Salazar quit his first ministry after five days, then ruled Portugal for 36 years
In June 1926 army officers travelled out to Santa Comba Dão to recruit an economics professor as finance minister. António de Oliveira Salazar lasted five days in Lisbon; when his spending controls were rejected, he caught a train back to the university. Two years later he returned on his own terms and stayed in power until 1968.
Salazar was born on 28 April 1889 in Vimieiro, near Santa Comba Dão, the only son of a farm labourer who rose to manage a wealthy family's estates. For reasons nobody knows, his surnames were placed in reverse of Portuguese custom, unlike those of his four older sisters. He won a free place at Viseu's seminary at eleven and studied there eight years but did not become a priest. At Coimbra he graduated in law in 1914 with 19 out of 20 and took over the chairs of economic policy and finance by 1917.
The First Republic, founded in 1910, went through eight presidents, 44 cabinet reshuffles and 21 revolutions, and Lisbon police counted 325 street bombs between 1920 and 1925. Salazar was elected to parliament in 1921, attended once, and never returned. After the 1926 coup he refused the finance ministry several times, citing health and his elderly parents, until the country faced collapse. He accepted in April 1928 only after President Carmona promised him a veto over spending in every department. Within a year the budget balanced and the currency was steady.
Becoming prime minister in 1932, he built the Estado Novo, a corporatist, Catholic-flavoured authoritarian state under the motto God, Fatherland and Family. He kept soldiers out of politics, dismissed fascism as pagan Caesarism, and called his National Union a non-party. Censorship and the PIDE secret police crushed opponents; the dissident general Humberto Delgado was killed by PIDE agents in 1965.
He backed Franco in Spain, kept Portugal neutral in the Second World War while helping the Allies, and made it a founding member of NATO in 1949. Wars against independence movements in the African colonies began in 1961. After Salazar slipped into a coma in 1968 the president dismissed him, and he died in 1970. His regime fell in the Carnation Revolution of 1974.
Source: António de Oliveira Salazar
