizen; merely political leadership without effective accountability or transparency, and consequently incompetent functioning where the best are silenced and even mistreated. There is also a world of useless and defective expenditure on registering the creation of laws of autonomous origin, the multiplication of copies of national law without any regional interests, including the lack of quality legal texts on parliamentary and governmental legal techniques; or the seriousness of the concept of “resolutive autonomy”, i.e. legislating more by resolution (and ordinance) than by law, with devastating consequences for the legal system and with costs that are an autonomous waste, and in this way violating the Constitution and the Political Statute by evading control of constitutionality and with studied practical results. Who can forget the concentration and centralization of all political autonomy on a single island?: everything takes much longer on seven islands than it did before 1976 (in proportional comparison); and since all our eggs are in one basket, in a “blackout” situation we will see disaster…

At the root of all this real and sad image of democratic autonomy is an obvious fact: the people wanted to welcome the novelty of Azorean political autonomy, but they didn’t know how to take care of it and despised it in favour of the pecuniary metal of millions of investments without an adequate return on civilization. And the politicians, children of this society, received this political autonomy as a blessing, often using it to their own advantage, hiding in reformist chimeras that only had the name of reform and the self-proclaimed diplomas of great political wisdom. The weakness of the politicians is the real image of the island people. And Azorean political autonomy is also this social image.

This “everything, everything, everything” is based on a genetic problem. The new democratic state that was born in 1976 gave us an autonomy that was poisoned: afraid of independence; afraid of the island elite turning the islanders into slaves; afraid of the islanders using their sovereign power to create laws that violated a modern constitution; afraid of novelty and what it might lead to in deviating from the democracy that we wanted to seek in moving closer to modern Europe; with all this, the Constitution, which praised and created us, forgot the most important thing: if it was precisely democracy that was at stake, why did the state develop a system of government that guarantees effective political control of parliamentary and governmental policies of party origin? Why didn’t it make a model identical to the state’s for the Autonomous Region? If the democracy of a decent state was above all at stake, why did it create an appropriate system of government for the fundamental rights of the Portuguese, and why did it not take the same care for the rights of the islanders in the Region?

The collective person in the autonomous region is sick. It has several problems, which we have mentioned above, and many others if we look at them in more detail. However, these problems exist, and above all remain, because the Autonomous Region does not have an appropriate system of government in the Portuguese Constitution. This kind of illness cannot be cured by itself; it can only be cured by the structural system of democracy. We can give it a new heart, a restored liver, better quality blood, ultrasound vision, and a full head of hair. These are all palliatives. They are deceptions about ourselves. Only democracy, procedural democracy, in a register of checks and balances between the organs of political power, is adequate and sufficient to create democratic policies and democratically and gradually cure the democratic filth in which we live.

Two indisputable facts (in illustrative percentages): the national government system has a 65% popular political component and a 35% party political component; the regional government system has a 15% popular political component and an 85% party political component. This reality is not a simple problem; on the contrary, it is the evil of all the islands’ political, social, and civilizational ills. Within the decent Portuguese democracy, the Autonomous Region is an indecent and, therefore, continually decadent democracy.

In Diário Insular-José Lourenço, director

Arnaldo Ourique is a specialist in the Portuguese Constitution and the Azorean Autonomy.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, giving the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the 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).