The article denounces that the announcement of "100% execution of the PRR" made by the Republic Government and the Regional Government of Madeira results from a financial and political engineering known as reprogramming of targets and investments. To achieve this total execution within the European deadline (August 2026), the governments resorted to continuous adjustments, removing delayed works and slow-executing projects from the plan, such as complex public housing interventions, large water infrastructure, dams, or hospitals.
The funds released with the removal of these projects were channeled to projects with rapid financial absorption, such as direct support to companies and acquisition of technological equipment already available on the market. Thus, on paper before the European Commission, 100% of eligible funds were spent and the 44 reforms were considered completed.
About 2,000 million euros in works and investments initially planned in the PRR failed to meet the community calendar and had to be removed from the European "bazooka". This value was not totally lost, but was rescued by national and regional public budgets, meaning that the expenditure started to be supported by taxpayers instead of being funded by the European Union.
In Madeira's specific case, structural sectors like Public Housing fell outside the PRR/IHRU's 100% financing time window. The article contends that official discourse frames the outcome as a management success, but it's fundamentally an "accounting illusion" — the original transformation targets for the country and region were scaled down to meet the deadline, which will burden regional and municipal budgets in subsequent years.
