There is a literary genre that flourishes quietly in island regions and that no critic has yet deigned to catalogue: the business plan for an air route. It has the optimism of a first novel, the unshakeable faith of a prospectus, and an extraordinary generosity in its demand projections — all rising, all confident, all written in the first person of the party doing the asking. The State reads it with the moved attention of a patron, approves it, signs, and on the appointed day appears on the airport apron for the ritual that pleases everyone: the ribbon cut, the inaugural aircraft, the smiling officials, the promise that this link will open markets and reconcile the archipelago with the world. In that happy moment nearly everything visible is counted. What goes unasked is only the invisible: at what cost that route is operated, at what margin, and whether the fare ever actually fell.
The question is far from academic. Strategic routes — the links that bring tourists from new markets, investors, exports, students and talent — are today the declared bet of both regions, and rightly so: on them depends, in good measure, whether island economies can grow beyond what their domestic market allows. The Azores approved a fund this year for the development of new routes. Madeira, which has not yet established an equivalent instrument, operates a scheme supporting tourism promotion and marketing that rightly recognises that demand does not arise of its own accord. These are legitimate answers to a real problem.
The objection is not to the purpose. It is to the arithmetic that is missing. For the design of these supports, examined closely, reveals an asymmetry that would have delighted a moralist. The State carries the risk of the launch with the anxiety of a primary investor; the airline keeps the gains of efficiency with the discretion of an heir. When the route yields less than promised, low occupancy is presented not as a failure of the operation but as irrefutable proof that the link still cannot stand on its own — and the treasury, cornered by the fear of losing the connection and all the hotels, operators and jobs that already depend on it, opens the envelope once again. The circle closes elegantly. The ceremony repeats. And no one, at the end of five years, can say with any certainty whether it funded an efficient route or merely subsidised the patience of whoever runs it.
It would be unfair, however, to lay the gap at the door of the newer instruments alone. It comes from further back, and the largest case is the everyday one. The old mobility subsidy was renamed this year the Territorial Continuity Mechanism, and the change of name was among the aptest our recent legislation has produced: flying between the Autonomous Regions and the mainland is not receiving social assistance, it is exercising a right bound up with the continuity of the national territory. The designation was properly changed. The engine was not. The airline sets the fare, the resident buys and advances several hundred euros from their own pocket, the platform checks the documents, and the State reimburses later. The support follows the price; no one asks whether that price corresponds to the cost of an efficient operation.
And it was precisely on this footing that an instructive imprudence was committed a few weeks ago. A cross-party parliamentary majority decided, generously, to abolish the maximum limit on the eligible cost of the ticket — it did so against the Government's position, and the President of the Republic himself, on promulgating the law, warned that removing that ceiling could carry effects requiring careful regulation and demanding oversight of its execution. The warning was not rhetorical. The ceiling on spending was abolished before the instrument capable of forecasting, calibrating and containing it had been built; and there is no payments network, however efficient, that does that work, because processing payments is not controlling a budget. One reimburses; the other anticipates the expense, calibrates it and limits it. Without the second, the taxpayer's burden comes to depend on whatever fares the airlines charge — fares which, be it noted, are known only once the ticket has been bought.
The lesson is not that platforms need time to be adapted. It is that a public policy whose cost depends on market prices requires, before it takes effect, an economic engine capable of forecasting, controlling and limiting the risk the State assumes. The burden was legislated; the instrument was not built.
Now, that instrument exists, and this is where the discussion ought to begin. Not as a promise nor a sketch: as a developed and stabilised architecture. It is called the Hybrid Territorial Continuity Mechanism, and the word "hybrid" says what matters — it leaves the resident's protection intact and adds to it an economic discipline that today does not exist. Instead of the State reimbursing the price put before it, the mechanism establishes what that link would cost operated prudently and efficiently, compares it with comparable links, allows the airline a legitimate return on the capital it risks — and settles against that reference, not against the invoice. Raising the fare ceases to raise public money automatically. The resident pays at the point of sale only the share that falls to them, without temporarily financing an obligation that belongs to the State. And when the operation improves on its own merit, the gain does not quietly disappear into the balance sheet of whoever produced it: it is shared three ways — one part eases what the resident pays, another reduces the taxpayer's burden, and a third, smaller but indispensable, stays with whoever generated the efficiency. That last share tends to scandalise purists, and it is precisely what makes the mechanism workable: stripping an airline of every fruit of its own merit would teach it to hide savings and preserve inefficiencies.
Let it be said precisely what "stabilised" means, because words, in these matters, are worth money. It does not mean ready to go into production tomorrow. It means that the architecture, the economic model and the rules are closed and coherent, and that the mechanism is in a condition to be submitted to independent audit, then calibrated against real data, and only then implemented. That is the sequence, and no stage of it can be skipped — as recent experience has just demonstrated at the taxpayer's expense. What is being asked is not an act of faith: it is that the mechanism finally be placed on the desk of those who decide, so that the audit may begin.
And there is a second, less obvious reason not to postpone it. That engine does not serve the continuity of residents alone. It serves, with the adaptations proper to each case, the instruments the regions have already created and which all suffer from the same gap: the Azorean route fund, which sets tapering support but does not establish the efficient cost of the link nor share the productivity gains; the Madeiran promotion schemes, which contract campaigns and receive reports without knowing, in the end, whether the route became less dependent on the treasury; the continuity mechanism itself, which reimburses without calculating. A common engine would resolve this without replacing any of them. The fund would remain the political and financial framework; the schemes would go on contracting promotion; the national mechanism would go on guaranteeing residents' rights. What all would gain is what none was given: knowing what they bought.
From this observation the next path is born — and it should be presented for what it is, a path, and not a solution off the shelf. International strategic routes are not judged by the same criteria as territorial continuity, and it would be a coarse error to treat them as though they were the same thing. Continuity asks how to keep an island from being isolated within its own country; it is a logic of cohesion, turned inward, and its beneficiary is the resident. Strategic connectivity asks which links to the world make the region's economy grow; it is a logic of development, turned outward, and its beneficiary is an entire ecosystem — the tourist who arrives, the firm that exports, the university that attracts, the hotel that fills. The purpose changes; the discipline remains.
The extension of the same economic core to strategic routes — the Hybrid International and Strategic Territorial Connectivity Mechanism — has been conceived and its architecture drawn. It would treat each link according to the phase of its life, recognising that a route at launch asks of the operator a risk that a mature route no longer runs, and that the sharing of gains should follow that maturing, progressively shifting value towards the taxpayer and towards affordability as the link establishes itself. It would be dishonest, however, to present it as a finished thing: it lacks its sectoral adaptation, it lacks airline data, and it lacks calibration. It has a road to travel, and travelling it depends on information not yet available. But it is the right road, and acknowledging as much now spares us from building, in the meantime, further instruments without an engine.
This leads to an institutional question worth putting frankly. The continuity mechanism is already national and serves both archipelagos under a single model. Nothing prevents the engine from taking the same route — a common framework, approved nationally, serving the Azores and Madeira while leaving each region the sovereign choice of its strategic routes and the calibration of what is proper to it. One statute, differentiated execution. Alternatively, and fully respecting the autonomies, each region would adopt its own legislative vehicle, both referring to the same architecture: two statutes, one mechanism. The choice between the two paths is political and not mine to make. What seems to me indefensible is the third possibility — that each instrument goes on being designed from scratch, without common discipline, without comparability and without memory.
There is in this, for the regions, more than good bookkeeping: there is leverage. The Azores ask Lisbon, with reason, for more stable financing of their links. Now, the central State hesitates to pay more precisely because it does not control the efficiency of what it would be paying for. Let the argument then be inverted: national funding ceases to be a favour that is begged and becomes a counterpart that is earned — in exchange for a mechanism that assures whoever pays that it is not funding waste. The regions that adopt it will have, with which to press their case, an argument they do not have today.
What remains, in the end, is a change of era. The challenge of public policy this century no longer consists merely in funding needs — at that we were always adept. It consists in designing mechanisms that turn funding into efficiency, efficiency into affordability, and affordability into development that outlasts the term of the support. The true public asset was never the subsidy, that guest who installs himself and rarely takes his leave: it is the far rarer capacity to convert limited resources into lasting connectivity. In an age when public money is scarce, the competitiveness of regions will depend less and less on the quantity of support they receive and more and more on the quality of the instruments with which they turn it into value.
The cutting of ribbons will keep its place; communities need symbols and governments need public moments. But the test of a route is not the first flight. It lies in the economics of the hundredth, in the fare the passenger can actually afford, in the share of efficiency returned to those who financed it, and in the link's capacity to remain once the cameras have gone. That is where the politics of the envelope ends and the politics of sustainable connectivity, at last, begins.