Let’s finally be honest.

We need courage and must learn to take responsibility.

Only a few days ago, a school friend from my youth came to visit me. I am one of those people who live and work far from their place of birth, having built up a new existence here, some 3,000 kilometres away. Veronika and her husband Bert came to Portugal from Germany in a campervan with a roof rack to get to know the country and to spend their holiday here without any worries. Portugal thrives on tourism, and the annual holiday is the highlight of everybody’s year.

Things went very wrong. No, they didn’t get into the funicular in Lisbon and hurtle 285 metres to their death in the ‘devil’s lift’. No, they weren’t trapped in a forest fire in Monchique and didn’t suffer any personal injury. They were lucky in their misfortune, as we say in German. They only drove into an underground car park in Sesimbra in order to park their car safely. The height was specified as 2.2m, so that the campervan with its roof rack should have easily fitted into this underground car park. However, it wasn’t meant to be. The van plus roof rack measured 2.1m, but the entrance to the underground car park was in reality only two metres high. So, it tore off the roof rack. Was it their own fault?

Nobody is responsible for the harm that happens to people in Portugal, are they? Or to put it another way, in the far south-west of Europe, everyone is responsible for any damage that may happen to them. You get into a tram or a funicular and are fatally injured in an accident. Was it your own fault? It is not unusual for tragic accidents to happen in Portugal. Nor is it unusual for maintenance work on technical projects to be outsourced.

I can’t even begin to imagine what the general state of bridges and their maintenance is like in Portugal.

But there is one thing that I find absolutely unusual. Namely, that nobody is responsible for anything. As a member of an association, I took EDP to court, accusing the company of being responsible for the 2018 forest fire in Monchique. I would have been better off suing the mayor, the civil defence and the PS government under former Prime Minister António Costa. Nothing came of the lawsuit. The court did not even open legal proceedings, on the grounds that there would be no guarantee of success. To this day, seven years after the devastating forest fire, nobody has been held responsible; nobody has been punished for having started the forest fire, whether wilfully or as a result of their own negligence…

And so an accident happens every day in Portugal: operations fail in hospitals, and misdiagnoses are made about people’s health. Operations are messed up by surgeons because… Accidents happen in so-called lifts in Lisbon for which nobody is responsible. Do you see what I’m driving at? It’s about taking responsibility. It starts with thinking about what might happen when you do something. So, if you plant eucalyptus in an area that is drying out, you have to reckon with the fact that there will be no water around to put the forest fires out with. And what is the penalty?

We all know that the so-called social media are one of the greatest threats to democracy. The social media are, in fact, commercial enterprises whose business is to analyse and manipulate people. Advertising is sold and we know where these social networks will lead to. We have already witnessed horror scenarios such as Brexit, which would not have been possible without the social media. And we have Donald Trump, who, only a few days ago, proudly stated that he would not be where he is today without these networks. We know that we should ban Facebook and Instagram immediately, as well as X and TikTok. But we let them get away with it: people are insulted and lies go unpunished. On the contrary: if I tell an untruth here, on this website, I will be held accountable. But the social media can lie and deceive as much as they like and always go unpunished – and, what’s more, they don’t need to pay any tax in Portugal.

Well then, until the next accident…