Portugal: Birth of a Democracy

157 Pages·1978·19.566 MB·English

by  Robert Harvey (auth.)

PORTUGAL: BIRTH OF A DEMOCRACY
PORTUGAL:
BIRTH OF A DEMOCRACY
Robert Harvey
@Robert Harvey 1978
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 978-0-333-23303-0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1978 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Harvey, Robert
Portugal, birth of a democracy
1. Portugal-Politics and government- 1974-
2. Portugal - History- 1974-
I. Title
946.9'042 DP68o
ISBN 978-0-333-23871-4 ISBN 978-1-349-15987-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15987-1
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FOR JANE
Contents
List of abbreviations viii
Laboratory of revolution
2 The angry young captains 10
3 Summer's president, autumn's victim 21
4 The revolution devours its children 28
5 The civilians struggle through 37
6 Pandora's box 51
7 People power 59
8 The north raises the standard 64
9 All eyes on Portugal 72
10 Anarchy 78
II The professional soldier 93
12 The delivery IOI
13 A revolution's hangover ug
14 Colonels in the wings 136
Index 147
List of abbreviations
CAP Confederation of Portuguese Farmers
CDS Centre Democratic Party
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CIP Confederation of Portuguese Industry
COPCON Operational Command for the Continent
DGS Directorate-General of Security
EEC European Economic Community
ELP Portuguese Liberation Army
FLA Front for the Liberation of the Azores
FMU United Military Front
FNAT National Federation for Joy at Work
FNLA National Front for the Liberation of Angola
FRELIMO Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
FUMO United Democratic Front of Mozambique
IARN Institute for Aid to National Refugees
IMF International Monetary Fund
LUAR League of United Revolutionary Action
MDLP Democratic Movement for the Liberation of
Portugal
MDP Portuguese Democratic Movement
MFA Armed Forces Movement
MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
MRPP Movement for the Reorganisation of the Portuguese
Proletariat
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development
PIDE International Police for the Defence of the State
PPD (later PSD) Popular Democratic Party (later Social Democratic
Party)
PRP{BR People's Revolutionary Party{ Revolutionary
Brigades
RALI-I First Light Artillery Regiment
suv
Soldiers United Will Win
UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola
Laboratory of Revolution
1
Portugal is a peanut of a country. Its total land area of 34,000 square
miles is less than that of Scotland. Its population at the last census was
just over 8 million people-less than the population of greater London.
Its capital of Lisbon has only 8oo,ooo people, less than the population of
a medium-sized English city. Portugal's other major city, Oporto, has
only 30o,ooo people. For fifty years of dictatorship it was a backward,
neglected comer of Europe, its economic expansion, even the ferocity
of its authoritarian ruler, overshadowed by those ofits larger neighbour,
Spain. Its economic and social structures were almost feudal. Most of
Portugal's people lived in and around villages ofless than 100 people,
and only one-third lived in towns of over 5000 people.
Portugal's industrial expansion had been hamstrung by the tight
monetarist policies of its dictator, Antonio Salazar, and by the stagna
tion of enterprise under the small monopolist group that dominated the
country's banking and industry. Most of Portugal's industry, trade and
farming in the north was small-scale-more than half of the labour
force was employed in units often people or less. Most Portuguese firms
were traditional and inefficient, competitive only because of the low
cost of wages. Except in certain developed areas, near Lisbon and in
the Algarve in the south, the country's tourist potential had hardly
been touched. More than any other country in Western Europe,
Portugal's was still a peasant economy. The middle class that grew up
in Spain after the 196os hardly materialised in Portugal. What middle
class there was came largely from the professions and service industries
connected with the government. Salazar treated Portugal like an only
daughter, keeping her away from the outside world so that she would
lead a maidenly existence and look after him in his old age.
But some maiden daughters go wild after the old man dies. The
extrovert abandon of Portugal's revolutionary experience after April
1974, and the country's flirtations with all types of undesirables,
shocked Europe and the world into suddenly sitting up and taking an
interest in .what was happening in Portugal. Portugal's novel experi
ments in government and society yielded enough material to absorb a
generation of political and social historians.
In 1974, the country was taken over by a left-wing group of army
captains, similar in some respects to the cliques that seized power in
Egypt in 1952 and in Libya in 1969. The captains tested out orthodox
2 PORTUGAL: BIRTH OF A DEMOCRACY
Soviet-style communism, and idealistic 'popular power' style assem
blies. They tried government by committee, by officers' assembly, by
triumvirate. They attempted to transform an army from an organisa
tion based on discipline to one based on ideology-with disastrous
results. They experimented with workers' control of industry, with mass
expropriation ofland, with nationalisation. Two coups, one failed coup,
and a successful counter-coup, took place in rapid succession over the
space of two years. A prime minister was driven from office by an
overwhelming popular revolt against him, and his successor went on
strike a~ pri'lle minister when a major confrontation with the unions
threatened to drive him from office. Every major political freedom-of
expression, of the press, of the right to strike, of assembly, of the judi
ciary-was debated, discussed, wrangled over and eventually estab
lished in the course of the Portuguese revolution. What started as a
coup became a revolution which was stopped by a reaction before it
became an anarchy. Out of the tumult a democracy was born.
Portugal became a centre of attention in Europe and the world not
just because of the freakish quality of its democratic experiment, but
because the people won in the end. The attempt to replace a right-wing
dictatorship with a left-wing one failed because the great mass of
Portuguese rebelled against the idea of exchanging one master for
another. The armed forces, which had propped up Salazar's dictator
ship for so long, replaced his successor in 1974 as if they had been in no
way responsible for the regime's durability. They called themselves
liberators on 25 April 1974, but almost immediately assigned to them
selves the task of deciding what was best for the people they had
liberated. But the Portuguese rose up behind a group of tenacious
civilian politicians and together they proved stronger than the political
minority running the army, which eventually yielded power in surprise
to a group of professional officers prepared to hand over power to the
civilians.
How long the people's representatives will stay in control still
remains to be seen. The soldiers, although smarting from their rebuff
from the people, have not lost their interest in politics yet. But Portugal
was proof at least that political rule cannot be wholly imposed from
above. That silent minorities, when prodded too far, can become vocal.
That democracy is still an ideal capable of stirring as much passion in
the hearts of the masses as the economic self-interest usually cited by
extremist ideologies as the motive force of political action. The Sala
zarist ethic had been that dictatorship survives if people are just
sufficiently provided for to stay quiet, and if the social structure is kept
unchanged. And the far-left ethic on the other hand was that demo
cracy and freedom are bourgeois ideals in which the masses are
uninterested, provided they get equal economic justice. Both were
LABORATORY OF REVOLUTION 3
shown by the Portuguese people between 1974 and 1976 to have
presumptuously false foundations.
It was a surprise to both extremes that democracy should assert
itself so forcibly in a country without a large middle class. The Marxist
view, that bourgeois dictatorship is the natural historical precursor of
proletarian revolution, has rarely been confirmed. Most revolutions, in
those few countries such as Russia, China and Cuba where they have
not been imposed by force of foreign arms, have generally taken place
in underdeveloped societies. Only in such societies has it been possible
for a small minority to impose itself without facing the hostility of a
large middle class. Portugal, then, might seem a revolutionary walk
over: through the early months of 1975 when political parties and
conservative generals alike seemed unable to stop the drive of a deter
mined revolutionary minority towards the far left, the situation looked
depressingly like that in Russia in 1917, when confusion on the right
and in the centre allowed what was originally a tiny party, the
Bolsheviks, to seize control of the main organs of power.
But the revolutionaries in Portugal ran up against the brick wall first
of the Church's influence in northern Portugal and second of the
system of landholdings there. The majority of northerners, who them
selves comprise 6o per cent of the people of Portugal, are smallholders
and their families, clinging ferociously to tiny plots of land which offer
them an adequate-if hardly consumer-oriented-standard of living.
The smallholders felt themselves threatened by the onward march of
land seizures by the far left in the south of the country, and the peasants
rallied in the summer of 1975 to tum back the revolutionary tide. Most
of the northern farmers were no better off than Portugal's urban labour
force, but their land ownership gave them, in Marxist terminology, a
bourgeois mentality. Underdeveloped as Portugal was, it had a very
large class of people who would inevitably feel themselves threatened by
a revolutionary seizure of power. Portugal's old right-wing dictators
were shocked to find revolutionaries quietly subverting their most
reliable and stalwart conservative prop, the army, in the early 1970s;
but after 1974 the country's revolutionaries were transfixed to discover
that the impoverished Portuguese people were anything but revolution
ary, and capable even of fighting against revolution.
Nor were the Portuguese fighting just out of economic self-interest.
When Portugal's electorate first went to the polls in April 1975, 38 per
cent of them supported the Socialist party and 26 per cent the Popular
Democratic party, both of which were then, in different degrees,
preaching socialism. In the general elections held in April 1976, and in
the local elections the following December, they voted for the same
parties in only slightly lesser numbers, although the Socialists had shown
themselves unsympathetic to many of the economic interests of those