Hélder Rosalino Demands Urgent Overhaul of Portugal's CReSAP in Scathing Public Administration Essay – streamlinefeed.co.ke

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Hélder Rosalino, former Secretary of State, demands urgent reform of Portugal's public recruitment body, CReSAP, citing political capture and systemic exploitation.
A leading architect of Portugal’s public sector recruitment framework has issued a blistering critique of the system he helped create, demanding immediate reform or the complete abolition of the institution. Hélder Rosalino, current administrator at the Banco de Portugal and former Secretary of State for Public Administration, delivered the assessment in a comprehensive essay published Friday, exposing deep structural flaws within the state machinery.
The critique centers on the Commission for Recruitment and Selection for Public Administration (CReSAP), established in 2012 to eliminate cronyism and ensure merit-based appointments for top government roles. Fourteen years later, Rosalino argues that the political class has systematically learned to bypass the entity, rendering its original mandate ineffective and compromising the delivery of essential state services.
When CReSAP was founded during the administration of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, it was heralded as a triumph of modernization. Prior to 2012, senior civil service appointments in Portugal were largely discretionary, often tied to political patronage rather than technical competence.
CReSAP introduced strict vetting protocols: mandatory public vacancy announcements, rigorous curricular evaluation, standardized interviews, and independent juries. It was designed to act as a firewall between raw political ambition and the execution of state policy. Rosalino, writing strictly in his personal capacity as a citizen, noted that the commission initially represented a crucial advancement for Portuguese governance, introducing transparency to a historically opaque system.
However, Rosalino explicitly stated that the creation of CReSAP should have been the beginning of a continuous learning process, not a definitive endpoint. “Nenhuma política pública é definitiva ou imune à necessidade de revisão,” (No public policy is definitive or immune to the need for revision), he wrote, emphasizing that institutional quality depends on adapting to practical failures.
The core of the current crisis lies in how successive governments have exploited legal loopholes to sidestep CReSAP’s rigorous vetting. The most prominent tactic is the extensive use of “substitution regimes” (regime de substituição).
Under Portuguese law, if a leadership position suddenly becomes vacant, the government can appoint an interim director without prior CReSAP approval to ensure the continuity of state functions. In practice, ministries have weaponized this provision, placing politically favored candidates in interim roles for months or even years. By the time a formal CReSAP competition is finally opened, the interim appointee has amassed specific on-the-job experience, giving them an insurmountable, manufactured advantage over outside candidates.
This exploitation fundamentally subverts the meritocratic process. Rosalino observed that rather than evolving the model to correct its weaknesses, the dominant concern of the political class has been to “circumvent the system, exploring its ambiguities, insufficiencies, and spaces for informal capture.”
The struggles of the Portuguese recruitment model offer stark lessons for developing democracies attempting to depoliticize their civil services. In Kenya, the Public Service Commission (PSC) frequently battles similar allegations of political interference, particularly when acting executives are appointed to permanent roles following contentious transitions.
Similarly, in Nigeria, the Federal Civil Service Commission faces ongoing scrutiny over the balance between federal character quotas and strict technical meritocracy. The fundamental challenge remains universal: how to compel elected politicians to cede hiring authority to independent bodies.
For the UK civil service, traditionally a bastion of political neutrality under the “Whitehall model,” recent tensions between government ministers and permanent secretaries highlight that the friction between political will and administrative independence is not confined to Southern Europe.
Rosalino’s essay does not merely outline the problem; it serves as a stark ultimatum to the current administration. The failure to revise the 2012 framework has allowed the system to stagnate, heavily penalizing highly qualified candidates who refuse to engage in political maneuvering.
The Banco de Portugal administrator asserts that the quality of public administration depends entirely on its top leaders, who are responsible for translating political priorities into concrete administrative execution and managing vast human and financial resources. When these leaders are selected through a corrupted process, state capacity degrades.
The mandate is clear: Portugal must either drastically overhaul CReSAP—closing the substitution regime loopholes and restoring independent authority—or abolish the commission entirely rather than maintain the illusion of meritocracy. The political response to this high-profile critique will serve as a crucial indicator of the nation’s commitment to genuine state reform.
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