inThere are speeches that announce changes and there are speeches that announce themselves as revelation. The problem begins when someone stops speaking as a reformer and starts speaking as an envoy, and when reform stops being a tool for improvement and becomes liturgy. The situation worsens when public policy, which should be prudent, concrete and cumulative, turns into a kind of administrative gospel, pronounced as if before it there was only ruin, delay and original sin.
The current Government speaks of a “new public service paradigm” to describe this agenda. Nothing against ambition, as the Brazilian State truly needs simplification, coordination, digitalization and a better response to citizens. But it’s one thing to want to reform, it’s quite another to speak as if the reform began the moment you enter the scene, with the solemnity of someone arriving to correct not only the State’s machinery, but almost national History itself.
State reform, being a serious and necessary cause, should call upon memory, continuity and institutional intelligence. It should recognize that the Portuguese State was not born yesterday, that it was not invented in a PowerPoint and that even what is worn out or stuck today was often built by successive attempts at modernization, by generations of officials, technicians, jurists and decision-makers who worked with the instruments and limits of their time. Reforming is not denigrating the past, it is working on it.
But there is a contemporary temptation, very typical of the times of marketing policy, to turn any modernization agenda into a moral war. On one side the enlightened ones of the future, on the other the fossils of backwardness. On one side, efficiency, innovation, transformative energy and on the other, paperwork, inertia, the dead weight of inheritance. This simplification is intellectually poor but politically profitable. It allows you to sell a cause of unity as if it were a battle of liberation and allows you to trade the difficult work of reform for the easier pleasure of harassing.
It is necessary to warn that the State is not an enemy to be defeated, it is not a fortress occupied by ghosts and it is not a museum of incompetence waiting for a messiah with a new organizational chart. The State is at the same time, problem and solution, weight and protection, slowness and memory, continuity and guarantee of equality. Treating it as if it were just an ideological ruin is a mistake in vision and treating it as a territory of purification is worse, as it is paving the way for a policy that confuses reform with reckoning.
Perhaps it is this redemptive drive that is the most disturbing feature of this type of discourse. Reform no longer appears as an imperfect, negotiated, gradual and even humble process. It appears as a promise of redemption, almost as if it were enough to name a “new paradigm” to absolve the present and condemn en masse everything that came before. When politics adopts this messianic tone, there is always a risk of stopping governing with reality and starting to preach against symbols.
Now, the past is not an enemy field, it is our ground. A country that declares war on its own soil in the name of regeneration almost always ends up exchanging reform for staging, because reforming the State requires less epic and more precision, less proclamation and more patience, less ideological combat and more institutional respect. It requires recognizing that a cause of national unity cannot be transformed into a cultural war against everything that existed before the reformer took office.
It is necessary to be wary of rulers who surround themselves only with applause and who talk about reform as if announcing salvation. Not because the State doesn’t need to change, but serious reforms are not born from the vanity of inaugurating the world, they are born from the intelligence of realizing that no solid future can be built at the expense of a caricature of the past.
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