Pastéis de Belém and Malassadas

(Portuguese Custard Pastries and the Azorean Donuts)

There are moments in the political life of small Atlantic nations when irony becomes indistinguishable from history itself. The Azores, long accustomed to existing somewhere between symbolic autonomy and carefully managed dependency, have once again been offered a confection in place of structural transformation — a pastel de Belém served delicately over the old constitutional bitterness of insularity.

For decades, the office of the Representative of the Republic has lingered over the Azores like a faded colonial shadow: ceremonially democratic, constitutionally paternalistic, politically unnecessary. To many Azoreans, it has always represented less a safeguard of legality than a permanent reminder that Lisbon continues to regard the islands with a subtle but unmistakable distrust. The office exists because the Portuguese state, consciously or not, recognizes difference. Geography alone imposes it. The Atlantic imposes it. Fragmentation, oceanic isolation, strategic positioning, historical consciousness — all the elements that forged Azorean identity also created the uneasy relationship between the islands and the mainland state that governs them.

And now comes President António José Seguro, offering what appears to be both continuity and rupture. The office remains intact, yet for the first time its occupant is not merely a woman, but an Azorean woman: Susana Costa. Symbolically, this matters. Symbols always matter in island societies where representation itself becomes emotional geography.

It is not the ideal solution. The ideal, many would argue, would be the abolition of a position that feels increasingly like an anachronism surviving from another constitutional age. Yet the gesture opens a crack — however narrow — in the heavy architecture of the Portuguese constitutional imagination. If Lisbon insists on maintaining this institutional overseer, then at minimum the role must emerge from the islands themselves, shaped by those who understand the reality of insularity not as administrative abstraction but as lived experience.

The paradox is revealing: Portugal maintains the office because it fears the consequences of difference while simultaneously denying the full implications of that same difference.

The debate surrounding the appointment also says much about contemporary Portuguese political culture. Seguro himself was for years treated almost as a political exile within sectors of his own Socialist Party. Figures deeply embedded within the machinery of partisan power dismissed him with a severity that bordered on contempt. His refusal to fully align himself with the dominant Sócrates-Costa axis rendered him suspect among political operators who equate loyalty to networks with political legitimacy itself. His eventual ascent to the presidency therefore carries the quiet satisfaction of historical reversal: the man once mocked as politically insufficient now occupies the symbolic summit of the Republic.

Yet the deeper issue transcends personalities.

The Azores continue to confront an unresolved constitutional contradiction. If regional autonomy is genuinely respected, why must there remain a figure of supervisory vigilance appointed from above? And if the concern is constitutional oversight, does Portugal not already possess institutions designed precisely for that function — namely the Constitutional Court itself? The existence of the Representative of the Republic reveals an older political psychology still embedded within the Portuguese state: a lingering centralist instinct unable to entirely relinquish supervisory authority over its Atlantic territories.

Meanwhile, the office itself accumulates the rituals of prestige familiar to all bureaucratic power: official residences, ceremonial functions, privileged status, ribbon cuttings, institutional visibility. Such symbolism may comfort the architecture of the Republic, but it increasingly convinces fewer citizens in the islands.

And yet, perhaps unintentionally, these very tensions strengthen Azorean identity rather than dilute it.

For every gesture of oversight generates a countercurrent of self-awareness. Every institutional reminder of difference deepens the islands’ consciousness of their own uniqueness — geographical, cultural, historical, emotional. The Atlantic has always taught the Azores this lesson: isolation may wound, but it also clarifies.

In the end, what Lisbon often fails to understand is that insularity is not weakness requiring supervision. It is a civilization shaped by distance, endurance, migration, volcanic memory, and oceanic imagination.

The malassadas of the islands do not need the approval of the pastéis de Belém to know their own sweetness.

José Soares is a regular contributing writer in several Azorean newspapers and here in Novidades.