Antonio de Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar (28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese dictator, academic, and economist who served as President of the Council of Ministers of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. Having come to power under the Ditadura Nacional ("National Dictatorship"), he reframed the regime as the corporatist Estado Novo ("New State"), with himself as dictator. The regime he created lasted until 1974, making it one of the longest-lived authoritarian regimes in modern Europe.
A political economy professor at the University of Coimbra, Salazar entered public life as finance minister with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the 28 May 1926 coup d'état. The military of 1926 saw themselves as the guardians of the nation in the wake of the instability and perceived failure of the First Republic, but they had no idea how to address the critical challenges of the hour. Armed with broad powers to restructure state finances, within one year Salazar balanced the budget and stabilised Portugal's currency, producing the first of many budgetary surpluses. Amidst a period when authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Europe were merging political power with militarism, with leaders adopting military titles and uniforms, Salazar enforced the strict separation of the armed forces from politics. Salazar's aim was the de-politicisation of society, rather than the mobilisation of the populace.
Opposed to communism, socialism, syndicalism and liberalism, Salazar's rule was conservative, corporatist and Portuguese nationalist in nature; it was also opposed to capitalism, which it regarded as plutocratic in nature. Salazar distanced himself from Nazism and fascism, which he described as a "pagan Caesarism" that did not recognise legal, religious or moral limits. Throughout his life Salazar avoided populist rhetoric. He was generally opposed to the concept of political parties when, in 1930, he created the National Union. Salazar described and promoted the Union as a "non-party", and proclaimed that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party. He promoted Catholicism but argued that the role of the Church was social, not political, and negotiated the Concordat of 1940 that kept the church at arm's length. One of the mottos of the Salazar regime was Deus, Pátria e Família ("God, Fatherland and Family"), although Catholicism was never the state religion. The doctrine of pluricontinentalism was the basis of Salazar's territorial policy, a conception of the Portuguese Empire as a unified state that spanned multiple continents. From the 1950s onward, during the later phase of Salazar’s rule, Portugal recorded sustained growth in GDP per capita and a decline in illiteracy, though by the end of the Estado Navo in 1974, Portugal still had the lowest per capita income and the lowest literacy rate in Western Europe.
Salazar supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and played a key role in keeping Portugal neutral during World War II while still providing aid and assistance to the Allies. Despite being a dictatorship, Portugal under his rule took part in the founding of some international organisations. The country was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, joined the European Payments Union in 1950, and was one of the founding members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960; it was also a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961. Under his rule, Portugal also became a member of the United Nations in 1955 and joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1961. The Portuguese Colonial War broke out in 1961, leading to the independence of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique in 1974. The annexation of Goa by India also occurred in 1961.
With the Estado Novo enabling him to exercise vast political powers, Salazar used censorship and the PIDE secret police to quell opposition. One opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, who openly challenged Salazar's regime in the 1958 presidential election, was first exiled and became involved in several violent actions aimed at overthrowing the regime, including the Portuguese cruise liner Santa Maria hijacking and the Beja Revolt ultimately leading to his assassination by the PIDE, in 1965. After Salazar fell into a coma in 1968, President Américo Tomás dismissed him from the position of President of the Council of Ministers. The Estado Novo collapsed during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, four years after Salazar's death. In recent decades, "new sources and methods are being employed by Portuguese historians in an attempt to come to grips with the dictatorship, which lasted forty-eight years."
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