28 May Coup and the End of the First Republic
A military coup in May 1926 ended the Portuguese republic and led to forty-eight years of dictatorship. The first republic had lasted sixteen years and had produced some forty-five governments, eight presidents, several attempted counter-coups, participation in the First World War that was unpopular and costly, and inflation that destroyed savings. Almost nobody defended it. The rising began at Braga under General Gomes da Costa, and the columns marched on Lisbon over several days while the government resigned rather than fight. The officers who made it had no programme beyond order, and they then removed each other in sequence: Gomes da Costa was in power for three weeks before being exiled to the Azores by his own colleagues, and General Carmona emerged as president. What they could not do was the accounts. The military government's finances were worse than the republic's, and in 1928 they invited António de Oliveira Salazar, a professor of economics at Coimbra, to be finance minister — on his condition that he control the spending of every department. He balanced the budget in a year, became prime minister in 1932, and gave the country a corporatist constitution in 1933 that he called the New State. It lasted until 1974: a secret police, censorship, a single party, colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea from 1961, and the poorest population in western Europe. The officers who ended it in 1974 were fighting those wars. The republic's own record explains why so few defended it, and the dictatorship that replaced it lasted three times as long. Salazar was a civilian who never joined a party of his own creation with any enthusiasm and governed for thirty-six years by declining to leave the office he had been invited into.
- Year: 1926 CE
- Category: Political
