The Minister’s Eclipse

The need for the frigates is not in question. But nearly four billion euros is the age of life on the planet—four billion years. Thanks to the Azores, the country has an enormous maritime area to scour, patrol, monitor, police, and explore. And it seems that those Italian frigates will come in handy for precisely that. Besides, the money is co-financed by Mother Europe. Portugal, on its own, does not have the means for “luxuries” of this nature.

And this is where a Minister of State—the Minister of National Defense, in this case—enters the picture, one who does not know how to live with Democracy.

Minister João Nuno de Lacerda Teixeira de Melo, better known as Nuno Melo, rose to office by force of the electoral circumstances. An ally of the PSD, the leader of the CDS never, even in his wildest dreams, imagined that he would one day govern anything at all. Yet the boundless ambitions of human beings handed him a stroke of good fortune. Luís Montenegro allied himself with him so that he could govern with the numbers more or less evenly balanced.

The frigates devised by the government, with arguments presented as justification, bring to mind another Minister of Defense, also from the CDS, who became embroiled in a submarine affair. It was a corruption case involving a public tender for the acquisition of three Tridente-class submarines, conducted in 2004 by Portugal’s XV Constitutional Government and awarded to the German Submarine Consortium. The case became associated with allegations of corruption, influence peddling, and the illegal financing of political parties, with claims that the €880 million sales contract had been secured through bribes and fraudulent consultancy arrangements. The affair generated prolonged political controversy, parliamentary commissions of inquiry, and judicial investigations into suspicions of corruption. The contract was signed in 2004 by the PSD/CDS-PP coalition government. Defense Minister Paulo Portas assumed political responsibility for the decision to reduce the number of submarines purchased from three to two. The head of government at the time, Durão Barroso, would later become the 11th President of the European Commission, serving two consecutive terms from 2004 to 2014.

As the people say, and with good reason: “Once bitten, twice shy!”

Back then, the parties involved were German, and German justice took action, with the imprisonment of those implicated in Germany. In Portugal, nothing happened. Everything was shelved.

Now the deal is with Italy, where the “Godfathers” are far more plentiful. The warnings voiced by ordinary people are legitimate when such matters are raised through the media.

But the current Minister of Defense did not like it and, as a result, went running to the courts, making complaints through threats of legal action against those “whistleblowers of other people’s supposed innocence.”

If Minister Nuno Melo did not want to “be a wolf, he should not have put on the wolf’s skin”—in other words, he should not have entered public life. He forgets that he is a servant of the People, not the other way around. In politics—that “woman of the streets,” adored and sought after by everyone—popular criticism, however strange it may sometimes seem, is an integral part of democratic life and, more than that, of Freedom of Expression, which the minister is now attempting to stifle.

Minister Nuno Melo must either learn to live with Democracy and stop spending public money on court proceedings, knowing that they will come to nothing, or he can resign, because he is not fit to serve Democracy.

Take it easy, Nuno! Follow the examples of Durão Barroso and António Costa, and perhaps you too will end up in Brussels!!!

José Soares is a contributing writer for several Azorean newspapers. He was an immigrant for many years before returning to São Miguel, Azores