Politics and power

The third axis of Hermínio Cerqueira’s work descends from the scale of the great powers to the European and Portuguese scale — and it is here that the catalog reveals its most constructive face. If the geopolitical axes diagnose a world in fragmentation, this axis asks what Europe, and within it Portugal, can do with that diagnosis. The five books that make it up form a coherent program of political economy: sovereignty conceived as a sum of capabilities (Autonomia Estratégica), the critique of the budgetary rules that stifle it (O Mito dos 3%), the strategic treatise that projects it into the 2026–2036 decade (A Esperança Lúcida / Lucid Hope), the social contract that must sustain it from within (A Economia da Dignidade), and the common home that shelters it (A Bíblia do Ambiente). In all of them, the same structuring conviction: dependencies have a price, and sovereignty options — energy, technological, budgetary, social, ecological — are built or lost by decision.

The fourth axis is the democratic laboratory of the work: three books that analyze, from complementary angles, the crisis of liberal democracy in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Two take the American case as their subject — Trump as a structural phenomenon in one, Trump as a psychological, political, and social profile in the other — and the third brings the problem home, examining the crisis of the Portuguese and European democratic right and its encounter with the far right. The methodological conviction is the same in all three: the demagogue is at once cause and symptom, and understanding what made him possible — inequality, resentment, media fragmentation, post-truth — is the first form of resistance. None of these books is neutral: all take an avowedly democratic position; but all refuse to replace analysis with indignation.