The world is on the brink of disaster. I am not the first person to warn of this reality, nor is it even the first time I have done so. And yet, it continues. Our planet has accepted with a sense of impunity the selling of its soul to the devils working behind the scenes to destroy it.

Anyway. It’s summer. At this time of year, in times gone by, we would be watching the endless reports from the beach, where half-naked sunbathers with mature gray hair would give their opinion on the relatively normal level of heat felt there. Someone would buy a Berlin ball and an apple Compal, and the reporter would question the quality of the material, without mentioning the rampant inflation that is strangling the middle class before our very eyes. There would be airtime for a six-and-a-half-hour report focusing on the work of the fashionable football club’s training center, without dramatizing internal elections or turning the normal process of selling a player into a soap opera. Nothing serious would happen in the rest of the world, because August was a time to pretend that we were once again proudly alone, on our individual towels, under the family parasol, by the sea, and in a beach hut.

Except that now summer is different. We are on the edge of a precipice. With a devastating succession of criminal attempts to destroy our life as we know it. Lies made reality by demagogic discourse, supported by poorly produced videos, are disseminated in a few seconds on social media and indoctrinate those who have little time to think. It is a time of appeals for consensus with neo-Nazi forces and their peripheral allies, preferring to join hands with hatred rather than learn to admit our faults.

I could return to Montenegro and write two more pages about the moral decay of its young minority government, which, in order not to be stabbed by gangs of thugs on the loose, has preferred to continue the process of indoctrinating the country with the remodeling of Citizenship. They are not against discipline, mind you. They are in favor of controlling their educational program, transforming what could be an opportunity for individual growth into a trip to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of Capital, where it is more important to accept that you have little money than to learn to question the system that allows you to have little money.

I could also talk about Sérgio Sousa Pinto and Pedro Passos Coelho, who have been put at the service of an association that is nothing more than a Portuguese-style lobby to prepare the plan to reform the Portuguese Constitution that the right wing wants to implement before the end of this decade. All this is dressed up in other guises, starting with the socialist tie that Sousa Pinto insists on wearing, even though he is no longer a socialist, or the social-democratic jacket that Coelho wears reluctantly, to pretend that he still has some orange in his skin, when everyone knows that he belongs to Ventura’s party.

The document they are going to produce will be a kind of Project 2025 for Portugal, that is, a manual of practices to be carried out to destroy what remains of our public services and throw open the country’s doors to the free will of private economic power, which will come to sacrifice workers on the altar of profit. Seeing a fake socialist announcing his presence as a force for consensus in the center reminds us of the biblical words about wolves dressed as lambs, and the importance of getting rid of them in good time. Along the same ideological lines will be Aguiar Branco and his selective inability to understand the dictionary, the meaning of insult, and the act of wearing a mask. A braggart, like all those who follow him on the path of the PSD, which is already allied with Chega, he decided to choose the summer to reveal his authoritarian tendencies, which we always knew were there, but which he decided to use to penalize his enemies. Do you still remember the agreement that brought him to office the first time?

Also at this time of year, here on our islands, it is time to see the Secretary of Education announce the great school results of students. First, she started with a publication about national success. She had to apologize and post a rehashed video to admit that, after all, the success was very relative, and that eight subjects is fewer than sixteen. Perhaps someone gave her a math lesson in the meantime. In Angra, two major cultural festivals took place without the presence of representatives from the Culture offices, which happen to be the same as the Education offices. However, their existence could be confused with the functioning of the municipal cemetery.

Once again, the region’s debt has risen exponentially. Once again, there are systematic delays in payments to suppliers, with the old rhetoric of blaming a party that ceased to govern in 2020. Once again, cultural agents are denying payment orders because they have not been executed.

Across the archipelago, discussions continue about autonomy, deepening it, and navigating the troubled seas of geopolitics. Across the ocean, there is an aging Trump, with enough makeup to hide the wounds of age, but unable to shield himself from the sex scandals that may finally catch up with the predator. Members of the cult of the leader and Republicans with a shred of moral fiber are increasingly remorseful. They are late, of course. Although they could perhaps serve as a warning to people like Montenegro and Aguiar Branco, if they still had any shred of common sense left that was not clouded by the will to survive.

The Americans regretted making a pact with Trump, albeit belatedly. In Portugal, the PSD is closing a similar pact with Ventura. There is no longer a Silly Season. Here, we are in the era of Faustian agreements. The day of Guilty Season will come. But Hell is full of regret, and not even the internationalization of the pastel de nata will save us.

Alexandra Manes is from Flores Island but lives on the island of Terceira in the Azores. She is a regular contributing writer for several Azorean newspapers, a political and cultural activist, and has served in the Azorean Parliament.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with insight into the diverse opinions on some of the archipelago’s key 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).