Was the Portuguese Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar a Fascist?

Since his rise to power and a certain part of his reign coincided with the Fascist rule in Italy, and soon also the Nazi rule in Germany, as well as the reign of Francisco Franco in neighboring Spain (often also suspected of the same thing, albeit with some more justification), the perception of the Salazar’s …

Born in 1889 in a rural part of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar played a key role in shaping Portuguese politics and society in the 20th century, leaving a mark sufficient to be elected the greatest Portuguese in history by a majority decision in 2007. As a backward country placed on the edge of the European continent, whose former glory and greatness – which began to rapidly decrease after the loss of Brazil in 1822 – were maintained only by holding dominion over territorially several times bigger colonies in Africa, in the first half of the 20th century Portugal went through a turbulent period of several regime changes. The conflict between Monarchists and anti-clerical Republicans resulted in political instability, further increased by the country’s participation in World War I, which was followed by a balancing on the brink of a civil war. Such uncertainty was finally ended by a military coup d’etat in 1926, which abolished the rotten democracy and created the political context for the Salazar’s imminent rise to power.

Educated first in the seminary due to a growing interest in politics, in 1910, Salazar enrolled in law school, where he soon distinguished himself among Catholic circles as a conservative thinker and an expert in the field of economics and finance. After the mentioned military coup – by which the new government “inherited” a country in a difficult economic situation – he was therefore included first in the Ministry of Finance and then handed over control over the budgets of all ministries, with a veto right overall spending. Working to restore the dignity of Portugal and create such Portuguese as Portugal needed to become great again, and given the dependence of the new regime’s survival on financial consolidation, he soon surpassed the control of military circles and – along with President General Óscar Carmona – became the central national figure. On the 28th of June 1928, he finally gained the position of prime minister, which he then – combining it with various ministerial positions in certain periods – retained until the end of the 1960s.

Since his rise to power and a certain part of his reign coincided with the Fascist rule in Italy, and soon also the Nazi rule in Germany, as well as the reign of Francisco Franco in neighboring Spain (often also suspected of the same thing, albeit with some more justification), the perception of the Salazar’s regime is marked by the frequent labeling of it as Fascist. But while some of its features really were similar to that of the mentioned Fascist regimes, much of Salazar’s ruling skill shows a departure from these alleged role models. In this essay, we shall therefore show their similarities and differences while trying to explain how and why such a way of governing survived for such a long period of time in one Western European country, outliving even its creator for a few years.

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Assuming that the reader is familiar with the basic features of Fascism, without presenting them in more detail, we must first look at the real and possible points of contact of that system with the system present in Portugal from 1933 to 1974. As already mentioned, Salazar’s rise to power coincided with the period of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s rule and thus necessarily led to certain contacts and consequent influences on Portugal and its leader. However, it is necessary to distinguish between the real influences derived from Fascism itself and the common features of the two (or three) regimes that only seem to be originally Fascist, while in fact they have their roots in the same, non-Fascist source. Given the contemporary tendency to crude categorization – with Fascism, in particular, playing the role of a huge ideological box into which, regardless of their real nature and often incompatible differences, almost all ideologies and movements that deviate from the Left mainstream are crammed – emphasizing the fact that similar is not the same as equal is of the greatest importance. However, from the points of contact between Salazar’s regime and Fascism, it is necessary to single out two or three of the basic ones, while for the others usually mentioned, it will be explained why their similarity is actually only apparent or nonexistent at all.

The greatest concrete resemblance to Fascism Salazar’s Portugal achieved in the economic field, namely, as in Mussolini’s Italy, and with the same goal of overcoming – in Marxist terms – class struggle by setting goals common to both the owners of the means of production and the workers, a corporate system was introduced into the Portuguese economy. By embedding Corporatism, together with the right of the state to intervene in order to protect the moral integrity of its citizens and the state itself, into the new 1933 constitution, Salazar tried to – at least in theory – base Portuguese economy on the Catholic social teaching – competitiveness remained, but with the common interest of the nation as the fundamental criterion, which enabled the wider possibilities of the state intervention in certain fields of production. However, despite the creation of the Corporate Chamber as a representative body of all social classes, Portuguese Corporatism still served primarily as an extended arm of the state control over society, resulting in filling the key positions with the people the regime sought to reward or bind to itself, which was followed by corruption and over-reliance on the state, to some extent comparable to that still present in (post)socialist countries.

The second, more pronounced, point of contact with Fascist European regimes came during their greatest expansion in the period of World War II. Seeking – and ultimately succeeding, as attributed to him even by the political opponents – to keep Portugal out of the new global conflict, Salazar nevertheless established economic cooperation with Nazi Germany, primarily in the trade of tungsten, needed for the development of the German war industry, in return receiving large quantities of gold, often abducted from the victims of Nazi genocidal policies. However, at the same time, assistance was provided to the refugees from Nazi violence, including the Jews. But, given its crucial geostrategic position and despite its declared neutrality, Portugal suffered pressure for cooperation from other warring parties; despite the efforts to remove all foreign influence and the threat of German retaliation, Salazar eventually allowed the Allies to use the Portuguese Azores as military air bases, which played some role in the survival of his regime after 1945.
Finally, as in many other countries, including the neighboring Spain, already during the interwar period a movement with the aim of turning the country in a Fascist direction emerged in Portugal. After several years of activity, during which they gained the greatest popularity among students and junior officers, the National Unionists or Blue Shirts, gathered around Francisco Preto, were finally suppressed due to, according to Salazar, their inspiration with certain foreign models, exaltation of youth and cult of force through direct action and the principle of the superiority of state political power in the life of society, and the aspiration to organize the masses behind one leader. Although it should be borne in mind that a significant part of the motivation for stifling the movement was the removal of a potential threat to his own rule, in the quoted words, it is possible to read a direct condemnation of some of the main elements of the Fascist ideology.

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In order to elaborate in more detail the aforementioned aversion to Fascist ideology in Salazar’s political worldview, it is first necessary to define it. In short, Portugal at that time could be described as a traditional autocracy, and Salazar as a reactionary, relying on Catholic conservatism. Namely, realizing the state to which the Portuguese nation was brought by the political factionalism and fruitless party competition of the Liberal period (until 1926), Salazar began to perceive democracy, and for the most part the politics itself, as an obstacle, not a means of reaching solutions. Considering that the country, therefore, needed political detoxification, he reduced the party life to the existence of the União Nacional party, whose representatives occasionally met in the National Assembly, whose de facto only task was to maintain the status quo within which The New State (Estado Novo) could develop. At its core was Salazar’s paternalistic attitude toward the Portuguese as a people currently incapable of broader political participation, whose development, therefore, required the guidance of a well-meaning leader. However, although Salazar relied heavily on the aforementioned Catholic social doctrine, believing that the authority came from God and not from the social contract, it should be emphasized that the Catholic Church in Portugal never acquired the status it enjoyed in the neighboring Franco’s Spain. Finally, the main theoretical framework of the political system remained the constitution, written as a mixture of democratic and authoritarian elements.

But, although creating a sort of one-party state, unlike the Fascists in Italy and especially the Nazis in Germany, Salazar never sought to turn the only allowed party into the leading force of society. As already mentioned, the goal was not the political fanaticism of the masses and their gathering in the movement but quite the opposite. In the same context, it is therefore necessary to interpret the very absence of Salazar’s pronounced public appearance. Leading a life bordered by asceticism and imbued with daily work routines and never wearing a military or any other uniform, Salazar rarely gave public speeches and only occasionally accepted the honors which, with the lag of time, could be placed in the sphere of the cult of personality. As a result, in foreign political circles, Portugal was often perceived as a dictatorship without a dictator. In addition, unlike the Fascist regimes, based on the ideas of Futurism and Modernism, Salazar’s goal – despite the aforementioned tendency to transform the Portuguese – was never to create a new man in the Fascist, especially not in the Nazi sense of the term. Moreover, in order to maintain the mentality and the way of life he considered useful, Salazar tried to delay the processes of modernization of rural areas of the country, thus damaging them in the long run and accelerating their depopulation after opening the opportunity to go abroad, where emigrants actually became even more exposed to what the state sought to avoid.

Finally, despite his shared aversion to Communism and its perception as the greatest danger to civilization, Salazar’s attitude towards Fascism (or, more precisely, all totalitarianism) is clearly evidenced by one of his many speeches said in a similar tone: We must put aside the inclination to form what might be called a totalitarian state. The state, which in its laws, ethics, politics, and economy subordinates everything to national or racial interests, would appear to be an omnipotent being, the principle and an end in itself, to which all individual or collective action would be subject; it might even bring about an absolutism worse than that which preceded the Liberal regimes. […] Such a state would be essentially pagan, incompatible with the character of our Christian civilization, and leading sooner or later to revolutions like those that infected the older, historical systems of government and, who knows, to religious wars more terrible than those of the old.

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After the presentation of Salazar’s attitude towards Fascist regimes, it is necessary to finally answer the question of how such a system – although not Fascist, authoritarian, and undemocratic nevertheless – managed to survive for so long, especially if we keep in mind that it ruled over a Western European country and a NATO member. From the foreign policy perspective, the answer is, as expected, provided by the Cold War context – although Salazar’s regime had occasionally clashed with the US (especially during the Kennedy administration, insisting on leaving the African colonies as soon as possible) and other Western bloc countries, its geostrategic position on the very edge of the European continent made it an essential factor of defense in the event of a continental Soviet attack. As with many other undemocratic regimes, including the Communist Yugoslav one, Western powers were therefore willing to look through Salazar’s policies as long as they performed their function in the common defense mechanism.

However, much more interesting is the interpretation given in the above-mentioned biography of Salazar by Tom Gallagher about the causes of the internal political transfer of leadership over the country to one man over several decades. According to his interpretation, in the first half of the 20th century, Portugal was such an economically and socially disordered country that one of the only few consensuses that existed among its conflicting political circles was the willingness to leave the fixing of such a mess to someone else. In the person of António de Oliveira Salazar, such a statesman was found, and – although, besides periods of growth, it also suffered economic downturns even during his era – for a while, Portugal had a stable leadership and a secure political direction. However, after Salazar’s death, the same problem arose again, now further exacerbated by the years of (self-)imposed political passivity, within which the next equally capable and willing statesman failed to develop. After a decade of regime changes – including a Communist one – Portugal joined the European Economic Community in 1986, leaving the dictation of national policy to the supranational political bodies in Brussels.

The case described, therefore, encourages asking some questions: In the context of the evident weakening of interest in participating in democratic processes due to frustration with political scandals and falsehoods of the multi-party system in which both (or more) leading parties show little difference in concrete plans, caring only about their own interests, what is the future of modern national (and European) democratic systems? Will national political bodies, tired of internal conflicts and often unnecessarily ideologized and politicized, constantly repeating scenarios, end in handing over their sovereignty to external entities, or will in some of them appear statesmen who, like Salazar, will take matters into their own hands, with whether a long-term positive or negative result?

Saša Vuković
mag. hist.

 

Footnotes

[1] With 41.0% of the vote, Salazar was named the greatest Portuguese by viewers of the then-popular TV-show Os Grandes Portugueses, modeled on the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons (in which Sir Winston Churchill was named the ‘winner’) and broadcasted on the state television RTP. The next in line, Communist leader Álvaro Cunhal, got 19.1% of the vote. Most of the other “top ten” candidates were rulers from the time of the peak of Portuguese power and great researchers from the Age of Discovery. The main source of this and most other information presented in this article is Salazar’s recent biography by Scottish political scientist and historian Tom Gallagher, Salazar: Dictator That Refused to Die, published in 2020.

[1] Along with several smaller colonies scattered along the African and Asian coasts, the two most important and largest Portuguese colonial estates were located on the territory of the present-day states of Angola and Mozambique. Along with them, as one of the most prestigious, it is necessary to highlight Goa on the Indian subcontinent. Called The Ultramar, in Salazar’s time – and especially since the beginning of the decolonization pressures – these colonies were presented as an integral part of Portugal, or as its overseas provinces, which the motherland therefore cannot and must not give up, as it would lose its international significance. In addition, the idea of Lusotropicalism was developed. Of course, in addition to some that – like the mentioned Goa, which was taken over by Nehru’s India in 1961 – were lost during Salazar’s rule, other colonies finally gained independence during the 1970s, sparking a wave of hundreds of thousands White Portuguese settlers returning to the country already affected by the economic crisis.

[1] After a series of strokes and a temporary coma, Salazar was replaced by Marcello Caetano as the actual head of the state. In that period, however, the regime was already living its last years, and not even the replacement of The New State by The Social State under the motto of evolution as a part of continuity could save it from the fall of 24th of April 1974, less than four years after Salazar’s death. In the following months, an attempt was made to carry out a Communist revolution, and in 1975 the country again found itself on the brink of a possible civil war. Avoiding this, it then faced a series of difficulties inherent to the states in political transition, with multipartyism transformed into a struggle between a few only seemingly different parties, concerned primarily by their own interests.

[1] António Costa Pinto, The Blue Shirts – Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 112.

[1] Apart from the Papal encyclicals on social issues and the situation in Portugal itself, a significant impact on Salazar’s mentality also had the texts of the French thinker Charles Maurras.

[1] For example, in Portugal civil marriage remained valid, Church communities were taxed, and property nationalized in the 19th century – despite a sense of aversion to the Liberal authorities taking such and other actions during the period – was not returned. Reasons for the satisfaction of the Catholic circles, however, were sufficient throughout the existence of the regime, and the previous Catholic political activity was redirected to the charitable and educational spheres.

[1] Of course, this does not mean that there has been no governmental repression of the political opponents, either by sending them to the more distant positions or by the more direct action by the secret police (PVDE/PIDE), including imprisonment, torture and liquidation; the Portuguese Communists came under special attack. But, as mentioned, most of the potential opponents of the regime have been “removed” by their inclusion into the system, i. e., by giving them favorable economic and other positions.

[1] Although he delivered the quoted speech as early as 1934 – so before the manifestation of the full extent of the totalitarian state in Germany and even in the Soviet Union – Salazar maintained the presented attitude towards their regimes throughout all his life; Tom Gallagher, Salazar: Dictator That Refused to Die (London: Hurst & Company, 2020), 69.

 

This essay, here slightly modified, was originally published on the Croatian website Heretica .com on November 19, 2021. I would like to thank Mr. Matija Štahan, the editor of the mentioned site, for his kind permission to republish it.

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