Portugal's president wants more state money for the interior and the border (and more trust in town halls)
At a formal session in Vila Nova de Cerveira, António José Seguro named depopulation, ageing and distance from decision-making centres as problems the central state has to answer with investment.
Vila Nova de Cerveira sits on the Minho, in Portugal’s far north-west, with a castle built under King Dinis and a contemporary art biennial now in its 24th edition. From there, on Sunday, President António José Seguro sent a message to the government.
“I know the difficulties common to so many territories of the interior and the border. Depopulation, ageing, distance from the big decision-making centres,” he told the biennial’s formal session. “These are challenges that demand of the central state more attention, more investment and more trust in local authorities, who know their people and their needs better than anyone.” The full address is published on the presidency’s website.
The line that will travel is the next one: “A cohesive country is not measured by the strength of its capitals, but by the vitality of its territories. And Portugal needs Cerveiras — communities that hold on, that reinvent themselves, that attract people from outside and do not let go of those who want to stay.”
He said something similar two weeks ago
On 11 August, Seguro used almost the same framing: the interior “is not a burden” and needs “an opportunity”, with public investment capable of pulling private investment behind it. Twice in a fortnight is rarely an accident at Belém.
It is worth being precise about what that means in practice. A Portuguese president does not set budgets or launch tenders. What he has is a diary and a platform. Using both repeatedly on one subject is how a theme gets fixed for political debate — and this one is being fixed ahead of the autumn budget round.
What “the raia” actually means
In Cerveira the border is not an abstraction. Across the Minho lies A Guarda, in Galicia, and for generations life here has been organised around crossing the river. Seguro drew on that to say the town “knows itself as border and knows itself as bridge”, and that the frontier worth having is “the one that joins, not the one that separates”.
The material problem is the same from Bragança to Castro Marim: without services, transport and skilled work, no town keeps the people born in it. Parliament is weighing the reopening of the Corgo railway line between Régua and Chaves, and the government says it will close August having delivered 28,000 homes under the 1.º Direito programme. Two pieces of the same argument, both still to be proved on the ground.
The XXIV Cerveira Biennial runs in phases until 31 October, on the theme of territories without borders.
Image: Vitor Oliveira / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
