If there is one thing that history teaches us, it is that there is no eternal power.
Not even from a man, because we are finite, that is, we die, whether from a regime, or from a network considered invincible, or from a team that marks an era, whether in football, basketball or any other sector of life. .
Knowing how to leave on time is a virtue that is not available to everyone. I would even say, almost none, because power is addictive. It is said to be a drug, like dopamine, that can never satisfy us.
There is even a story, which explains what power is and the subservient way in which power is dealt with in Portugal. On August 3, 1968, the all-powerful President of the Council was enjoying a period of vacation, at the fort of Santo António do Estoril, when the improbable happened. We will never know whether it was due to carelessness, imbalance – or the mere weakness of the canvas chair. What is certain is that he violently hit his head on the stone floor. He never recovered.
Until his death, two years later, the context of the transition was difficult and it was decided to maintain, for the patient in the Red Cross hospital, all the honors inherent to the position of head of government.
Symbolically. Despite Salazar being mentally very limited, the ministers pretended to hold Councils of Ministers in his presence. The dictator thought he still decided. The fall from the chair was followed by the decline of a mind that emptied itself, into farce and simulacrum.
This comes in connection with yesterday’s resounding and humiliating defeat of Pinto da Costa, who, ill-advised or out of mere blindness, re-applied, when he should have been allowed to leave through the big door, a term ago, unless he was mistaken as national champion and who He would be the target of all the various honors and accolades and would enjoy the last years of his life, with a red carpet rolled out, but he chose to defy the law of physics and try to die in power.
The Porto supporters did not do the same thing that the ministers did with Salazar, that is, pretend that he remained in power. On the contrary, they inflicted on him the biggest and most humiliating defeat I can remember seeing on a leader in power in Portugal, a country so inclined to venerate leaders with feet of clay.
We are a country, little given to change, extremely conservative and that even in cases where there were convicted or indicted presidents (Isaltino de Morais, José Sócrates, António Costa, Miguel Albuquerque, among others), they maintained power, or at least the aura of winners and, even in the football phenomenon, it would lead us to think that Pinto da Costa would remain in power, even if he wanted to, even if the club continued to weaken. See the examples of their rivals, Benfica and Sporting, where Luís Filipe Vieira only falls, not at the polls, but at the hands of the PJ, as well as Bruno de Carvalho, overthrown by Alcochete, also at the hands of justice.
Thus, with a crash, Pinto da Costa falls from his throne, or rather, from his chair, not by mere accident, but pushed by those who always idolized him, giving up the desired, but slippery dream chair, to those who longed to dream with it, prepare yourself to occupy and invest in it, in an ambitious and modern way, never hiding the fact that it is your dream chair.
One way or another, I predict that, with this example, in Portugal, nothing will remain the same.
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