Portugal increasingly presents itself as a Brazilian state in Europe. Both countries seem interested in this movement: the Portuguese language being an instrument of citizenship. Will the European Union allow it?
Today the signs are as strong as the facts. History is drawn in front of our eyes, and what was the intuition of a few is today the certainty and will of many. Living in Portugal is at the top of the wish list of more and more Brazilians.
Do the experience. Getting lost in the streets of São Paulo, in Uber, in markets, theaters, gardens, gyms and restaurants, no matter what sophistication or price, from Mooca to Faria Lima, popular or elite, feel the reaction to the name “Portugal”. It has changed substantially in recent years.
Where before there was ignorance (or even emptiness), today there is an affable desire for closeness that is expressed, sometimes nervously, in expressions of affection that are organized around an idea that, increasingly, everyone feels as normal. —to live in Portugal.
Soon the feeling of the streets is consolidated. In Google searches, social networks, official statistics and —a major novelty — even in legislative production, with the Lisbon government having just created an innovative migratory instrument. A new visa, with a duration of 180 days, is exclusively intended for Portuguese speakers to seek —and find—work in Portugal.
Hunger is combined with the desire to eat, as they say back in the country, because the reasons for such a rush are prosaic and weighty and are not just related to the romanticism of the bicentennial of independence; the discovery of an ancestral grandfather born in Coimbra; in the unexpected transhumance of D. Pedro’s heart or even in the sudden desire to say “I love Portugal”.
The Portuguese country is aging inexorably and without “we” it will die. For 40 years, Portuguese society has lived below the generation replacement mark —which is 2.1 children per fertile woman—, currently hovering around 1.4 (in 2019), which has caused successive declines in the population.
With the most pessimistic projections pointing to a catastrophic demographic decline, Portugal “turns around” looking with desire at its Brazilian brothers in the Southern Hemisphere, at a happy moment when, for many social and economic reasons that we will discuss in due course in this column that today inaugurates, Brazil is also looking with strategic interest to the brothers in Europe.
Portugal needs good immigration and investment, and Brazil needs a gateway to a European market. The Portuguese prime minister knows this and will fight in Brussels for a special citizenship regime for citizens of Portuguese-speaking countries. It will be the first “citizenship of language” in world history.
