Founding of the Estado Novo
Salazar gave Portugal a corporatist constitution in 1933 and governed under it for thirty-five years. He was a professor of economics at Coimbra, had been finance minister since 1928 with control over every department's spending, had balanced the budget within a year, and became prime minister in 1932. The New State that followed was authoritarian and unusually cerebral: a written constitution approved by a plebiscite in which abstentions were counted as yes votes, a single party called the National Union that was deliberately not a mass movement, a corporative chamber representing economic interests, and a doctrine summarised as God, fatherland, family and work. Salazar disliked crowds and rarely spoke in public, which distinguishes the regime from the Italian and German versions he was compared to. The apparatus was real. A secret police trained in part by the Gestapo, censorship of everything printed, a political prison in Cape Verde, and an economy of protected national champions. He kept Portugal neutral in the Second World War while leasing the Azores to the Allies and selling tungsten to both sides. The colonies were redefined as overseas provinces in 1951 to avoid decolonisation, and wars began in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique in 1961 that consumed nearly half the budget. He suffered a brain haemorrhage in 1968, reportedly after a deckchair collapsed, and was replaced without being told; his household maintained the fiction until he died in 1970. The regime fell in 1974. The regime's longevity is the fact worth explaining. It survived a world war, decolonisation and the postwar boom by keeping the country poor, rural and emigrating, and by 1974 about a tenth of the Portuguese population was working abroad.
- Year: 1933 CE
- Category: Political
