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Introduction

ON APRIL 25, 1974, scores of junior Portuguese Army officers staged a coup d'état that in a manner of hours toppled the authoritarian regime that had ruled their country for nearly half a century. The virtually bloodless coup was followed by what became known to the world as the Revolution of 1974 as Portugal's archaic and repressive governing system was swept away in a period of political and social turbulence. The young officers, members of the secret Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas--MFA), wished to end the wars their country had been fighting in its African colonies since the early 1960s. Their modest aim of changing Portugal's political leadership, however, let loose long pent-up social and political energies that soon turned into a veritable revolution and kept Portugal in the headlines of the world's newspapers for the next eighteen months. A nervous Western Europe looked on as Portugal's governing and financial elites fled the country or were exiled, as a variety of forces vied for dominance and the Stalinist Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português--PCP) seemed close to seizing power, as leading banks and businesses were nationalized, and as large estates were collectivized by landless peasants.

The revolution eventually played itself out. Many of its feared consequences, such as a communist takeover or a civil war, did not occur. Moreover, many of the actions, for example, nationalizations and collectivizations that were implemented during the revolution, had been reversed to a great extent by early 1993, and the serious damage done to the overall economy was gradually being repaired. The economy grew rapidly in the second half of the 1980s and continued to show respectablegrowth rates in the early 1990s. As another indication of improving economic health, Portugal's currency, the escudo, was strong enough to be placed in the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System in April 1992.

The revolution's legacy also had a positive side, however, and nearly two decades after the sequence of events that began in April 1974, some remarkable achievements could be seen. After centuries of isolation and backwardness, Portugal had become an fully integral part of Western Europe through its membership in the European Community (EC). In the first half of 1992, Portugal assumed the presidency of the EC and fulfilled the obligations of this office in a professional manner. Even more significant, perhaps, were the establishment and consolidation of a system of parliamentary democracy. After a troubled start, this democracy, watched a had given the country a strong and competent government able to bring about peaceful change.

Portugal has a glorious past. It is the oldest European nation-state, having attained its present extent by about 1200, centuries before neighboring Spain or France became unified states. In the early decades of the fourteenth century, Portugal began a period of exploration that within a hundred years gave it an empire that literally spanned the globe.

The wealth the empire brought mainland Portugal had woeful long-term consequences, however. The country's leaders turned away from Europe and its political and technological advances. Portugal's economy battened on the colonies, rather than developing through competition with other European countries. Because Portugal was too small a country to defend its extensive possessions, much of the empire was soon lost. Even into the second half of the twentieth century, however, enough of the empire remained that Portugal continued to exist somewhat outside the world economy. The colonies provided the mainland with foodstuffs and raw materials and were a captive market for low- quality Portuguese manufactures.

A greater threat to the long-term well-being of the Portuguese people than the country's backward economy, however, was perhaps the state of its social and political institutions. Long ruled by a tiny oligarchy supported by the military and a rigid authoritarian church untouched by the Reformation, the mass of the Portuguese population was passive and ignorant. The nation's wealth was reserved for a few, most of whom lived in Lisbon. The small middle class was docile and without experience in government.

The European Enlightenment had a powerful exponent of its ideas in the Marquês de Pombal, who attempted a thorough-going reform of Portugal in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. His reforms were paternalistically enforced from above, however, and after his fall from power were soon reversed. The early nineteenth century saw the fashioning of a constitutional monarchy, but parliamentary politics was soon a cynical rotation of public office among members of a small elite in Lisbon. Most of the population labored neglected and illiterate in the countryside.

A more serious attempt at parliamentary democracy occurred in 1910 when a republic, the so-called First Republic, was proclaimed. Suffrage was restricted, however, and most Portuguese were without the right to vote. The small urban middle class that was active in the republic's affairs formed into numerous personalistic parties that soon showed themselves incapable of governing. The dozens of inefficient governments in the republic's brief life of sixteen years did not win many Portuguese to the cause of parliamentary democracy. Anticlerical laws also alienated many, as did frequent instances of corruption.

When a coup by junior military officers in 1926 put an end to the First Republic, few regretted the death of Portuguese parliamentary democracy. But no member of the military was able to effectively direct Portugal's affairs, and a young economist, António de Oliveira Salazar, gradually came to govern the country. First as minister of finance, then as prime minister beginning in 1932, he brought a new order and stability to the country. In 1933 an authoritarian, traditionalist, statist system, the New State (Estado Novo), was inaugurated to protect Portugal from both Western liberal democracy and communism.

Salazar directed this regime until he was incapacitated by an accident in 1968. He was succeeded by Marcello José das Neves Caetano, who governed until April 1974. The governing system they ruled attempted to shield Portugal from such modern problems as labor strife, rapacious wealth, and departure from traditional concepts of personal morality. Salazar outlawed labor unions, replacing them with organizations that were supposed to bring labor and capital together in such a way that class conflict was avoided. He banned all political parties except one official party, rigorously controlled the press, and carefully supervised the country's few schools. Mindful of the social changes a modernizing economy engenders, he even attempted to arrest commercial change and stop the expansion of the country's small industrial sector. An extensive system of informants and an efficient secret police easily countered the regime's few opponents.

Portugal's authoritarian regime lasted for nearly half a century. It loosened its strictures on the economy somewhat after 1959, and the Portuguese economy grew at a very rapid rate until 1974. It permitted a few elections in which dissenting voices were heard but to no lasting effect. The press was allowed a slightly greater degree of freedom in the early 1970s, but otherwise the regime remained firmly in control.

The sudden collapse of the regime in April 1974 surprised everyone. Also unexpected were the engineers of its collapse, young officers who served in the military, long the regime's chief support. These officers were brought to their extreme action by the regime's stubborn determination to retain Portugal's African colonies. Having served on the front lines and seen the human costs of the wars firsthand, the officers knew that defeating the strong rebel movements in these colonies was beyond Portugal's power. They staged the April coup to stop further futile bloodshed. Their simple coup became a revolution.

The sudden and unexpected collapse of the regime created a political vacuum. Decades of political repression had left the Portuguese people with no practical experience of governing themselves. The widespread hatred of the regime barred the government's major figures from any active role in politics. A few younger politicians active within the regime were seen as sufficiently untainted to continue to be involved in public affairs. Their experience allowed them to assume leadership positions in several parties located on the moderate right of the political spectrum. Francisco Sá Carneiro took control of the Popular Democratic Party (Partido PopularDemocrático--PPD), and Diogo Freitas do Amaral, a law professor, came to head the Party of the Social Democratic Center (Partido do Centro Democrático Social--CDS). Mário Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares, who had long opposed the regime and had endured imprisonment and exile because of his open resistance, returned to Portugal within days of the coup to lead the newly reestablished Socialist Party (Partido Socialista--PS). Communists had been active underground for decades under the leadership of the Stalinist Álvaro Cunhal, who directed the PCP from Eastern Europe. Like Soares, Cunhal also returned to Portugal immediately after the coup andplunged into the turbulent politics that filled the capital's streets and squares. Because the PCP alone among political parties had a sizeable organized infrastructure in place, it occupied a political space greater than its actual strength.

Political power was by no means limited to these parties, which in the first months of the revolution had marginal roles, but was held by a broad variety of groups. Numerous splinter groups to the left of the PCP were soon active and made themselves known through street demonstrations. The PCP- controlled labor union Intersindical emerged from its semi- underground position and worked alongside the often independent Workers' Committees, which quickly began taking control of numerous factories and businesses. The MFA, with its select military force, the Continental Operations Command (Comando Operacional do Continente--COPCON), wielded much power, as well. The most visible politician of the first months of the revolution was General António de Spínola, who became the president of the country's interim government.

Given this array of forces, there was no one center of power. Groups formed temporary alliances, giant street rallies attempted to influence the direction of politics, the PCP placed its people in many key positions in the country's public institutions, and political parties to the right of the PCP attempted to prevent a communist takeover. Given its nature as an organized and disciplined force, the military was the single most important element during the revolution, although most officers were not radicals.

A series of provisional governments was formed that with time became increasingly leftist and dominated by radical military officers. An attempted rightist coup by Spínola in March 1975 caused a leftist countermovement, a wave of nationalizations of banks and other businesses, and the seizure of many large farms in southern Portugal. Attempts to bring the revolution to the north backfired, and that region's smallholders offered the first successful resistance to the revolutionary left's program to turn Portugal into a socialist state.

Another indication that the country as a whole did not wish a revolutionary government was the April 1975 election of the Constituent Assembly, in which parties to the right of the PCP had an overwhelming majority. The assembly had no legislative powers but had as its sole purpose the drafting of a constitution for a democratic government. It began this work against the backdrop of an increasingly radical revolution.

During the summer of 1975, splits appeared within the MFA itself. Moderate elements favoring a political program akin to Scandinavian social democracy gained the upper hand in the organization, deposed the most radical of all the provisional governments in September, and put in place the last of these six governments, one destined to last until the first constitutional government came into existence in July 1976. An attempted coup in November 1975 by extremists was put down by a counterattack led by moderates. The arrest of several hundred radical officers and the dissolution of COPCON ended the radical stage of the Revolution of 1974.

The military remained active in politics, however. Although the African wars ended when the colonies were granted independence in 1975, elements of the military were determined to defend the accomplishments of the revolution. The MFA arranged with the drafters of the constitution that the military would retain guardian rights over the new democracy, ensuring that it remained true to "the spirit of the revolution." The constitution of 1976 provided for a strong president who, with the help of a military-dominated Council of the Revolution, could veto any legislation that reversed such revolutionary actions as the extensive nationalizations of 1975. General António dos Santos Ramalho Eanes, the hero of the November 1975 countercoup, was elected the new democracy's first president in 1976. An austere man of unquestioned integrity, Eanes could be trusted to preserve the revolution's gains.

The first regular parliamentary elections were held in April 1976. The winner was the PS with 35 percent of the vote, far ahead of its competitors, but not enough for an absolute majority in the new unicameral parliament, the Assembly of the Republic. With its leader Soares as prime minister, the PS formed a minority government that governed for eighteen months. When it fell because of a motion of censure, the PS formed a governing coalition with the Christian democrat CDS that lasted another year. Enormous social and economic problems, including the return of 600,000 Portuguese settlers and demobilized soldiers from Africa, combined with factionalism and personal rivalries, were the undoing of these first two constitutional governments. Eanes then appointed a series of nonpartisan caretaker governments composed of experts and technocrats in the hope that they could better deal with pressing issues and govern until the next parliamentary elections mandated by the constitution for 1980.

Each of the three caretaker governments failed, and Eanes was forced to call for early elections in December 1979, even though parliamentary elections would still have to be held the following year. The Democratic Alliance (Aliança Democrática--AD), a coalition of the PPD--now called the Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata--PSD)--the CDS, and several smaller groups, won the election, but without a majority. the coalition formed a government with the forceful and charismatic PSD leader Sá Carneiro as prime minister. The AD won the October 1980 election, as well, and governed Portugal until 1983. New elections were called that year because the AD, without the leadership of Sá Carneiro, who had died in a December 1980 plane crash, had disintegrated, and no effective government could be formed.

During its time in power, however, the AD coalition had effected some far-reaching constitutional amendments that strengthened the system of parliamentary government. With the support of the PS, which gave the AD the required two-thirds majorities, constitutional amendments were passed in 1982 that weakened the power of the president and strengthened both the prime minister and the legislature. The presidency remained an essential governing institution, but the balance of political power had shifted to favor the cabinet and the legislature, as in most other Western democracies. A further amendment ended the military's guardianship over the new democracy. The amendment eliminated the Council of the Revolution, through which the military had frequently vetoed legislation, and replaced it with the Constitutional Court that functioned in the same manner as similar bodies in other parliamentary democracies. President Eanes, easily reelected in late 1980 for a secondfive-year term, signed the amendments into law, although he opposed them because they reduced the president's powers and returned the military to the barracks.

After the 1983 parliamentary elections, the PS formed a coalition government with the PSD. The huge losses stemming from the many firms nationalized during the revolution, the enormous expansion of the numbers of those employed by the state, the effects of the two oil-price hikes of the 1970s, and the flight of much entrepreneurial talent from Portugal had left the economy in a desperate state. Inflation was as high as 30 percent a year, and many workers had real earnings lower than those of the early 1970s. In addition, many companies were in such financial straits that wages were often months in arrears.

No government had been able to deal with these economic problems in a meaningful way. The AD and PS combination that had effected some vital constitutional changes was not able to amend the constitutional provisions that declared the revolution's nationalizations irreversible. In addition, the country's labor laws in essence guaranteed employees jobs for life and made rational deployment of labor nearly impossible. Given these circumstances, the PS-PSD government had to make some very difficult decisions and became unpopular as the economy worsened. The alliance, troubled also by personal rivalries, collapsed in early 1985.

The PSD began its political ascent in the 1985 parliamentary elections. As the senior partner in the coalition and with its leader Soares as prime minister, the PS was blamed by voters for the failures of the fallen government; it polled only 20.8 percent of the vote, compared with 36.3 percent in 1983. Despite its participation in the government, the PSD won more votes than ever before, 29.9 percent, and for the first time was the party with the most parliamentary seats. Much of the PSD's success was due to its new leader, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who waged a clever campaign and presented his party in a new light. His personal qualities of austerity, probity, and competence appealed to many Portuguese, who saw in him, an economist and former minister of finance, someone who could deal with the country's serious problems.

INTRODUCTION CONTINUED...

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