According to the most recent data, the financial execution of PRR funds in the country stood last November at roughly 45%, and in the region, according to figures from the first quarter of 2025, at a lamentable and almost embarrassing 37%. One must keep in mind that all PRR contracts must be completed by August 2026, with their financial execution closed by December of that same year—an inexorable countdown now ticking within the next twelve months.

This colossal financial instrument—more than €22 billion for the nation and €725 million for the region—conceived by the European Union amid the ruins and anxieties of the pandemic, arrived first as a bazooka, then softened into a vitamin, and now risks devolving into a kind of pathetic counterfeit “Viagra,” whose true stimulus to the economy seems destined to fall painfully short of its proclaimed ambitions.

Just this week, Pedro Dominguinhos, president of the National Commission for Monitoring the PRR, again sounded the alarm about the country’s chronic incapacity for planning and the very real danger that the execution of the plan could strike a devastating blow to essential sectors such as education and health. In the region, too, the Economic and Social Council of the Azores has repeatedly warned of delays and structural obstacles in the implementation of the various financial envelopes, urging “particular attention to these data, so that the implementation of the PRR does not prove to be yet another problem, instead of the high-impact solution initially envisaged.”

Last week, in the final debate on the proposed Regional Plan and Budget, Berto Messias, the new parliamentary leader of the Socialist Party, after delivering harsh and often justified criticism of the Regional Government—especially regarding the sluggish and troubled implementation of European funds—ultimately justified his party’s abstention with the argument that the region could not afford to waste “a single euro” from the PRR or Azores 2030.

The difficulty, however, lies in the deep dissonance between the discourse and the vote, between the rhetoric of alarm and the gesture of accommodation—and in the real consequences such contradictions imprint on regional political life. The prevailing perception in public and published opinion is of an unmistakable decline in governance. The financial situation hovers perilously near a state of pre-catastrophe, and the Government offers no convincing indication that it possesses either the competence or the imagination to reverse the descent. SATA, public debt, and a tourism sector in free fall compose a triptych of doom, a portrait of an economic and financial time bomb preparing to explode in the hands of ordinary Azoreans, for whom the PRR and the Azores 2030 program operate more as mirages shimmering on the horizon than as tangible instruments of progress.

Given this panorama, the main opposition party appears more preoccupied with its own survival than with the region’s subsistence. At a moment when public discourse is saturated with appeals to “credibility,” and when combating populism and polarization has become a civic refrain, the PS-Açores has chosen instead the ancient craft of electoral arithmetic: criticize with fire in the voice so that governance may nonetheless limp onward.

And it is here—precisely here—that the deepest fissure in our regional political life is laid bare, mirroring the national stage: ideology and coherence have been quietly sacrificed at the altar of tactics and calculation. The Government is attacked with vehement oratory, only to be propped up moments later out of fear of losing one’s foothold in the political architecture. This duplicity, disguised in the language of solemn duty, erodes not only the very notion of public service but, more gravely, accelerates the public’s growing disillusionment with politics itself.

Our parties seem to have mislaid their reason for being: to defend and enact the ideas they claim to embody. Instead, they glide through an endless choreography of strategy, polling, portfolio distribution, and internal equilibrium—a meticulous dance of positions and postures—while the people function less as citizens and more as pawns in a vast partisan chess game. And while this political culture persists, the danger is not merely the faltering execution of the PRR, nor the millions the European Union dangles before us like an enchanted carrot, but something far more essential: the very possibility of restoring politics as an act of courage, responsibility, and truth.

Pedro Arruda is a regular contributor to Azorean newspapers. We are thankful that he agreed to have his op-ed translated and available to our readers.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from leading thinkers and writers in the Azores, providing the diaspora and those interested in the current state of the Azores with a sense of the significant perspectives 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).

You can follow his writings in Portuguese online on: https://azoreansplendor.blogspot.com/