Portugal Is Gutting Its Cultural Backbone — and Calling It Reform

Portugal’s latest cultural policy move is being sold as “efficiency.” In reality, it looks a lot like vandalism in a suit.

By dissolving the advisory boards of DGArtes and centralizing decisions inside the Ministério da Cultura, the government claims it is fighting elitism, speeding up bureaucracy, and making public funding more “democratic.” The rhetoric is familiar. The consequences are not new either.

Let’s be clear: this is not administrative housekeeping. This is political erasure.

The advisory boards — made up of artists, curators, producers, and cultural workers — were one of the last imperfect but real buffers between power and patronage. They were messy, slow, and sometimes contradictory. They were also the only mechanism that prevented cultural funding from becoming a direct extension of government taste, ideology, or convenience.

Now they’re gone.

In their place? A vague promise of “simplification” and “strategic alignment.” Translation: fewer voices, tighter control, and a shorter leash.

The official justification is almost insulting in its simplicity. Advisory boards, we’re told, are “circular.” They reproduce the same elites. They block access for outsiders. This argument conveniently ignores a basic fact: if Portuguese culture feels closed, precarious, and underfunded, it’s not because too many artists had a say — it’s because too few resources were ever put on the table.

You don’t fix inequality by removing participation. You fix it by funding diversity properly.

What this move really does is shift cultural decision-making from a plural ecosystem into a vertical structure. One that is easier to steer, easier to silence, and easier to instrumentalize. Culture becomes less of a public commons and more of a managed asset — safe, exportable, and politically neutral.

And yes, neutrality is the point.

Independent culture is inconvenient. It criticizes housing policy, colonial amnesia, labor precarity, and racism. It refuses to fit neatly into tourism brochures or EU funding decks. Advisory boards were never radical enough — but they were unpredictable. Governments hate unpredictability.

So we get the classic playbook: delegitimize expertise, accuse insiders of self-interest, then centralize power “for the people.”

Sound familiar?

Across Europe, culture is increasingly treated like a branding exercise rather than a democratic infrastructure. Something to “optimize,” not protect. Something to measure in foot traffic and Instagram reach, not in critical friction or social memory.

Portugal is now following that script.

The irony is brutal. This is a country that built its post-dictatorship identity on cultural freedom — on the idea that art is not decoration, but dissent. And yet here we are, watching cultural governance quietly hollowed out under the language of modernization.

No police raids. No censorship laws. Just administrative tweaks with long-term consequences.

Because when artists lose a seat at the table, culture doesn’t become more open. It becomes more obedient.

And once funding decisions no longer require listening — only approval — the system stops asking what culture needs and starts asking what power prefers.

That’s not reform.

That’s control, politely packaged.