Oscar Carmona
Oscar Carmona was president of Portugal for twenty-five years and is remembered, when he is remembered, as the man who appointed Salazar. He was a career cavalry officer and a former war minister, and he came to power four months after the military coup of May 1926 that ended the First Republic - not as its author but as the general the other officers could agree on after two of them had already fallen out. He was confirmed by a plebiscite in 1928 with no opponent and re-elected three times on the same terms. The decision that mattered came in his first years. The military dictatorship could not balance a budget, and in 1928 Carmona brought in a professor of economics from Coimbra as finance minister on the condition, which the professor set himself, that he have a veto over every department's spending. The books were balanced within a year. Four years later the professor was prime minister, and by 1933 he had written a constitution creating a corporate state that would last until 1974, with a censorship office, a political police and a single party. Carmona kept the presidency throughout and it kept shrinking. He retained the formal power to dismiss the prime minister and never used it, including in 1945 when he considered it; the one contested election allowed in his lifetime, in 1949, saw the opposition candidate withdraw days before the poll on the ground that the count could not be honest. He died in office in 1951 at eighty-one, having presided over the construction of a dictatorship he did not design and could not have stopped after the first few years, and having outlasted every other European head of state who had held office in 1926.
- Lived: 1869 CE – 1951 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
