Portugal is rightly proud to be a plural democracy. However, behind the succession of governments, a silent mechanism persists, almost unchanging over the last five decades, which always circulates power within the same circle. The monarchy ended, but the court remained, not in symbols, but in the culture of governance. A core of those responsible moves between positions, councils, commissions and opinions, sharing the same origin, the same trajectories and, above all, the same conviction that the State must think for everyone and decide for itself, taking this as neutrality.
The State consults itself. Those who define policies are those who execute them, those who execute them are those who evaluate them and those who evaluate them are those who comment on the results. The cycle closes naturally and what is merely self-reference is taken as a virtue. The problem is not just the repetition of names, but the repetition of thoughts.
This endogamy has no party color, crosses governments of all tendencies and resists any political program. The right promises to break with the State and the left promises to reform it, but in the end both trust the same faces. There is an alternation of power, not a system.
The most obvious example is in higher education. Official rhetoric extols institutional diversity, autonomy and internationalization, but in practice the system has remained closed for decades. Designations for commissions, conferences, councils, agencies or working groups circulate in an exclusive circuit where the names are repeated and the origin is always the same, the public sector.
In political and cultural terms, it is legitimate to say that, in higher education, true democracy has not yet arrived. There is legal freedom, but there is no true intellectual openness. Plurality is celebrated in discourse, but neutralized in practice. We live in a closed circuit, with little international vision, which talks about globalization with an administrative accent and designs the future looking only at the past. The country discusses itself without questioning itself.
The Government recently presented a proposal to review the RJIES (Legal Regime of Higher Education Institutions) that limits the hiring of doctorates by the institution that trains them, thus recognizing that endogamy is a problem in public higher education. It is a sign of awareness, but it only touches the surface. True endogamy does not reside in the first hiring of teachers, it begins much earlier, in the capture of decision-making centers, in circles of influence and in networks that, for decades, determine who thinks, who decides and who represents the sector.
The consequences are clear. A State that only listens to itself makes predictable, slow and often disconnected from reality decisions. The economy loses oxygen, society loses mobility and politics loses alternatives. Voting stops being a choice and becomes a protest. We are not looking for someone who governs better, we are looking for someone who shakes up the system.
Portugal is not experiencing a people crisis, it is experiencing an openness crisis. Government endogamy, in higher education and beyond, is more than a malfunction, it is a strategic block to national development. The State remains enchanted by the echo of its own voice. It forgets civil organizations and distrusts those who do not belong to it. Without airing there is no reform, without a confrontation of visions there is no progress and without renewal there is no future.
Portugal ended with the formal monarchy, but in higher education an invisible monarchy persists, which is repeated in the same protagonists and the same ideas. The system turns on itself, certain that there is nothing more beautiful than its reflection.
A democracy without renewal is just a succession of procedures, and a sector that is not open to the future inevitably ends up a prisoner of its past.
*This article reflects the view of the author and not necessarily APES