Manuel de Arriaga
Manuel de Arriaga was the first elected president of a republic that had eight governments in his four-year term. He was a lawyer and poet from the Azores, a republican propagandist for forty years before there was a republic to serve, and the first Portuguese republican ever elected to parliament under the monarchy. When the king was shot in 1908 and his surviving son deposed by a rising two years later, Arriaga was the obvious compromise for the presidency the new constitution created: old, honest, literary and factionally unattached. The republic he headed was ungovernable almost by design. The constitution gave the president no power to dissolve parliament, the dominant party split into three within two years, the church was separated from the state in terms the countryside experienced as persecution, and monarchist columns crossed the northern border twice to try to restore the king. Governments lasted an average of five months. Arriaga's response in 1915 was to appoint a general to head a cabinet of his own choosing, which was constitutionally doubtful and provoked a rising in Lisbon that killed perhaps a hundred people; he resigned in the aftermath. The following year Portugal entered the world war, at British request and against considerable domestic opinion, seizing German ships in the Tagus and sending fifty-five thousand men to Flanders and more to the African colonies, where the fighting on the Mozambique frontier had already begun in 1914. The war cost the republic its remaining credibility - inflation, food queues, a coup in 1917 and eight thousand dead - and the sixteen years of instability that followed ended in the military rising of 1926. Arriaga died in 1917 having seen the first two of the republic's eight presidents, of whom he was one, and none of the forty-five governments it managed in sixteen years.
- Lived: 1840 CE – 1917 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
