Der Bearbeitungsschutzstatus des Wikipedia-Artikels jedes europäischen Landes, 1. Januar 2025

What has happened to the Portugal page to earn this?

Is this in English or the countries respective languages?

Someone should delete the page on Luxembourg, I wonder how long it will take till someone notices

because eg. one of those is not even a country

France don’t deserve it

Italy being grouped with the third world once again 🤩

If anyone’s wondering why Portugal is yellow, it’s editing conflicts relating to Portuguese Administrative Divisions, a topic which is quite controversial in Portugal. I will try to explain:

Historically, Portugal was divided into provinces. The exact number and borders of the provinces changed, but not by that much. What is important to the discussion is that the historical portuguese provinces were based on culture and geography. A province included lands with relatively similar geography and whose people had relatively similar culture and customs.

However, in 1835, the entire portuguese administrative system was redone, and the province model was abolished in favour of the district model, which was based on a major city, and the land which it influenced. This reform was very controversial, and people still haven’t quite gotten over it, even after 190 years.
For example, if you ask a modern portuguese where they are from, there’s a good chance that they’ll reply with either their city/ town or with the name of an old province.

To make things more complicated, the Constitution of 1976 contemplated another change to the administative system, based on the region model. No one knows exactly what this system entails though, as it’s application entails approval by national referendum of the borders of the regions. No referendums have ever been approved, except for one in 1998, in which the “NO” won.

However, obviously, a country can’t operate without local governments in a very efficient way, so, since 1998, some “soft reforms” have been tried.

During Durão Barroso’s government (2002-2004) the “Relvas Reform” (named after the politician Miguel Relvas) was implemented, based on Metropolitan Areas, Urban Areas and Intermunicipal Communities.

During José Socrates’ government (2005-2011) and Pedro Passos Coelho’s government (2011-2015), the previous Relvas Reform was abandoned, and the administrative system was again reformed through successive changes, leading to the current “5 regions” model, which includes Metropolitan Areas and Intermunicipal Communities as a kind of “band-aid local government”. These administrative bodies are unelected and made up by representatives from each municipality (which do have elected governments). On top of these you have the 5 regions, which are used as coordinating bodies for the MAs and ICs. One of the most important steps in this reform process was the “Relvas Law” in 2013 (named after that same guy, which by now was Minister of Parliamentary Affairs), which reduced the number of parishes in the country.

Since then, no large scale changes have been made, even though António Costa (2015-2024) said he was in favour not only of reforms to the administrative system, but also of “Regionalisation” (the name by which the previously mentioned referendum and everything that it entails is known in Portuguese politics). The current Prime-Minister Luís Montenegro (2024-?) has said this topic is not a priority of his government.

So now you have multiple administrative systems being used simultaneously: the district model (for elections and addresses), the 5 regions model (for band-aid local government), the NUTS model (used for statistics) and the provinces model (in people’s culture and mind).

As you can guess, all of this makes this a very complex, convoluted, and politically sensitive and divisive topic in the country, and it seems that Wikipedia hasn’t escaped the drama, with editorial conflicts galore. The article is now fully protected until the 3rd of January.