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Opposition in Portugal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Herminio Martins
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Extract

CONTRARY TO EXPECTATIONS, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SALAZAR FROM the political scene has not, in the short-run at least, led to a serious succession crisis in Portugal. A few weeks of hard but covert bargaining within the ruling circles culminated in the appointment by the President, Admiral Tomás of Dr Marcello Caetano as Prime Minister. Admiral Tomás was himself appointed by Salazar and chosen partly for his docility and innocuousness to replace the rebellious Craveiro Lopes in 1958; he has no power base of his own. Although in a fluid situation such as this his role has allowed him a greater latitude of choice than in normal circumstances, his decision probably reflected the balance of forces within the ruling circles. Caetano's background is typical of a whole generation of ‘counter-revolutionary’ monarchists, whose political formation matured within the matrix of the Portuguese Maurrassist movement, the integralismo Insitano. Somehow his monarchist allegiance, if not his authoritarian-corporatist convictions, waned as his career within the Estado Novo waxed. He was one of the young (in their twenties and thirties) integralista experts whose services were vital in Salazar's transformation of a mindless military dictatorship into a ‘respectable’ authoritarian regime.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1969 , pp. 250 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1969

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References

1 Martins, H. ‘Portugal’ in Woolf, S. J. (ed.), European Fascism, London, 1968, esp. pp. 302–12.Google Scholar

2 Merton, R., Social Theory and Social Structure, New York, 1957, p. 199.Google Scholar

3 See for instance the report in the Guardian of 18 December 1968 that more than 200 oppositionists, including the socialist leader M. Scares, urged Caetano to speed up liberalization, and asked for the lifting of press censorship, amnesty for political offenders and a revised electoral law; in exchange they pledged that they would grant his government ‘understanding and essential credit’.

4 Hirschman, A., Journeys towards Progress, New York, 1963.Google Scholar

5 Cf. The analysis of levels of political mobilization in Germani, G., Politica y sociedad en una epóca de transitión, Buenos Aires, 1962.Google Scholar

6 To follow Latin American taxonomy: cf. Stokes, W. ‘Violence as a Power Factor in Latin American Polities’, Western Political Quarterly, 09 1952, pp. 445–69.Google Scholar

7 It is odd that at about this time de Gaulle should have told Kennedy that the only alternative to Salazar was a communist revolution. Cf. Schlesinger, A., A. Thousand Days, p. 328.Google Scholar

8 The approach here utilized is that of Apter, D., The Politics of Modernization, Chicago, 1965 Google Scholar, and Anderson, C., Politics and Economic Change in Latin America, Princeton, 1967.Google Scholar

9 D. Apter, op. cit., for the concept of ‘political speculation’ though not for its application here.

10 This alternation falls outside the range of political time perspectives discussed by Mannheim, K., Ideology and Utopia, London, 1936.Google Scholar

11 Levi-Strauss, C., Anthropologie structurale, Paris, 1958.Google Scholar

12 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins describes these liberal circles just after the end of the war.

13 Cf. the description of a similar syndrome in Lichtheim, G., Marxism in Modern France, New York, 1967.Google Scholar

14 Popper, K. R. ‘Two Sources of Knowledge and Ignorance’ Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XLVI, 1960.Google Scholar

15 The complexities of the Catholic position are well brought out by the excellent typology of Vallier, I. ‘Religious Elites’ in Lipset, S. and Solari, A., (eds.), Elites in Latin America, New York, 1967.Google Scholar