BY TOM GALLAGHER
Portugal is already a year into lavish anniversary commemorations of a revolution that occurred unexpectedly in 1974-75. Perhaps its culminating point was in March 1975 when sweeping nationalisations of industry and banking, as well as land, occurred. It was the most radical advance of state power into the private economic realm seen anywhere in Western Europe since 1945 and, arguably, the Portuguese economy has yet to recover from the deformations that it suffered.
Subsequently, a little-loved democratic successor regime, largely under left-wing control and with few solid achievements to its credit, has been in charge. It can perhaps be forgiven for wishing to wrap itself in revolutionary tinsel to compensate for its drab image. But most Portuguese have hung back. They see it as the official Portugal of career politicians and their supporters in the heavily subsidised media, the universities, and state-dominated corporations having one long party.
Their recent voting habits suggest that they are not impressed by the relentless throb of ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric that emanates from the Lisbon left-wing establishment. An undemocratic regime, deep into atrophy, was removed by junior officers in 1974. But it entailed little risk for them. Marcello Caetano, a mild-mannered law professor, was one of Europe’s unlikeliest dictators. His regime lacked any discernible ideology and he had been desperately wanting to quit.
The political vacuum was filled by ideologues of the far-left, misfits, adventurers and a few ruffians. They included the theatrical junior officer Otelo de Carvalho who commanded the gendarmerie of the revolutionary regime until it collapsed after 18 chaotic months.
What really should have been marked – or even celebrated – this year was the tenacious efforts of ordinary citizens to foil the implantation of a new and far more disruptive authoritarian order. They quickly saw through the histrionics of Otelo, but his death in 2021 revealed that he remained a convenient icon for those attached to revolutionary kitsch. They included António Costa, currently the number two figure in the European Union as president of the European Council.
He was Portugal’s prime minister when he delivered his tribute to Otelo. His predecessor as prime minister and fellow socialist party leader, António Guterres, helped secure an amnesty for the rogue major in 1994.
This was after Otelo had been condemned to fifteen years in prison in 1985 for leading a left-wing terror group, FP-25, which was responsible for the violent deaths of twenty people.
As head of the United Nations since 2017, Guterres has been better known as a tireless advocate for the creation of a new global technocratic order run along firmly post-national lines. He is a poor salesman both for Net Zero and for a Middle East where Israel is cut down to size. He steps down from the UN this year just as Portugal’s presidency becomes vacant, but his progressive outlook marks him as unelectable in the unlikely event he becomes a contender.
The national conservative Chega party became the main opposition party in the March general election, having had only a single seat when it was launched in 2019. Led by an articulate populist, André Ventura, it is on the pragmatic wing of Europe’s New Right, as its supportive stance towards Ukraine’s fight for survival indicates. Its strongholds are in the former left-wing bastions around Lisbon and further south. It exhibits no nostalgia for the austere and autocratic rule of Dr António Salazar that lasted from 1932 to 1968.
The appeal of Chega (meaning ‘Enough’ in Portuguese) derives from its uninhibited assault on a nepotist elite that has been regularly found out, trafficking in favours with money from the EU meant to enable Portugal to catch up with richer members.
What has particularly alarmed the normally phlegmatic Portuguese is that recent governments have used EU funding to try to promote a low-wage economy by importing poorly-skilled migrants, mainly from South Asia. No less than 1.2 million have arrived since 2020 and public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the pace of demographic change in a country with less than ten million people.
Back in 1975, it was property seizures masterminded by communist party allies of the revolutionary captains which lit the flame of a citizens’ revolt. Owners of middle-sized farms in the fertile Ribatejo region that were facing expropriation shouted ‘Enough’. Farmers, anti-Marxist leftists, the Catholic church and remnants of the old regime closed ranks and chased the communists out of much of Portugal north of Lisbon, leaving the revolutionary officers at a loss about how to respond. Among a supposedly cowed population, the hunger was strong for free expression, equal treatment of individuals, and a rational approach to problem-solving, and many were prepared to fight and die for these rights.
In April 1975, the Portuguese people got the right to speak for themselves when elections were held for a constituent assembly. Intended by the left to be a toothless body, the turnout was a massive 91.2 per cent (with the communists and their allies receiving a paltry 16 per cent).
The Portuguese, who usually prove themselves ready to be well-integrated citizens in the countries to which they emigrate, now clearly wished to enjoy the fruits of developed citizenship in their own local environment. Many were unconvinced that the military overlords could improve on the record of the old order as ruling paternalists. A critical mass of them were prepared to tenaciously resist idealists and ideologues who wished to accomplish a new voyage of discovery in the realm of ‘popular power’ shaped by ‘progressive’ activists. Portugal’s presence on the western littoral of Europe meant its people had more chance to have a real say in controlling their own destiny than if they had been in Central Asia or West Africa.
In other words, they emphatically chose to be Western, that is to belong to a country others would be happy to emigrate to rather than flee from. Of course, it took courage to affirm this preference, and many would display this courage in the fateful year of 1975.
It was unfortunate for the Lisbon radical zealots of those days that the elements in West European politics and society that could have given the process more depth and staying power were still a generation or two from maturing. Aggressive secularism, radical feminism, and the rise of a consumer capitalist culture sympathetic to left-wing symbols and assumptions, still had to make an appearance. The mass media in Western Europe had not shifted heavily to the left and indeed played a pivotal role in alerting the world to the new authoritarian peril that Portugal faced. Occupational groups belonging to the working class also proved fickle in their commitment to radical change. With critical race theory, queer theory, and post-colonial theory still to be invented, there was no favourable ** woke** culture to enable durable revolutionary seeds to be planted in Portugal.
The early brush with revolutionary experimentation during the Cold War years was undeniably damaging for Portugal. Ironically, Lisbon remains one of Europe’s most un-woke capitals with numerous monuments to the long imperial past facing no pressure to be removed or rebranded. Arguably, the revolutionary misadventure of the 1970s may have done the Portuguese a long-term service by building resistance to renewed radical excesses of the kind that have been convulsing the bigger European states.
Tom Gallagher is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Bradford, England. Tom’s newly released book can be acquired here: Portugal and the West: From British Ultimatum to Utopian Revolt, 1890-1975 (Published by Scotview Publications. ISBN 978-0993465451)