Fifty Years Ago on Tuesday the Azores Swore In a Government of Their Own, and the Argument It Started Is Still About Money
The first Azorean government took office on 8 September 1976, four days after the assembly elected that June, under a 33-year-old Mota Amaral. Fifty years on the design has held and the funding has not, and a working group has eighteen months to rewrite the regional finances law.
On Tuesday it will be fifty years since the Azores had a government of their own. The first Governo Regional (Regional Government) took office on 8 September 1976 at the Palácio da Conceição in Ponta Delgada, four days after the inaugural session of the regional assembly elected on 27 June that year. Its president was 33 years old.
Mota Amaral, who went on to run the region until 1995 and to preside over the Assembleia da República (Assembly of the Republic) from 2002 to 2005, told the Lusa news agency this weekend what the room felt like. "The Regional Government took office with great expectation from the population in general," he said. "People had gone to vote with enthusiasm and with pleasure." The novelty was structural, not local: "It was a great novelty in the structure of a Portuguese state almost 900 years old. It was the first time there was a government of our own here in the Azores."
He built it, in his phrase, with the silver from the house: nine regional secretariats and one sub-secretariat, staffed largely with young islanders. In his inauguration speech he warned against "the ridiculous fantasy of some Fifth Atlantic Empire that would mean chaining the Azores to practices of a colonialist nature, tinged though they may be with paternalism".
What the Constitution actually handed over
The instrument was the 1976 Constitution. Its original article 227 grounded the regime in the islands' geographic, economic and social conditions and in "the historic autonomist aspirations of the island populations". Article 229 then listed what the regions could do: legislate on matters of specific regional interest not reserved to the organs of sovereignty, exercise their own executive power, administer their own property, and dispose of the tax revenue collected in the islands. The wording has moved since, and in the current text the principle sits at article 225, the powers at article 227 and the organs of self-government at article 231, but the bones are the ones laid down in 1976.
The part that was never settled
Mota Amaral is blunt about what came next. "There was great resistance from the central power. I do not know whether people out there thought we would give up, that we would quarrel among ourselves and abandon the idea of autonomy. We did not." Transfers of competence moved with Mário Soares's collaboration from 1978, he said, and took a qualitative leap under Sá Carneiro in 1980.
The transfers kept going. The money did not follow at the same speed, and that is the argument the fiftieth anniversary has landed on. On 11 June the Council of Ministers created a working group to revise the Lei das Finanças Regionais (Regional Finances Law), coordinated by José Tavares, the former president of the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors), and made up of representatives of both regional governments, of the ministries that deal with the regions, and of independent experts. It has roughly eighteen months to produce a draft. The law it is reopening has been in force for thirteen years.
At the solemn session in Horta on Friday, the Speaker of the Assembleia da República, José Pedro Aguiar Branco, said the regions have taken on more responsibility in public works, education and health without the matching money. "Those responsibilities have to be accompanied by the means to exercise them," he said. "They cannot go on being hostages to a Lei das Finanças Regionais that is not updated." He called the process itself "a work still to be completed".
Luís Garcia, who presides over the Azorean parliament, put a building behind the argument: the Hospital da Horta serves not only Faial but Flores, Corvo, Pico and São Jorge, and the medical transfers that geography forces are exactly what the current formula does not price. The session in Horta was held without the President of the Republic, António José Seguro, without the Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, and without the great majority of parliamentary group leaders. The PSD in the Azores said the country had turned its back on the islands.
What this means for expats
- Region, not province. If you live in or move to the Azores or Madeira, a large amount of what governs your daily life is decided regionally, from health services to transport. The consequences are visible in items as ordinary as the region's EU-funded charging posts.
- The finance law is not an abstraction. Its formula is why growing more slowly costs the Azores 20 million euros of VAT and looking richer per head costs another 33 million, and why Madeira is still waiting for Lisbon to sign for half of its new hospital.
- Anniversaries are where the constitutional argument gets made. The same held in April, when Portugal marked fifty years of its Constitution.
Fifty years in, the design has held and the funding has not. The working group has until roughly the end of 2027 to say what a modern formula looks like, and the two regions will spend that time arguing that the bill for running an archipelago was never really counted.
