The Pulpit, the Rostrum and the Shipyard

On the speeches of Miguel Monjardino and António José Seguro in Angra do Heroísmo — and on the lines everyone applauded and no one has yet budgeted.

Last Wednesday, in Angra do Heroísmo, something rare happened in the civic liturgy of Portugal: two 10th of June speeches that said true things. From the pulpit of the military ceremony, Miguel Monjardino, president of the organising commission, delivered — between Camões's ship Santa Clara and the big-wave surfers of Nazaré — the diagnosis that official documents usually banish to the annex: the historical cycle begun in 1945 has ended; the multilateral world that served us so generously is being replaced by another, hierarchical, complex and fragmented; this will be a maritime century; and Portugal, which for centuries insisted on looking at the sea from the land, will have to learn again to look at the land from the sea. All of it exact. And he closed with the sentence the whole audience applauded — a sentence that deserves to be reread with an accountant's coolness:

“We need the people and the resources to guarantee national sovereignty in Portuguese territory in the Atlantic.”

Hours later, from the rostrum of the formal session, the President of the Republic walked the rest of the road — the political road. He opened with Nemésio, called Angra the heart of the Atlantic, and left two statements worth keeping. The first is doctrine: European strategic autonomy does not contradict transatlantic defence — it is its natural complement; and cooperation with allies must rest on a relationship of balance and reciprocity. Said on the island of the Lajes base, with the agreement on the table and the Middle East ablaze, this is not ceremonial prose: it is a direction of State. The second is social diagnosis: Portugal's problem was never talent — it is talent leaving, because gains in qualification have not been matched in pay, and because housing exhausts any family budget. And he asked, to crown it all, for courage to make hard choices without yielding to populism, and for “words of the middle” against the virus of polarisation.

And yet — for the second time in a single day.

The President, too, stopped at the shipyard gate. What people, what resources, the morning asked; what hard choices, the afternoon asks — paid by whom, entered under which budget line, run by which institution? Neither orator said; nor, strictly speaking, did they have to — one does not ask a 10th of June oration to come with parameterised annexes. But the country has the old vice of mistaking diagnosis for treatment, and of leaving ceremonies persuaded that, the sentence having been well said, the thing is half done. In Portugal, diagnosis is a consecrated literary genre, with centuries of tradition and prizes to its name; execution is a minor genre, left to the curious.

It so happens that the answers exist, and they are not rhetorical. The people and the resources of the maritime century have a name, an address and a megawatt. They have them in Sines, where a data campus is heading towards 1.2 gigawatts of capacity beside the country's largest submarine-cable node. They have them in Lagoa, on São Miguel, where Google's new transatlantic cables will, by 2028, moor Europe to the Americas — passing precisely through the archipelago both orators had before their eyes. They have them in the geothermal energy of São Miguel and Terceira, firm and clean power the rest of Europe would envy if it knew it existed. They have them in the spaceport of Santa Maria, already licensed, and in a Portuguese drone company worth more today than many banks ever were.

It is on this inventory — and not on nostalgia — that I have been proposing an architecture. The passage from distributive autonomy, which shares out what exists, to productive autonomy, which creates what does not. A dual-use civil-military cluster on Terceira, sized at around €980 million and between two thousand and four thousand four hundred direct jobs — my own proposal, as an independent author, debatable like all proposals. But note the coincidence: that cluster is, point by point, the material translation of the “balance and reciprocity” the President called for. Because only those with assets of their own on the table negotiate in balance; reciprocity is not decreed — it is built, in concrete, in fibre and in megawatts. A Terceira that is European strategic capability within NATO's European pillar negotiates the Lajes; a Terceira that is merely somebody else's runway is grateful for them.

The same holds for the rostrum's social diagnosis. If qualification has not met pay, it is because the extraordinary rent of the new economy — of automation, of data, of the productivity that machines multiply — is being captured by few and taxed by no one. A contribution on technological substitution and on productivity rents above the sectoral benchmark is precisely the instrument that converts presidential lament into funded wage policy. And “words of the middle”, if they are to outlast an ovation, need a grammar: rules that oblige majorities and oppositions to reform together — a symmetric supermajority for structural reforms, for instance — without which the middle is merely the place where speeches cross on their way to the extremes.

Courage is freedom, said the commissioner of the celebrations; courage for hard choices, asked the President. Very well. But courage, in politics, is not measured in decibels of applause — it is measured in budget lines, in decrees with technical annexes, in shipyards with people inside them. “Tomorrow is not too far away,” Angra heard, twice, so that no one would forget it. Whoever said it is right. All that is missing is for tomorrow to appear in the State Budget — for it has appeared in speeches for five hundred years. The pulpit and the rostrum have nobly done their part. What remains is the part that earns no standing ovation: because it is done sitting down, at a desk, with numbers in front of you. ■