António de Oliveira Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar governed Portugal for thirty-six years and was replaced only after a deckchair collapsed under him. Born in 1889 to a farming family, he studied for the priesthood for eight years before switching to law and economics at Coimbra, where he became a professor of finance and a devout Catholic corporatist intellectual. The army brought him in as finance minister in 1928, two years after a coup, on his own condition that he control the spending of every department. He balanced the budget in a year and became indispensable, and prime minister in 1932. The Estado Novo he built the following year was authoritarian without being fascist in the German or Italian sense — no mass party in the mobilising sense, no cult of youth, no territorial ambition in Europe. Its slogan was God, Fatherland and Family, and its instruments were censorship, a political police trained partly by the Gestapo, a single legal party and the elimination of strikes. He kept Portugal out of the Second World War while leasing the Azores to Britain and selling tungsten to both sides. He held the colonies absolutely, redefining them as overseas provinces in 1951 and fighting three wars simultaneously from 1961 that consumed nearly half the budget. He fell from a chair in 1968 and had a brain haemorrhage. He was replaced and never told, and spent two years being shown a specially printed newspaper and receiving ministers who addressed him as prime minister. He died in 1970. The regime he made outlasted him by four years and was ended by officers exhausted by the wars he had refused to end.
- Lived: 1889 CE – 1970 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: prime_minister, economist, dictator
