A Nation Adrift: 51 Years after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution

It has been 51 years since revolution swept through the streets of Lisbon. On 25 April 1974, an insurrection of disgruntled, low-tier army officers toppled the national-conservative Estado Novo, ending a regime that had presided over the nation’s fortunes for four decades. Hailed as a triumph of democracy and much mythologised since, the revolution promised liberty and prosperity to western Europe’s poorest nation. Instead, it robbed Portugal of its self-respect, independence, and pride, plunging a nation used to punching above well its weight into a half-century of drift, despondency, and stagnation.

Since its inception, the new regime’s propaganda machine has been hard at work, painstakingly painting the Salazar era as a neo-inquisitorial dark age of censorship, political repression, enforced ruralism, poverty, war, and mass emigration. Although it is true that no government is perfect—and Salazar was by no means a believer in liberal democracy—this depiction should nevertheless be dismissed as nonsense by the mature observer. Instead, Salazar’s Portugal, lasting from 1932 to 1968, was a largely benign, paternalistic dictatorship that achieved the miracle of stabilising a country that had lived in a state of uninterrupted mayhem since Napoleon’s invasions in the early 19th century. While he certainly endorsed heavy handed measures of political control, Salazar never once—in 36 years as Prime Minister—ordered the death of an enemy or critic; the total ‘victims’ of his regime number in the low dozens, almost all of whom died of natural causes while in prison at an average rate of about one per year. Given the European context of the time, this is hardly an appalling record.

A scholar-statesman—perhaps the closest 20th century Europe had to the Platonic ideal of a philosopher-king—Salazar steered Portugal through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War with a steady hand and immense strategic skill. His Estado Novo, rooted in Catholic values, nationalism, and economic discipline, prioritised self-sufficiency and national independence over doctrine and political fashion. Under his prudent fiscal management, the vast debt that had initially led to his coming to power was reduced to minimal levels, and the foundations of modernisation were finally put in place after two centuries of impoverishment and civil strife.

In this, though a staunch conservative, Salazar ought to be compared to the other great modernisers of his time, leaders of backwards countries whose task it was to breathe new life into long ailing, sclerotic societies: Brazil’s Getúlio, Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yew, Turkey’s Atatürk, and Iran’s Mohammad Reza all come to mind. Detractors of Salazar’s rule often ignore the sheer disaster that was pre-Salazar Portugal, a country that was not only among Europe’s poorest by 1926, when a right-wing putsch put an end to the Jacobin Republic that had existed since 1910; it was also bankrupt, illiterate (around 70% of the population couldn’t read or write), and utterly reliant on the whims of foreign powers. Anyone doubting the indignity of Portugal’s position in the early 20th century need only read the memoirs of Imperial Germany’s Ambassador to London, Prince Lichnowsky, to learn how the great powers of Europe understood and dealt with Portugal as if it were merely a British protectorate.

After returning stability to political life and freeing the nation from the yoke of foreign debt through a program of brutal fiscal austerity, Salazar created virtually all of the institutions that are necessary to a viable modern state. From building thousands of kilometres of roads and electrifying the country with dozens of dams to establishing Portugal’s first school network (7,000 primary schools were built by the 1950’s) and increasing the number of universities from 3 to 12 (by 1974), his government was single-handedly responsible for catapulting the nation from the late 18th to the 20th century. Whereas the literacy rate among children aged 7-14 was only 33% in 1930, reflecting the Jacobin Republic’s abysmal educational record, it had risen to 97% by 1960. Yet the prevalent left-wing narrative portrays Salazar as an enemy of education, and the Republic that preceded him as having brought literacy to the masses.

Decades of steady, tranquil government led to a veritable economic miracle. Portugal, which had failed to meaningfully industrialise under the liberalism of the constitutional monarchy (1834-1910) and the Republic that succeeded it, achieved its years of fastest growth in centuries between 1960 and 1974, when its economy repeatedly expanded at a yearly rate of over 8%. By the end of the Estado Novo, Portugal’s per capita income had risen from about 30% of the Western European average in the ’30s to almost 60% of that figure.

On the foreign front, his stubborn assertion of Portuguese independence once again made Lisbon a genuinely sovereign centre of power. No longer a vassal to external interests, Portugal refused any talk of ceding her overseas territories to Nazi Germany, even when the idea was discussed in London as part of Stanley Baldwin’s dealings with Berlin. It ignored international outcry and went on to help General Franco beat the Stalin-influenced Spanish Republic, giving the Nacionales men, equipment, and diplomatic cover. It refused participation in the Second World War while keeping true to the old British alliance, in force since 1386, and allowing London and Washington to fight the U-boot threat from the Azores. Later, it refused American, European, and Soviet pressure to decolonise when it was clear that abandoning Africa would only succeed in delivering it to the hands of obscurantist, tyrannical communist rule. To secure its interests in Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere, Portugal faced a bitter guerilla war for 13 years, mobilising a million men and engaging in a national effort that few countries have rivalled. That Portugal was at all able to do this is itself testament to the success of Salazar’s domestic policies.

The events of 1974 shattered this. Sparked by junior officers weary of carrying on their duty, which was to fight, the coup was bloodless but its aftermath chaotic. The Movimento das Forças Armadas, backed by communist and socialist factions, unleashed a frenzy of purges, nationalisations, and land grabs that permanently and irrevocably threw Portugal off the course of development. Banks, industries, and estates were seized, crippling the economy. Inflation soared, unemployment spiked, and the escudo’s value plummeted. The hasty decolonisation of Angola, Mozambique, and many other territories, driven by ideological zeal and manipulated by the USSR through its agents in Lisbon, betrayed millions of Portuguese settlers, who were forced to flee for their lives, and plunged those territories into civil war, leading to the loss of over two million lives. Most of these states remain hopelessly miserable, corrupt, and despotic to this day. By 1976, the revolution’s utopian dreams had curdled into economic ruin and political instability, forcing Portugal to beg for a series of IMF bailouts and sell off the enormous gold reserves (over 900 tonnes) patiently built up by the previous regime.

Yet the most bitter of blows was to Portugal’s self-respect, sense of self, and ability to carry on as a free people. The revolution demonised Salazar’s legacy, absurdly branding him a fascist tyrant akin to Hitler and erasing his achievements from public memory. School children were taught to revile the Estado Novo and everything with which it was associated, national pride chief among them. The empire, once a symbol of Portugal’s outsized role in the world, became a source of shame that was conflated with exploitation, slavery, and cruelty. A disdainful political culture of loudmouth irrealism and sterile protest, a legacy of the revolution’s promises of a socialist paradise on earth, have plagued the country and the economy since. Meanwhile, Portugal’s admirable David vs. Goliath struggle to safeguard its imperial possessions and grandeur was mocked as proof of Salazar’s megalomania. This self-flagellation shattered the national psyche. Portugal began to see itself as a peripheral backwater, dependent on Brussels’ largesse and America’s protection. The revolution’s promise of ‘democracy’ delivered a political class more loyal to EU technocrats than to the Portuguese people it was supposed to serve.

The revolution also surrendered Portugal’s independence. Salazar’s defiance of foreign diktats gave way to dogmatic subservience. Joining the European Economic Community in 1986, Portugal traded sovereignty for subsidies, its fishing and agricultural sectors gutted by EU quotas. The euro replaced the escudo, stripping monetary control. Today, Lisbon bows to the edicts of Frau von der Leyen, from migration policies to green mandates, with no room for dissent. The revolution’s architects, in their rush to ‘modernise,’ tethered Portugal to a supranational project that annihilates national self-determination. Salazar’s Portugal, for all its flaws, answered to Lisbon, not Brussels.

This loss of agency haunts Portugal’s present. The nation’s youth, facing low wages and a stagnant economy, emigrate in droves: over 5 million Portuguese live abroad; the more recent diaspora rivals the exodus of the 1960s. Yet, unable to recognise its own failings, the regime remains obsessed with vilifying Salazar, his ghost still haunting the incomparably inferior political class of today.

Portugal’s post-revolutionary malaise is a warning to the West. The Carnation Revolution promised freedom but, through left-wing cultural hegemony and the destruction of national capacity, delivered dependence, parochialism, and poverty. It should come as no surprise that, decades after his passing and despite wave after wave of propaganda, Salazar remains one of Portugal’s most popular historical figures. This is not an endorsement of the repressive apparatus of his regime, however mild and exaggerated by pro-revolutionary historiography; it is not, as absurdly presented by the establishment, a desire to ‘return’ to the past. But it is true that, for any patriotic Portuguese, the Salazar era represents the last indisputable and triumphant period of national growth, self-confidence, and true sovereignty.