Lisbon is Portugal. Outside of Lisbon there is nothing. The whole country is between Arcada and S. Bento!” The complaint was written by Eça de Queirós in his masterpiece The Mayans. Almost 140 years later, it remains surprisingly current: it portrays a centralization that is not limited to the capital, but shapes the entire national narrative.
Barring modest resistance from the Porto–Braga axis, the statistics are inexorable in demonstrating a macrocephaly centered in the capital area. It’s the population, immigration, the number of companies, the number of public entities, salaries, purchasing power – everything, everything, everything.
It turns out that the inevitable has happened: the Lisbon Metropolitan Area is bursting at the seams, and the quality of life is clearly deteriorating. Every day we are bombarded with news that reflects the chaos that is taking place, in an unstoppable march that limits access to housing, health and education and that feeds a perception of insecurity, making this magnificent city less and less livable.
It is worth saying that, in terms of centralism, Lisbon went from victory to victory until final defeat.
Centralization in Portugal is not just historical: it is a living phenomenon, amplified by misguided economic and social policies. The brilliance of Lisbon, as a political, economic, social and cultural center, contrasts radically with the decline of peripheral regions. This condition prevents the full use of the national potential, as the country has renounced its territorial wealth by concentrating means and resources in a single region.
A spiral was thus generated that simultaneously imprisons the capital and the interior, silently accepted and very difficult to interrupt. Territories with little population naturally have few votes. And in a democratic system dominated by short cycles, where immediate electoral achievement is privileged, there is an almost structural temptation to channel public investment to where there are more votes. It’s cold reasoning, but unfortunately real.
The result is dramatic: where there are few votes, there is little investment; where there is little investment, there are few people; and where there are few people, there are even fewer votes. This fuels a perverse spiral, which can only be overcome with political courage and regime pacts that impose strategic priorities beyond short-term electoral logic.
The advantage of regime pacts is that they neutralize comparative electoral advantages. The parties – in power and in opposition – adopt the same voice on a specific matter, minimizing or nullifying the risk of differential penalties at the polls. Unfortunately, this is not the tradition in our Portuguese rectangle, which is why the old pathologies persist – in justice, health or… in centralism.
A good example is the plan proposed by the Government to progressively reduce the IRC rate. Instead of applying it across the board, the budgetary slack could be used to introduce a territorially differentiated – and even disruptive – reduction curve, for example offering two decades of zero CIT to a group of interior regions. Only with measures of this type will there be hope of interrupting a spiral that negatively affects us all, from the capital to the border.
Professor