“You had very courageous people
And you believed in your message
You were gaining ground
And you lost your memory
You already had half the world in your hands
You wanted to impose your religion
And you ended up losing your freedom
On the way to glory
Oh, Portugal, Portugal
What are you waiting for?
You have one foot in a crowd
And another one at the bottom of the sea
Oh, Portugal, Portugal
As long as you wait
No one can help you”
Jorge Palma
(I do the traditional disclaimerbut as Sportinguista confesses: despite not believing in miracles, I hope for one this day. Above all, I hope that Sporting will not behave again as the Portuguese people currently do: sitting in slippers on any sofa, lost between depressing shows and without any ability to react.)
Days go by and in each of them we are surprised by a political class that clearly does not live up to what would be required of them, even in minimal terms.
Let’s take a look at what has been learned from both those elected and those nominated by the Chega party, first of all because they do not have the charm of novelty and the currently most popular examples are caricatural, since from there the most attentive will know that anything is possible. Nowadays, we were, for example, faced with Montenegro assuming that it had made use of public jurists, that is, paid with taxpayers’ money, to provide opinions on an issue that, whether it wants to or not, is related to its private activity.
What seems certain is that, regardless of party color, with a greater focus on Chega, PSD, PS and CDS, there is no shortage of suspects, defendants and even convicted people in our country, not shying away from continuing to run for Districts or other bodies, holding public office, representing our country and using, sometimes at their own pleasure, our tax money for their own benefit. From scandal to scandal, whether regarding advisors accused of pedophilia or hairdressers with alleged aptitude for green spaces, or regarding elected officials also convicted of crimes that, if they do not embarrass them, at least do not honor the country.
Everything, in the face of a more than apparent resignation from everyone who effectively, in their day-to-day lives and with the high tax burden we have, are leading their lives honestly and, with that, making the country evolve, using these cases as mere entertainment and as an escape and without realizing that this is what is undermining us all.
Hence, in addition to Jorge Palma’s already advanced sung poetry, Vergílio Ferreira’s words make more and more sense, when he alluded that “faced with a difficult situation, the Portuguese choose to wait for a miracle or to decompress a joke. The serious thing about this is that the miracle doesn’t come and the joke decompresses everything. We are thus at the mercy of bad luck and have no reason to lift a finger.” And indeed, we weren’t very lucky.
The next question is whether there is a will to change this state of affairs and how. Now, although the Principle of Presumption of Innocence is in force (and well!) in Portugal, for this type of public positions the scrutiny will have to be much greater and, for example, the legislation changed, either in the sense of prohibiting those convicted of serious crimes from holding such positions, or in the more demanding sense of also prohibiting that, once an indictment has been issued, the records are public knowledge, which is different from being allowed access, upon request subject to review by the judge.
Another relevant measure would be, for example, to transform internal electoral fraud into a crime, which, to date, has not occurred, firstly because those who deceive those in their own party will more easily do so to unsuspecting third parties.
To moralize this state of affairs, in which evil has been trivialized, to the point of turning it into a mere anecdote, lamentations or quick indignation, expressed on social networks, are no longer enough.
Unlike many laws that are changed, often just to pretend that a problem has been resolved, these successive cases deserve, in fact, that the criminalization of those who represent us be presented differently, faster, but, above all, much more effective. It’s just that, in the end, while some people get strangely rich, the population pays the bill and pays too much for the (sad) spectacle that is offered.
And, if it is not us, each citizen, one by one, to demand, as Jorge Palma rightly says, “no one will help us”.
Write without applying the new Spelling Agreement
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