Financial Times | By: Various Authors | August 28, 2017:
Centuries of centralisation blamed for neglect, rural flight and sense of abandonment
In a wave of national solidarity, donations and emergency assistance have been flowing into the scattered hillside communities of central Portugal where devastating forest fires have claimed more than 60 lives this summer.
But the wounds exposed by the disaster and inflicted by decades of neglect, rural flight and remoteness from political power cannot be healed by aid alone.
“We have always been overlooked,” says Valdemar Alves, mayor of Pedrógão Grande, a small town 200km north of Lisbon where 64 people died in a catastrophic wildfire in June. “To many, we were just ‘the people from the hills’.”
His sense of abandonment is shared in sparsely populated villages across Portugal, where inhabitants feel they are forgotten communities living on the wrong side of a deep divide between the urbanised Atlantic coast and the poor, rural interior.
Centuries of hierarchical power fixed in Lisbon and entrenched by the authoritarian Salazar-Caetano regime between 1928 and 1974 have made Portugal one of the most centralised states in Europe, says Eduardo Cabrita, a minister in the Socialist government. This, he believes, has “set back the development of the whole country”.
It is harder for an economy to grow, he argues, when centralisation requires that “even the organisers of a beach volleyball competition in the north have to apply to the defence and environment ministries in Lisbon for authorisation”.
To remove such barriers, António Costa, prime minister, has charged Mr Cabrita with overseeing the first serious attempt in more than 40 years of democracy to devolve administrative power and give people like the residents of Pedrógão Grande more control over their lives.
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