On this small stretch of seaside land of unprecedented beauty with 943 kilometers of coastline that will mark 900 years of sovereignty in 2043, a tangible reality combined with political space. Sui generis Today they continue to explain the reason to Julius Caesar, who is no longer patient and regrets that he stepped here, allegedly said: “Within Iberia there are people who do not control themselves and do not allow themselves to be controlled!”

This is a historical fact, which was again a serious crisis that led us to the need to open up to the world (14th century), and the solution was found in foreign expansion, which combined with special geographic conditions and maritime and cutting edge science, encouraged us to open new horizons and make Peace known to other and unexplored “worlds”, as well as to accumulate power and wealth, which we never had and who quickly became friends and who were the envy of the great European powers of that period (and later). I think it would be unforgivable here not to mention the Portuguese epic about the various overseas “empires” created either by our symbolic courts or by people (and people) with unrivaled vision, ambition and courage!

However, unfortunately, the fate of crises does not let us go, and in recent decades the country (and the Portuguese) lived and supported crisis after crisis. The prolonged stagnation of our already weak economy – not to mention the line of convergence with the European average, which was interrupted at the turn of the millennium and which today seems to be “thrown back” – remains in place and is getting worse every day. Pandemic Covid -19. I remember, like it or not, that it was a pandemic for which we did not prepare properly (although expected by WHO in 2018, but later ignored), which officially appeared on November 17, 2019 in Wuhan, and only about four through for several months he arrives on our territory and has already claimed more than 17 thousand lives and has about 900 thousand infected. If in April 2020, here and abroad, they talked about the “Portuguese miracle”, then the mistake of the desire to save and celebrate Christmas led us to a nightmare (and tragedy) at the end of January 2021, when we reached daily highs of the infected (16432) and the dead (303 ), and we came to lead rating countries with the highest number of new cases and new deaths per million population. Once again, no one took any responsibility or acknowledged the NHS’s enormous weakness, and coupled with inconsistencies, opportunism and zig-zag measures (some even with vague constitutionality) even an attempt was made to blame the Portuguese for “inappropriate” behavior.

Now any citizen, minimally enlightened and attentive to the state and evolution of the regime – but especially to what televisions selectively serve it in this “society of spectacles” – understands that something very serious is happening and that fairy tales are part of political power. cynical and shameless. It is important for political leaders and high-ranking officials of the state to maintain visibility and hide or avoid responsibility, that is, take responsibility for any problem, failure or fiasco … especially if it leads to losses or broken lives. in short, it is important to preserve power (and public order) even if the value (and culture) of transparency is sacrificed to do so.

It is undeniable that after the financial crisis that erupted in 2008 in the United States, with the bankruptcy of the fourth largest investment bank Lehman Brothers – a crisis that quickly crossed the Atlantic with “shock waves” in countries such as Greece, Ireland, Cyprus, Iceland, Spain and Portugal, especially in our financial system due to their high exposure to toxic derivatives (and in institutions like Caixa Geral de Depósitos, BCP, BES, Banif and BPI) – the Portuguese have had to pay for the mistakes and dreams of administrators and managers ( and bank recapitalization), but also omissions or major failures in regulation and supervision at the national and local level. Since this unique period, demanding more information from rulers has been shown to be fundamental (as has been scrutinizing the messy relationship between political and financial power), but as usual, famous people and untouchables whistled aside and the blame fell. And again, about the usual, those who until today have paid the expenses with the help of state aid to banks in the amount of more than 21 billion euros.

But if this was the first financial, economic and social crisis of the new century and millennium – for which we are paying and will be paying! – in recent decades, the Portuguese have helped, supported and provided for a number of cases (where the word “corruption” is usually highlighted) that saturate and undermine the confidence of citizens in elected officials and institutions. Due to lack of space, only a reference to some of the most media outlets of recent decades: Tecnoforma, Bragaparques, Portucale, BPN, Freeport, Gold Visas, Monte Branco, BES and the famous “Operation Marquis”, “Banif”, “Collars for a smokeless environment”, the “Tankos” case, the death of Igor Khomenyuk and the whole “SEF” case … and more recently “Russian Gate” in the Lisbon City Hall, always with the participation of well-known or prominent citizens, some of whom are “politically exposed persons” or even hold (or former) government and political positions.

Of course, we ask: what is the effect of all this? There is no doubt that this is different, but we can perhaps identify two or three ideas that prevail in the spirit of the Portuguese: the first is that the state is embraced by a set of interests and some political parties; second, political power is “combined” with financial power and vice versa; thirdly, the sphere of state activity in Portugal is expanding, and the ordinary citizen enjoys less and less freedom and more and more often has to pay for the mistakes / mistakes of third parties. This has been the case recently with wage and pension cuts, and is likely to continue to be so in the not too distant future if millions of European bases are not effectively used in the implementation of our Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PRR). ). Faced with this scenario full of characters and situations that are both comic, bitter (or even bizarre), immoral, deceiving, liars, selfish, cocky … but also despicable, it would be appropriate to ask one final question: can anyone (still) put up with it all? Fernando Ulrich, the current “chairman” of BPI, gave us the answer in 2012, when people experienced austerity from a government that wanted to go far “beyond the three”: “Hold on, hold on!”