Salazar's Estado Novo ran Portugal for four decades on Catholic corporatism
For more than forty years Portugal was governed by a regime that rejected parties, unions of class struggle and liberal democracy alike, drawing its blueprint from papal encyclicals. Salazar's Estado Novo grew the economy briskly and clung to a vast empire, yet left Portugal with Western Europe's lowest literacy rate when it fell in 1974.
The regime grew out of chaos. Portugal's monarchy fell in 1910, and the First Republic that replaced it spent sixteen years lurching between governments until a military coup on 28 May 1926 installed a dictatorship. António de Oliveira Salazar, a finance specialist, became prime minister in 1932 and the next year gave the system its name, New State, defining Portugal as a corporatist, single-party country spread across several continents. Many Portuguese at first welcomed the calm and balanced budgets, which admirers dubbed Salazar's Lesson.
Its ideas came largely from Catholic social teaching. Two papal encyclicals, from 1891 and 1931, supplied a model in which society would be organised through corporations of shared interest rather than competing parties or classes. Salazar distrusted the mass-movement style of Mussolini and Hitler; his official party, the National Union, existed to keep public opinion quiet rather than stir it up. On paper the president held vast powers, but in practice presidents deferred to Salazar, and only members of the National Union could sit in the legislature, which could not propose spending.
Abroad, the regime insisted that Angola, Mozambique and other territories were integral parts of Portugal, not colonies, even as other European powers were granting independence. Salazar eventually borrowed the Brazilian writer Gilberto Freyre's theory of lusotropicalism, which portrayed Portugal as a naturally multiracial nation, after resisting it for two decades. At the same time the country tied itself to the West, joining the Marshall Plan in 1948, helping found NATO in 1949 and entering the European Free Trade Association in 1960.
From 1950 to 1970 income per head grew by an average of 5.7 per cent a year, narrowing the gap with richer neighbours. Illness forced Salazar out in 1968, and Marcelo Caetano continued opening the economy. On 25 April 1974, left-wing officers staged the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon and brought the Estado Novo to an end.
Source: Estado Novo (Portugal)
