Opinion: Message From a Portuguese Mother With a Broken Heart

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) I was two years old when the Portuguese Carnation Revolution took place on April 25th, 1974, overthrowing the authoritarian ‘Estado Novo’ regime, in force since 1933 under Salazar, beginning a process that would culminate in the establishment of a democratic regime and the coming into force of the new Constitution two years later, marked by a strong socialist orientation.

The April 25th date, like any revolution, was a moment. A moment when the best traits of humanity emerge. The hope for a better life, for more opportunities, for a window to the world that had until then been blocked, was born in this nation.

Then, shortly after, the dirty work of the less commendable traits of this same humanity began.

Forty-six years later, Eva, the eldest of two sisters, just turned 19, packed her bags to seek a better life, to leave this country corrupted by the rotten power that has settled since then, aborting her studies, setting aside her dreams solely to survive and help her family.

“I want to have children one day Mummy, but not in this country. They won’t have a future, just as I don’t have a present…”

Eva repeats the trajectory of thousands of Portuguese in the 1960s. History repeats itself. Nothing has evolved, nothing has improved, in fact, everything has worsened.

We raise our children the best way we can and know, we teach them that truth and honesty are the values to follow, they follow the best examples we set for them, they are good children, they study and fight for a better world, hopeful and dreamy while still in their childhood innocence, until they start looking around them in their adolescence.

They see their parents working from dawn to dusk, finding it ever more challenging to pay the household bills. Mom owns a used car, but she likes it because it runs on very little gas – in the European Union, Portugal ranks third among the 22 EU countries with the most expensive fuels – yet among the 22 countries which updated their minimum wage in 2019 by law, Portugal ranked 12th with EUR 600. Portugal ranked – for this and other similarly shocking reasons – 21st in terms of per capita GDP in the EU.

Or at least it did, before the pandemic. Now it ranks 22nd – the last position.

Eva is leaving. And with her, hundreds of youths leave their families and homes and head to other countries to try their luck, and who knows, one day retake their aborted studies or simply work to survive and help their parents, their retired grandparents – yes, retirement here is also a pittance, 482 Euros on average, according to PORDATA (Contemporary Portugal Database).

Because in Portugal family is important. Grandparents are important, parents, siblings. We are not very good at living without each other.

And the mothers stay. To the sound of their hearts falling apart. To the silence that their children leave behind.

Portugal, this “little piece of paradise planted by the sea” would be just that if it weren’t for man’s greed, the thirst for power, for wealth at any cost.

In Portugal there is an invisible foot that crushes economic areas, activity sectors, businesses, taxpayers, the sick, the individual, the people. It does so without great clout, because it does not all occur at once and its causal relationship is far from transparent. But the invisible foot is there.

And why is it invisible? Because this invisible foot of the State, before crushing, introduced itself as a charitable, supportive, generous, kind and visible hand. This hand has the role of satisfying a special minority interest by granting a benefit or regulating to its advantage. In doing so, the State holds out its hand while concealing its foot.

And it crushes.

But it also employs other tricks.

“The worst threat to freedom of information is a socialist government”

The distribution of EUR 15 million to the media in May made newspapers healines.

Socialist Prime Minister António Costa’s negotiating art is remarkable. After taming the far-left, he benefited from the inaction of the largest opposition party and the President’s politically amorphic and pop-star stance. A strange negative coalition has gained strength, disguised as a pretence of “stability” needed to address the economic and social problems that Portugal has been facing for decades, always exacerbated in periods of socialist governance.

By taming the far-left, he silenced the unions. By waving a financial package at the media, he garnered the niceties that he lacked, while scandalously silencing the achievements of the new conservative right-wing minority opposition.

As the invisible foot continues to crush. It crushes old lives, long struggles, and young dreams.

And Eva is leaving.

And with her many other youths whose families were left with no means of subsistence during the pandemic.

When the pandemic exploded, the government tried to convey the message that everything was fine, that the crisis would be temporary, and that it could afford the aid it had announced in the meantime.

The facts expose a very different reality. Portugal has no firepower to feed the economic relief programs it has announced since March. And the economy is heading for disaster…while Eva is walking towards the door to be driven to the airport.

The government has set aside EUR 1.2 billion for a single company (TAP national carrier) to the detriment of the rest of the economy. It injected EUR 3 billion into Novo Banco after the BES scandal – the first was introduced in 2014 to rescue assets and liabilities of the latter – to the detriment of other companies.

The difference between what was pledged and what was implemented? The truth is that the State has no money. The Portuguese State survives in debt. And so do Portuguese families.

Something is wrong in a country like this. Eva knows this.

Eva and many like her will leave a void at the dinner table, for their parents, their siblings, their grandparents, and an aging country that needs them so badly to survive.

But a mother…a mother’s heart doesn’t care about that. A mother’s heart cries over the void that Eva leaves behind.

Eva is very important to her country. But above all to me, as her mother.