The Rent and the Work

Fifty years of autonomy, €300 million requested, €980 million waiting to be built — or why the Azores should stop being paid for what they are and start being paid for what they do.

The Azores celebrate fifty years of autonomy this year, and do so in style: the 10th of June in Angra, the President of the Republic on Terceira, speeches invoking Camões, Nemésio and the heroes of the sea. The calendar, however, which has a taste for such ironies, decreed that the half-century should coincide with the week in which the islands' importance was solemnly “reconfirmed” — not by the islands' work, but by somebody else's war. When the United States used the Lajes base on the way to Iran, the president of the Regional Government declared that the bilateral agreement “had been honoured”, that the archipelago's strategic centrality stood “reconfirmed by the current conjuncture”, and that what was demanded, for the time being, was information. Weeks later, in an interview, he went further and put a number on the claim: the region should take part in negotiating the agreement, draw from it “a fair benefit”, be “compensated”. How much? Around three hundred million. And he added, with a modesty that is a whole programme in itself:

“It is not a fortune.”

It is not, indeed. And that is precisely the problem.

Consider the mental architecture of the request, for it is worth half a century of history. The importance of the Azores is “reconfirmed” — by whom? By others, and by the worst of routes: military usefulness in somebody else's conflict. The value of the islands is, in this grammar, a passive value, certified from outside, the way one certifies the value of a plot of land a motorway is about to cross. And the political answer to that value is compensation: the rent a landlord charges a powerful tenant, with the caveat — offered without a trace of irony — that no fortune is being asked, lest the tenant take offence. A seat at the negotiating table is requested; but a seat without assets of one's own on the table is a seat from which to watch. One watches with dignity, no doubt. But one watches.

I call this distributive autonomy: the autonomy that shares out what exists, claims what is missing, and waits for its value to be recognised from outside. It was the autonomy possible in 1976, and it would be unjust to deny its achievements — schools, hospitals, roads, institutions, half a century of self-government that lifted the islands out of the neglect to which Lisbon, looking at the sea from the land, had condemned them. But distributive autonomy has a ceiling, and the ceiling is this: whoever lives on transfers and compensations always negotiates from the position of the one who asks. Bolieiro's three hundred million are the faithful portrait of that ceiling — and the phrase “it is not a fortune” is its caption.

And not even that modest rent is guaranteed, because on the Lisbon side the conversation is another one altogether. In the Iran episode, the Government of the Republic practised a grammar of its own: it granted a “conditional authorisation” for the use of the Lajes — conditional after the operation had begun, which lends the condition a chiefly decorative value —, declared that Portugal “did not accompany, did not endorse and was not involved”, classed the United States as an indispensable ally and promised to regret nothing. And when the essential point arrived — the revision of the agreement that the president of the Regional Government demands — the foreign minister waved it away, leaving Belém and Ponta Delgada to their dissonances. Here, complete, is the picture of distributive autonomy in 2026: the region asks for a rent it deems fair; the State, sole subject of international law, judges this no moment to be discussing rents; and the tenant uses the house when he needs it and as he needs it. Fifty years after autonomy, the archipelago is still negotiated — rarely a negotiator.

There is another autonomy available, and the next fifty years will accept no other: productive autonomy — the kind that creates what does not exist, and therefore negotiates from the position of the one who has. And the most remarkable thing is that its foundations already exist, scattered across the archipelago as the islands are scattered across the sea. On São Miguel and Terceira, geothermal energy: firm, clean power the rest of Europe would envy if it knew it existed. In Lagoa, the new transatlantic cables that by 2028 will moor Europe to the Americas — fibre passing, literally, at the archipelago's door. On Santa Maria, a licensed spaceport. And on Terceira, an airport and military infrastructure worth far more than the rent being asked for it.

It is on this inventory that I have been proposing — my own proposal, as an independent author, debatable like all proposals — a dual-use civil-military cluster on Terceira: an envelope of around €980 million and between two thousand and four thousand four hundred direct, qualified jobs, conceived not as somebody else's base better let, but as European strategic capability within NATO's European pillar. The difference between the €300 million and the €980 million is not one of magnitude — it is one of nature. The former are a rent: they pay for what the Azores are, their geography, and they end when the tenant changes route or mood. The latter are a work: they pay for what the Azores do, their capability, and they remain — in jobs, in competence, in negotiating power. Rent is requested; work is negotiated. And only those with assets of their own on the table negotiate in balance, as the President of the Republic asked in Angra.

And the money? For the first time in fifty years, the money exists — and it is not even Lisbon's. Portugal has secured approval for some €5.8 billion in European defence loans under the SAFE programme: more than twelve years of the entire Military Programming Law. Read the national plan, however, and you search in vain for an address: armoured vehicles, munitions, frigates, drones — equipment without territory, purchases without a strategy of implantation. And since these loans enter the public debt and will be repaid for decades, as the Public Finance Council warns, all the more reason to prefer, over equipment that only costs, capability that also earns — in civilian revenue, in industry, in qualified employment. Until now, Europe has been for the Azores above all the auditor of subsidies, as SATA learned at its own expense; but the same Europe has already shown, on Santa Maria, that it contracts capability when it exists — the spaceport and the Earth-observation constellation, destined for the Union's future governmental service, involve for the first time both the Defence ministry and the Regional Government itself. On Santa Maria, productive autonomy is no longer a thesis: it is a contract. What remains is to turn the exception into the system — to link the Atlantic Platform to the dual-use defence-industrial cluster on Terceira, and to make it the engine of productive autonomy and of a territorial cohesion with priorities set island by island, fixed not in subsidies to be audited but in European regional-cluster contracts to be fulfilled.

Let it be said, in fairness, that Bolieiro is closer to this grammar than he perhaps supposes. He already accepts revising the Lajes agreement; he already claims a place in the negotiations; he already uses, and rightly, the word “asset”. What he lacks is its conjugation: an asset that is not developed is merely a location, and locations are compensated; capabilities are contracted. The leap from three hundred to nine hundred and eighty does not require changing convictions — it requires changing verbs: from “being compensated” to “building”. And changing counters: the three hundred million are requested in Lisbon; the nine hundred and eighty are presented in Brussels.

And let no one read here one island's suit against the others — that old vice which the commissioner of the celebrations, an Azorean himself, denounced in Angra. The work I speak of is archipelagic by construction, with clear priorities island by island — all nine of them. Geothermal energy on São Miguel and Terceira; the digital moored at Lagoa, as the Atlantic telegraphs moored at Horta a century ago; space launched from Santa Maria; dual-use defence and aeronautics installed on Terceira. And the remaining islands are not scenery: Faial, rightful heir of that cable-station Horta, has the vocation of a capital of ocean science and the blue economy, with the university and the deep sea at its door; Pico joins the vineyard that is a World Heritage Site to the atmospheric observatory on Portugal's highest mountain; São Jorge is an agri-food power of protected designation, with a brand half the world knows and half an industry yet to be built; Graciosa is already a European laboratory of renewable grids with storage — an asset worth, in the energy-transition market, far more than the island has ever received for it; Flores is the natural forward post for observing the deep Atlantic and the exclusive economic zone, on Europe's western frontier; and Corvo, a biosphere reserve, is the testing ground for the resilient micro-communities — energy, health and remote services — that the insular future will demand everywhere. Revenue, competence and employment circulating through them all, as the voice of Inter-Ilhas once circulated, island by island. Distributive autonomy divided the islands so many times, because sharing out is comparing; productive autonomy adds them up, because building needs them all.

Fifty is a fine age for a reckoning and a terrible age for a nap. The autonomy that received did, with what it had, what it could — and it did much. But the conjuncture that “reconfirmed” the archipelago's importance will pass, as all conjunctures and all tenants pass; and on that day the Azores will be whatever they have built, not one megawatt more. The rent ends when the landlord changes. The work remains. ■