We must doff our hats to the virtuoso Minister of Infrastructure for the extraordinary accomplishment of selling the very same airline twice. It is a feat without precedent in the annals of Portuguese governance: the sale of TAP to Lufthansa, after having already sold that very airline in 2015, when he was Secretary of State, in one of the more spectacularly muddled undertakings of Passos Coelho’s short-lived twentieth Constitutional Government, an administration whose shelf life proved shorter than that of a yogurt in the refrigerator. Among us, there are those who spend an entire lifetime attempting to privatize a public enterprise; Miguel Pinto Luz accomplishes the task in installments, displaying a touching and almost devotional fidelity to foreign capital.
Indeed, his affection for everything that comes from abroad is positively heartwarming. The distinguished minister runs on jet fuel whenever negotiations with powerful international conglomerates are concerned: a mere handful of months sufficed to dispatch the national airline into foreign hands. But when the matter concerns the inhabitants of the islands… ah, there time acquires an altogether different, almost three-dimensional quality. For two years, the Social Mobility Subsidy for the Autonomous Regions has languished in anticipation of a decent and workable solution. When committees must be established and specialized teams assembled to advance privatization, the ministry operates at supersonic speed. Yet when it comes to making the notorious electronic platform function—a platform supposedly designed to reimburse Azoreans and Madeirans for the excess amounts they must advance when purchasing tickets on TAP and SATA—the ministry prefers the leisurely progress of a single-engine aircraft. Bureaucracy, when inflicted upon islanders, acquires the peculiar charm of an eternal work of art: it is never completed.
This is the very same minister who basked in self-congratulation at a press conference announcing the sale of TAP, only to avert his gaze when asked whether the privatization agreement guaranteed continued air services to the Autonomous Regions. After all, who has the patience to concern himself with such trifling insular details when a historic contract is being signed in Berlin or Frankfurt?
This enduring pattern of disregard toward the Azores and Madeira has been immortalized in a splendid viral video. In it, the minister appears visibly enchanted, almost overcome with emotion, by the air connection between Bragança and the Algarve, applauding it as the very pinnacle of “territorial cohesion and justice.” It is a moment of rare cartographic beauty. Apparently, on the official maps adorning the ministry’s walls, Portugal has undergone a modest geographical amputation: the nation comes to an abrupt end precisely where the waters of the Atlantic begin to deepen. That quaint old notion that Portugal extends majestically westward, through its geography and immense maritime domain, thanks to the Azores and Madeira, must surely be a myth perpetuated by antiquated geographers. For the ministry, territorial cohesion is measured in kilometers of motorway or stretches of railway track.
This centralist disposition reaches such heights that, in next year’s State Budget, the Azores have been allocated precisely the same amount for Public Service Obligations (PSOs) as in the current year. Not a single cent more. Inflation—that inconvenient economic force which drives up the price of bread, fuel, and the ordinary necessities of human existence—has been ignored with Olympian serenity. One must presume that, in the imagination of the ministerial team, aircraft in the Azores are propelled by ocean breezes and the milk of contented cows, miraculously immune to the upheavals of the global economy.
Meanwhile, the Empire of Terreiro do Paço celebrates the triumph of progress upon steel rails. Construction has begun on the high-speed railway: two cities to be brought within an hour and fifteen minutes of one another, and a connection to Madrid promising a journey of scarcely three hours, projected for the coming decade. What breathtaking velocity! How marvelous to discover that a train will soon be capable of traversing the Iberian Peninsula more swiftly than the Ministry of Infrastructure can validate a digital reimbursement form submitted by a citizen of the Azores or Madeira.
Into this “structuring factor of the territory,” as the minister so eloquently describes it, two billion euros are cheerfully poured. Preliminary studies and projects alone have already consumed 57 million euros—five times the annual budget allocated to the Azorean PSOs. The hierarchy of priorities embraced by the anti-island minister could hardly be more transparent: the islands do not constitute or structure the national territory; within this peculiar logic, they exist merely to complicate the accounts and destabilize the budget.
Pinto Luz also created the Green Rail Pass for a mere twenty euros a month—a veritable bargain, although its implementation was duly blessed with the customary measure of technical confusion. Thus, mainland residents may travel for next to nothing. Meanwhile, more than a thousand kilometers away, islanders continue to part, with supposedly cheerful resignation, with five hundred euros or more for an airline ticket simply to reach Lisbon or Porto.
But no matter. Let them pay in advance. Let them endure months of bureaucratic waiting. Let them finance, discreetly and through the sweat of their own labor, the very airlines that the State subsequently sells to the Germans.
Such is the “territorial justice” of Montenegro’s government. It has achieved the remarkable feat of shrinking an entire nation to the dimensions of Terreiro do Paço, transforming the Atlantic into little more than an ornamental lake—one that nevertheless stubbornly insists on making the rumbling noise of a volcano that refuses to surrender.
And here, in our islands? Well, here our own political leaders, comfortably removed from such petty inconveniences, continue to delight themselves, with untroubled enthusiasm, in the magnificent rhetoric of “Atlantic centrality”…
They are, every last one of them, perfectly suited to one another.
Osvaldo Cabral is an emeritus journalist with over 40 years of experience covering the Azores. He was the director of RTP-A (the public television station) and the Diário dos Açores newspaper. He is a regular columnist for many newspapers throughout the Azpres and the Diaspora.
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.