Portugal Abandoned Outside the Bastions

Now that more than a week has passed since the local elections, I believe we can return to the topic, having already chewed on the results and their consequences. Not just because we continue to deal with the hundreds of posters from the various parties – which are all in favor of sustainability and care for nature but do not remove them immediately after campaigns, preferring to leave them peeling in the sun and rain, while paper and plastic run down the posts where they are stuck – but above all so that we can see what remains. And what remains, after a few more local elections in which everyone was a winner (as always), is a deep dismay when looking at the country. During the last few weeks, all parishes mattered, but some more than others – the truth is that the parties focused on the so-called ‘bastions’, municipalities where they had held leadership for more or less time and where they could not lose it. Until she escapes them. There were protests, promises, convictions, handshakes, masses, everything necessary to ensure that the number of voters voting for the right color guaranteed victory. The leaders of the various parties managed, in one or two statements, to sacrifice local authorities, concentrating their efforts on others, without even trying to disguise that they were doing so with conscience. They promised things that they will not fulfill, they freed themselves from others, they allied themselves with unlikely companions, they decided which cities they really wanted to keep or win, because that allows them to measure their pulse for the elections that they think matter: the presidential ones in 2026 and the legislative ones that will arrive in 2029.

But in the end, we still have the feeling that the country was the one who lost. There is no policy more important than local politics: it is a good municipality that guarantees quality of life for its citizens, that guarantees that a municipality or parish rejuvenates or ages, enriches or prefers to exchange it for another. And it is also in local authorities that we see more ego exercises and an intense fight for a position that, despite appearing to have power, is actually a service position. A week after the local elections, and passing through several municipalities that are not ‘bastions’ – therefore, they are not relevant to party leaders – what we feel is the following: outside the big cities, Portugal remains abandoned to its fate. No schools, no hospitals, no jobs, no future prospects, no visas goldwithout technology summits, without restaurants named after chefs and without policies that protect their future. And, worst of all, no people. Or less and less.