"What I consider shameful is that we have reached the point that we have in 2019, when Opart was created in 2007, and with many [people] to blame,” Fonseca told members of parliament. “There is structural … disorganisation in an entity that should have been reorganised, and its artistic project re-founded."


The minister was speaking in a parliamentary hearing, at the request of the Communist Party, precisely to give explanations about Opart, the body that oversees the national opera house, the São Carlos National Theatre (TNSC), as well as the National Ballet Company (CNB) and the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra (OSP) , and which has been turned upside down by a strike and upheaval at board level.


In the hearing, Fonseca spoke of a "profound lack of coordination" in the institutions overseen by Opart, saying that the new board of directors that was appointed on Tuesday has all the skills to "reorganise" it, by negotiating a new internal regulation of its artistic structures and salary tables, and "launching procedures to do works" in the TNSC and the Teatro Camões, which is home to the CNB.


The new board, which is to take office on Friday, is to be chaired by André Moz Caldas, who until now was chief of staff of Portugal’s minister of finance, Mário Centeno. Its ordinary members are to be Anne Victorino d'Almeida, currently deputy director of the National Conservatory, and Alexandre Miguel Santos, who until now was a member of the energy regulator, the ERSE.


One of the reasons for the strike is the salary differentials between technical staff at the CNB and TNSC.