Mayors met last weekend to elect the new bodies of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP). Two demands emerged from this conclave: 1st the creation of Administrative Regions; 2nd revision of the Local Finance Law.
If there was a lot to say about money, especially about the management of public resources available to councils and parish councils and the level of fiscal efficiency and policy options, it is not this matter that is of interest to develop here.
If municipalities ask for more resources from the State Budget, they should consider why 80% of them have discounts on IMI, 73% have part of their IRS refunded, 68% finance water and waste tariffs and 97% have increased spending on parties and entertainment by more than 100% in the last decade.
At the end of the ANMP congress, the mayors were left talking alone about the regionalization of the Portuguese continent. This circumstance is not new, it has been going on since the day the PS accepted the “constitutionalization” of the process of specifically establishing the regions through a referendum.
For two decades, the country has been witnessing two very concrete phenomena: 1st, the centralization of public decision-making; 2nd the concentration of central administration services territorialized in the Regional Coordination and Development Commission (CCDR) or in the general directorates.
Some political leaders talk about the decentralization process that António Costa’s governments will have implemented. Now, this process was not true decentralization, it was a “task-making” of local power.
The attributions and powers of municipalities were created in 1977 and underwent two profound changes (1984 and 1997/1999) and were in a continuous process of adjustments between 2017 and 2023. This heritage resulted in a vast set of intervention areas where local authorities have responsibility for the entire chain. However, the latest decentralization process does not reveal this chain because, by transferring, for example, the maintenance of health centers, the complete transfer and assumption of health policy is not being determined.
Should municipalities have more powers? In my opinion they shouldn’t have. Those that are emerging today are enough until they are definitively established in what the supra-municipal political and administrative structure should be.
Portugal has two thirds of municipalities without critical mass to be able to receive other areas of intervention and, looking at this reality, there is only one way out – either the municipalities are typified and new joint management rules are determined that are not Intermunicipal Communities (which are an excrescence in the country’s administrative organization), or any step taken results in the misuse of public resources.
Recent governments have followed the wrong path regarding this supra-municipal vision. The consolidation of the CIM’s did not occur for historical reasons and social and economic flows and the idea of transferring competences to the CCDR created two serious problems: 1st Public decision-making is today assumed by political protagonists appointed (elected?) by agreement between national directors of the PS and PSD; 2nd This process is making public institutions and services spread across the territory disappear and concentrating the decision in Porto, Coimbra and Évora. And not even the CCDR based in the country’s capital was transferred to another city.
I give an example – The Regional Directorate of Culture of the North, which was in Vila Real, moved to Porto; the Regional Directorate of Sports of the North, which was in Vila Real, moved to Porto; the Regional Directorate of Agriculture, which was in Mirandela, is moving to Porto; the Regional Forestry Directorate, which was in Vila Real, was integrated into nature conservation and no one knows where it really is.
It is, therefore, the creation of new Lisbons, the AD and PS governments achieved what was never expected to happen – centralism is now double, in Lisbon and in four other cities. Almost nothing was spread across the territory and with decision-making power.
I’m not talking about the Algarve, because in a self-respecting country, a specific territorial organization would have already been approved for this territory.
We therefore have what those who fought utopically for regionalization never expected to see – a decision that is increasingly far from everything and everyone.
The miraculous idea that digitalization solves all of the country’s problems added to the atypical process of “centralist regionalization” that I mentioned. People no longer have a State official they can contact, they live between unanswered telephones. Essential services for populations, which are increasingly distant, have led to deep discontent among citizens in the interior of Portugal and even on the margins of large cities.
A Government that had a vision for the country should always start from a law that territorially structured central services and deconcentrated services, but with local resolution power; there should also be a global reading of decision flows by ministry; and he should also know what is important to have in the “benefit” State. The governments of this century have not known, until today, what the country should be like as an aggregate network of services, everything is done with the “Lisbon-centric” perspective of eliminating, distancing and tiring through complete ineptitude.
The CCDRs have a wide range of duties and powers. Presidents are chosen by the leaders of national parties and voted on by mayors, vice-presidents are appointed by mayors and sectoral ministers, the European fund management units are run by people appointed by mayors and with the automatic presidency of the maximum chosen by Lisbon and the mayors, everything is a circle that asserts itself without direct democratic control, without supervision and without a true integrated vision of the territory. It is also stated that there is a concrete action to treat mayors who have public influence well and to belittle the rest due to their smallness or the mere application of a rule of proportionality in financial resources.
In the old district capitals, in the old agrarian region headquarters, in the old industrial and forestry districts and in the old educational territories, a patch of services structured the territories politically, economically and socially, today none of that exists. And with the disappearance of the State, banks, insurance companies, post offices and technical departments of large companies also disappeared. The country where there is little industry is dwindling and many people think that the decentralization, carried out recently and which they want to continue to do, is a process worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But the most relevant thing is that this process degraded local democracy. In current times, the entire life of a municipality with less than twenty thousand inhabitants revolves around the chamber and the president. Caudilhismo is larval, it is even worse than in liberalism or the Estado Novo. Even teachers, the only social class that had personal autonomy to participate in public life and structure political alternatives, became angry with the governments of the last two decades and gave up.
April’s democracy is going through its worst period in the relationship between the State and citizens. This is also one of the reasons why we have seen a transfer of votes to the extreme right and it is not just in Portugal. In this old Europe, politicians elected a pathetic cosmopolitanism that “defecates” in the agrarian sphere, in traditions, in popular culture, in the way of being different, even in the diversity of ambitions and world views. In the neighboring kingdom, more than half of the territory is Empty Spain, a vast camp for VOX neo-Francoists. In France, the many regions where fishing was the main economic sector and agriculture was a relevant activity, are now made up of immigrants turned into a powder keg, a space with large majorities of “Lepenism”. Big cities are full of problems, medium-sized cities are aging noticeably and small communities are already vegetating. This is also Europe in uproar.
Portugal is struggling with its future. Politicians are so good that they circulate between small groups of interests and small groups of debates about human existence. Meanwhile, the days pass without anything significant being noticed.
We lack people who know the country and know about “pruning”. It is important to refound the parties and public policy production centers.
This text is not about defeat or pessimism, it is just the state of the art so that we can start again.