Estado Novo (Portugal) - Regime

Regime

The Estado Novo was an authoritarian regime with an integralist orientation, which differed from fascist regimes by its lack of expansionism, lack of a charismatic leader, lack of party structure, and more moderate use of state violence. It incorporated, however, the principles for its military from Benito Mussolini's system in Italy. Salazar was a Catholic traditionalist who believed in the necessity of control over the forces of economic modernisation in order to defend the religious and rural values of the country, which he perceived as being threatened. One of the pillars of the regime was the PIDE, the secret police. Many political dissidents were imprisoned at the Tarrafal prison in the African archipelago of Cape Verde, on the capital island of Santiago, or in local jails. Strict state censorship was in place.

Executive authority was nominally vested in a president, elected by popular vote for a five-year term. The legislature was a unicameral National Assembly, elected every four years. An advisory body, the Corporative Chamber, nominally represented economic, social and cultural organizations. In practice, however, the system was completely dominated by Salazar. While opposition candidates theoretically could stand for office, in practice the system was so heavily rigged in favour of the official party, the National Union, that they had no realistic chance of winning.

The Estado Novo enforced nationalist and Roman Catholic values on the Portuguese population. The whole education system was focused toward the exaltation of the Portuguese nation and its five-century old overseas territories (the Ultramar). The motto of the regime was "Deus, Pátria e Familia" (meaning "God, Fatherland, and Family," and obviously intended as a counterpart to the French Revolution's "Liberté, égalité, fraternité"). After 1945, the main raison d'être of the regime became resistance to the wave of decolonization which swept Europe after the end of World War II.

The Estado Novo accepted the idea of corporatism as an economic model. Although Salazar refused to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1938, the Portuguese Communist Party was intensely persecuted. So were Anarchists, Liberals, Republicans, and anyone opposed to the regime. The only allowed party was the União Nacional (National Union), which encompassed a wide range of right-wing politics, passing through monarchism, corporatism, para-fascism, nationalism, and capitalism.

The Legião Nacional was a popular militia similar to the Italian Blackshirts. For young people, there was the Mocidade Portuguesa, an organization similar in organization (but not in ideology) to the Hitler Youth. These two organizations were heavily supported by the State and imposed a martial style of life.

Despite similarities in their political structures, and mutual distrust of communism, the Third Reich and Estado Novo had little time for each other. Portuguese authorities assisted Germany in secretly supporting nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. Both Salazar and the Portuguese public, however, felt they could not trust Adolf Hitler, especially as Germany began to dominate its neighbors in the years leading up to the Second World War. During the Second World War, Portugal remained neutral. It was bound by the 550-year old Treaty of Windsor, the world's oldest diplomatic alliance, to afford assistance to the United Kingdom. Portugal refused to declare war on the Axis powers, but granted the Allies access to establish military bases in the Azores. In 1942, Australian troops briefly occupied Portuguese Timor in advance of their occupation by the Japanese.

In 1958, incumbent President Craveiro Lopes was forced to resign. Naval Minister and staunch conservative Américo Thomaz ran in the 1958 elections as the official candidate. General Humberto Delgado was the opposition candidate. Delgado was credited with only around 25% of the votes with 52.6% in favor of Thomaz, despite the consensual opinion that Delgado had really won. Evidence later surfaced that the PIDE had stuffed the ballot boxes with votes for Thomaz. After the elections, Delgado was expelled from the Portuguese Military, and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy before going into exile, spending much of it in Brazil and later in Algeria. To keep opposition candidates from coming to power in 1959, the Government abolished direct election of presidents in favor of election by an electoral college.

On 23 January 1961, military officer and politician Henrique Galvão led the hijacking of Portuguese passenger ship Santa Maria en route from Curaçao to Havana, Cuba. The terrorist operation was successful as anti-regime propaganda but killed one officer (3rd Pilot Nascimento Costa) and wounded several others in the process of taking complete command over the ship. Galvão would later claim that his intentions were to sail to the Overseas Province of Angola to set up in Luanda a renegade Portuguese Government in opposition to Salazar. The journey of the hijacked Santa Maria was eventually cut short due to a troubled engine and problems with the 900 captives on the ship, and Galvão released the passengers in negotiation with Brazilian officials in exchange for political asylum in Brazil.

In 1962, the Academic Crisis occurred. The regime, fearing the growing popularity of both purely democratic and communist ideas among the students, carried out the boycott and closure of several student associations and organizations, including the important National Secretariat of Portuguese Students. Most members of this organization were opposition militants, among them many communists. The political activists who were anti-regime used to be investigated and persecuted by PIDE-DGS, the secret police, and according to the gravity of the offence, were usually sent to jail or transferred from one university to another in order to destabilize oppositionist networks and its hierarchical organization. The students, with strong support from the clandestine Portuguese Communist Party, responded with demonstrations which culminated on 24 March with a huge student demonstration in Lisbon, that was vigorously suppressed by the riot police. Marcelo Caetano, distinguished member of the regime and the incumbent rector of the University of Lisbon, resigned.

The reluctance of many young men to embrace the hardships of the Portuguese Colonial War resulted in hundreds of thousands of Portuguese citizens each year leaving to seek economic opportunities abroad in order to escape conscription. In over 15 years, nearly one million emigrated to France, another million to the United States, many hundreds of thousands to Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Venezuela, or Brazil. Political parties, such as the Socialist Party, persecuted at home, were established in exile. The only party which managed to continue (illegally) operating in Portugal during all the dictatorship was the Portuguese Communist Party.

In 1964, Delgado founded the Portuguese National Liberation Front in Rome, stating in public that the only way to end the Estado Novo would be by a military coup, while many others advocated a national uprising approach.

Delgado and his Brazilian secretary, Arajaryr Moreira de Campos, were murdered on 13 February 1965 in Spain after being lured into an ambush by PIDE.

According to some Portuguese conservative scholars like Jaime Nogueira Pinto and Rui Ramos, Salazar's early reforms and policies allowed political and financial stability and therefore social order and economic growth, after the politically unstable and financially chaotic years of the Portuguese First Republic (1910–1926). Other historians like far-left politician Fernando Rosas, point out that Salazar's policies from the 1930s to the 1950s, led to economic and social stagnation and rampant emigration, turning Portugal into one of the poorest countries in Europe, that was also thwarted by scoring lower on literacy than its peers of the Northern Hemisphere.

Salazar suffered a stroke in 1968. As it was thought that he did not have long to live, Thomaz replaced him with Marcelo Caetano, a reputed scholar of the University of Lisbon Law School, statesman and a distinguished member of the regime. Salazar was never informed of this decision, and reportedly died in 1970 still believing he was prime minister. Most of the people hoped Caetano would soften the edges of Salazar's authoritarian regime and modernize the already growing economy. Caetano moved on to foster economic growth and made important social improvements, such as the awarding of a monthly pension to rural workers who had never had the chance to pay social security. Some large scale investments were made at national level, such as the building of a major oil processing centre in Sines. The economy reacted very well at first, but into the 1970s some serious problems began to show, due in part to two-digit inflation (from 1970 and on) and to the effects of the 1973 oil crisis. However, the oil crisis of 1973 had a potentially beneficial effect to Portugal because the largely unexploited oil reserves that Portugal had in its overseas territories of Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe were being developed at a fast pace.

Although Caetano was fundamentally an authoritarian, he did make some efforts to open up the regime. Soon after taking power, he slightly increased freedom of speech and the press. These measures did not go nearly far enough, for a significant element of the population had no memory of the instability which preceded Salazar. However, even these meager reforms had to be wrung out of the hardliners in the regime—most notably Thomaz, who was not nearly as content to give Caetano the free rein that he gave Salazar.