We mark the 52nd anniversary of the April Revolution in a time of profound difficulty—for the Azores, for Portugal, and for a world unmoored, fractured, and increasingly governed not by wisdom but by self-interest. It is a world caught in a war of egos, where the most basic principles of truth and justice are wounded daily. And darker days may yet come if this growing tendency toward the erasure of history—this deliberate iconoclasm—continues to spread across political and social spheres, sweeping away memory in favor of narrow, immediate gain.

It bears repeating: fifty-two years after April may seem a long stretch of time, yet it scarcely exceeds the forty-eight years we endured under dictatorship. Only the unthinking could wish for such a return. Many who shaped the revolution are still among us; the emotional dust has not yet fully settled, and memory still stands as a living threshold between present reality and the shaping of history.

For those who lived both the “before” and these fifty-two years of “after,” judgment is never simple. Memory resists neat conclusions. Yet truth demands this: those who did not live through the darkness cannot fully grasp the magnitude of the dreams that were born—or the depth of the disillusionment that followed their fracture.

What is most needed today, in this difficult world saturated with fundamentalisms and extremes, can be distilled into a single word: Hope. A hope like the carnation—blooming, fragrant, defiant. April was hope, even as it soon veered through the currents of left and right. Still, it was hope.

Today, we face a true industry of pessimism, fueled by the hunger for power and the rise of populism that has hollowed out the very idea of service and distorted the meaning of the People. In politics, there is no innocence. The call to serve has too often become the reflex to serve oneself. And the People, weary and disenchanted, seem to settle into resignation, as though there were no alternative but to endure the corrosion of public life—corruption, crime, dangerous alliances—seeking vengeance in extremisms that offer only hollow words, inciting division under the guise of false moral dreams.

It may look like a dormant volcano—but it is not. Beneath this surface of indifference, manipulators and strategists of extremism quietly advance. We live in a moment when even what is clearly wrong finds defenders. Opposing crowds gather around the same reality, divided not by truth but by interest, as if reality itself had become negotiable.

April was not meant for this.

Yes, the revolution was born also from interests—personal, social, structural. But in 1974, the People seized it and gave it the scent of an ideal that felt pure, almost sacred. Soon enough, it became clear that some sought only to replace one dictatorship with another. That was the time of turmoil—the PREC—and the nation teetered on the edge. Yet it found its footing again. And today, fifty years after the Constitution was approved and the autonomy of the Azores enshrined, we can say: it was worth it.

It was worth it because even those who once opposed autonomy came to embrace it—and now live within it, though not always in the spirit it intended. It was worth it because Portugal found its place in Europe, even if that Europe has become a heavy, uneven machine moving at different speeds.

And yet, so much of April remains unfinished. We must ask ourselves: what would we be without it?

The task now is clear—to give younger generations a vision of hope rooted in reality. A hope that educates, that demands effort, that teaches that nothing of worth is given freely, that all must be earned through labor, through merit, through dignity.

April was a lived dream—shared, permitted, embraced. To restore hope is the challenge of a new April still to be born. An April that returns to the soul of the People—without masters, without executioners.

In the Azores, and across all of Portugal.

Santos Narciso is a well-known journalist and writer in the Azores. Translation by Diniz Borges.