The Legislative Assembly of the Azores has opened the commemorations of 50 years of constitutional Autonomy by honoring the men and women of its First Legislature. President Luís Garcia described their work as an act without precedent or instruction manual: the difficult transformation of a constitutional promise into a functioning democracy across nine Atlantic islands.

Every democracy possesses a moment before routine—before parliamentary procedure becomes familiar, before institutions acquire traditions, before the rituals of government begin to seem inevitable. There is a morning when the doors open for the first time, when elected representatives take their seats without inherited habits to guide them, and when words written into a constitution must somehow be transformed into the daily architecture of self-government.

For the Azores, that moment came in 1976.

Half a century later, the Legislative Assembly of the Autonomous Region of the Azores has begun commemorating the 50th anniversary of Autonomy by returning to those who first carried its institutional responsibility: the deputies of the First Legislature of the then Regional Assembly.

At a gathering at the seat of the Azorean Parliament, Assembly President Luís Garcia honored several surviving protagonists of that foundational political generation, bringing the present-day Parliament face to face with some of the people who helped create the parliamentary institution it has inherited.

“To be the first is a responsibility that can only truly be understood with the passage of time,” Garcia said. It is perhaps the most appropriate sentence with which to begin a half-century commemoration.

Before There Was a Parliamentary Tradition

Memory can make institutions appear more inevitable than they actually were.

Today, the Azores possess a Regional Parliament, a Regional Government, established political procedures, parliamentary groups, legislative experience and decades of accumulated democratic practice. In 1976, almost none of that institutional memory existed.

As Garcia reminded those gathered, there was “no Azorean parliamentary experience” and no consolidated political practice capable of providing ready answers to the many questions confronting the new legislature.

“There was,” he said, “a new responsibility and the need to exercise it.”

That distinction matters.

Autonomy was not completed simply because it had been recognized constitutionally. A constitutional principle had to become an institution; an institution had to acquire practices; practices had to earn legitimacy; and legitimacy had to be sustained across islands whose histories, economies, distances and local identities did not automatically disappear because a new political architecture had been created.

The first deputies were therefore doing something more consequential than beginning a legislative term.

They were learning how to make Autonomy govern.

The Names at the Beginning

Garcia invoked Álvaro Monjardino, the first President of the Azorean Parliament, and personally recognized the members of that First Legislature who attended the commemoration: Liberal Correia, João Paulino, José Pacheco de Almeida, José Borges de Carvalho, João Bettencourt Silva, Fernando Faria Ribeiro, Maria de Fátima Lopes, Adelaide Teles, António Belarmino Azevedo, Delmar Bizarro and Maria Regina Ribeiro.

Through them, he extended the tribute to all the deputies who served in that inaugural legislature.

There is particular meaning in naming them.

Political history is frequently compressed into institutions, constitutional dates and the biographies of its most prominent leaders. Yet parliaments are collective constructions. They are made not only by presidents and governments but by deputies who debate, disagree, negotiate, legislate and slowly establish the conventions that succeeding generations eventually inherit as normal.

Fifty years later, what was experimental has become institutional memory.

What was unprecedented has become tradition.

Parliament and Government: The Same Founding Moment

Garcia also remembered João Bosco Mota Amaral, the first President of the Regional Government, and José António Martins Goulart, who could not attend.

“The absences do not erase the importance of what we celebrate today,” he said. More significantly, Garcia resisted separating the birth of the Parliament from that of the Regional Government. “This tribute cannot separate the Parliament from the Government that was born at that time,” he argued, because both belonged to “the same founding moment.”

That is an important way of understanding 1976.

The challenge facing the first generation of autonomous government was not merely administrative. The new constitutional order had to be legitimized, institutionalized and given direction. Political structures had to demonstrate that Autonomy could become an effective instrument for governing an archipelago marked not only by its distance from Lisbon but by the distances separating its own islands.

The ambition, Garcia recalled, was to construct a united Region while pursuing the “integral, balanced and solidary development of all its parts.” Those words remain strikingly contemporary. Fifty years later, territorial cohesion among nine islands remains one of the defining tests of Azorean self-government.

Autonomy Was Never Meant to Stand Still

Anniversaries carry a particular danger: they can transform political achievements into museum pieces.

But Autonomy was never conceived merely as something to commemorate.

For Garcia, one of the principles guiding the Azorean political journey over the past half-century has been the “uncompromising defense of Autonomy and the permanent struggle for its deepening and evolution.”

And his message for the next stage was explicit:

“We must continue without wavering. We want more and better Autonomy, with more resources so that it can fulfill its purposes here in this insular Portugal.”

That formulation—“this insular Portugal”—contains much of the continuing constitutional conversation between the islands and the nation.

Autonomy is not separation from Portugal. It is a particular way of belonging to Portugal: one that argues that national unity need not require administrative uniformity and that geography creates realities best understood, and often best governed, closer to the citizens who experience them.

The history of Azorean Autonomy has therefore always involved two movements at once: affirming regional political capacity while remaining within the democratic constitutional architecture of the Portuguese Republic.

Fifty Years Is Both Achievement and Question

The commemorations now beginning should naturally honor those who built the institutions of 1976. But their greatest value may lie in encouraging the Azores to ask what those institutions must become after 2026.

What does “more and better Autonomy” mean for the next generation?

Does it mean additional legislative authority? Greater financial capacity? A stronger voice in European affairs? New approaches to territorial cohesion, transportation, health, education and demographic decline? A deeper relationship with Azorean communities throughout the diaspora? Greater participation by younger generations in political life?

Those questions cannot be answered by nostalgia.

And perhaps that is the most fitting tribute to the first deputies: not simply to admire what they built, but to recover something of the audacity required to build it.

They entered a Parliament without an Azorean parliamentary tradition behind them. Today’s deputies possess fifty years of experience, successes, disagreements, legislation, institutional memory and democratic precedent.

With that inheritance comes another responsibility.

The first generation had to invent.

The present generation must know how to renew.

The Empty Chamber Before the First Session

There is something profoundly moving in imagining the Azorean Parliament before its first deputies took their seats in 1976.

The chamber existed, but its traditions did not. The Constitution existed, but much of its autonomous promise still had to be translated into political reality. There were no decades of regional legislation to consult, no long procession of former legislatures against which the first could measure itself.

There were simply people entrusted with beginning.

Fifty years later, their greatest monument is not a plaque, a photograph or even this deserved ceremony of recognition.

It is the fact that the institution continued.

Autonomy survived its first uncertainty and became political memory. The chairs once occupied for the first time have been occupied by generation after generation. Debates became laws; laws became institutions; institutions became part of the ordinary democratic life of the islands.

And perhaps this is what should remain after the ceremonies have ended:

Autonomy was never a gift delivered finished to the Azores in 1976. Democracy opened the door, and those willing to assume the responsibility of governing themselves crossed it. Fifty years later, the best way to honor the first deputies is not merely to remember that they crossed that threshold. It is to make certain that the door remains open—wider, stronger, and more courageous—for those who will cross it next.

Based on a Press Release-Photos from the ALRAA.