Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die (2020) by Tom Gallagher

Portrait of a Pessimist Dictator

Antonio Salazar was born the fifth and last child to devout peasant parents in the coastal city of Vimieiro in 1889, a time when roughly eighty percent of Portuguese were illiterate. The future dictator was a brilliant scholar and a sincere Catholic who believed the teachings of the church were a necessary foundation for guiding society toward a more just world. Politics in Portugal were turbulent during his most formative years. The monarchy was overthrown in 1910. An unprepared Portuguese Army stumbled into World War I on the side of the allies in 1916. Forty-four governments came and went by the time the Portuguese First Republic expired in 1926 after just sixteen years. 

During these years Salazar emerged as an influential and prestigious conservative Catholic thinker who believed that all authority emanates from God and not from any kind of social contract. He believed that the idea that politics could shape and improve the human condition was dangerous nonsense. He was distrustful of all outside powers – especially the naive, capricious, and giant United States –  and anything besides religion that possessed a mass popular character, including soccer and fado music, two of Portugal’s greatest passions. Likewise, he was deeply suspicious of democracy. In 1961 he would tell a reporter: “If democracy consists of a process of levelling down and refuses to acknowledge natural inequalities; if it believes that power emanates from the masses and that government ought to be the work of the masses and not of the elites; then in truth I am convinced that democracy is a fiction.” Gallagher claims that Salazar was an instinctive Hobbesian – a man with a naturally realist, pragmatic or even cynical attitude to governance and human behavior, which explains his entrenched pessimism.

Salazar became one of the youngest tenured professors (economics) at the University of Coimbra and then entered government in 1928, filling senior roles in budget administration and financial affairs. From the very start he was known for being honest, frugal, retiring, and understated. He never married and had few, if any, close friends, and thus no “yes men.” He eschewed ambitious social programs believing that handouts softened the character of the people.

The National Union (UN) was formed in 1930. It would be the sole recognized political party in Portugal for nearly half a century, although Gallagher says it was an ancillary body, not a source of political power. “Salazar’s aim was the depoliticization of society, not the mobilization of the populace,” Gallagher says. “He believed that order and progress would go hand in hand if political activity was diluted and poured into the empty vessel of the UN.” Salazar would avoid the tight alignment between church and state exhibited in Franco’s Spanish dictatorship next door. Catholic influence in Portugal was directed away from politics and into education and charitable activities. The author holds Salazar in much higher esteem than Franco, who he calls opportunistic, cynical and dim. Whereas Franco was flamboyant and theatrical, Salazar was inscrutable and out-of-sight. In the words of veteran Belgian politican Andre de Staercke: “one was an amateur [Franco], the other was a technician [Salazar]; one was boastful, the other modest; one had sacrificed a nation for the sake of prestige politics, the other had shelved his prestige for the prosperity of the nation.”

“In terms of background, temperament, intentions, and ambitions,” Gallagher writes, “Salazar was an unlikely fascist.” He never developed a mass party, never engaged in street level agitation, never held mass rallies, and never showed any appetite for developing an extremist phalanx to prop him up when necessary. Rather, he was a reactionary, one with strong Christian conservative principles. His was a moderately totalitarian, rules-based, nationalist regime, not a violent party dictatorship. In short, Gallagher says, “[Salazar] ran Portugal very much like a punctilious head butler in charge of a sprawling country estate.”

Gallagher calls Salazar “a political entrepreneur unmatched in skill and effectiveness.” He would develop into a “micro-managing autocrat.” When he came to power in 1934 he announced the arrival of a “New State” (Estado Novo), a corporative and unitary republic with a single authoritarian leader. His primary aim was to turn down the political temperature of the country in order to restore equilibrium, stability and predictability. He would remain far more low-key and unobtrusive compared to the other European dictators of the mid-twentieth century. The Estado Novo was supposed to be tailored to Portugal’s unique conditions and not a version of some foreign model of government. It was to be centered around associations and not the state. Labor strikes were forbidden, as was divorce for marriages inside the church. All employers were expected to enroll in guilds centered around their area of economic activity. Gallagher says that the cooperative structure of the Estado Novo was ideally suited to Salazar’s partneralist and micro-managing tendencies. In a population of just over six million in 1930, only twenty percent (1.2 million) were eligible to vote. The National Assembly met just three months a year and possessed no lawmaking powers.

“Self-effacing, dedicated to his duties, shunning uniforms or bombastic displays, it was a benevolent autocrat who seemed to be in charge of Portugal,” Gallagher writes. However, Salazar also possessed many valuable skills and traits, such as energy, tenacity, clarity of expression, and nerves of steel. Between 1936 and 1945, Salazar simultaneously held the roles of prime minister, foreign minister and minister of war. The author believes that Salazar’s unusual self-effacing demeanor – “austere and puritanical,” he says – played a large role in the longevity of his reign. He was a paternalist, Christian leader without Caesarist or totalitarian tendencies. He was a self-avowed nationalist who was content with a small army and no parades. “Self-restraint and composure,” he says, were “Salazar’s abiding hallmark.” His primary aim was to keep Portugal out of World War II (the country’s humiliating performance in World War I weighed heavily on him). He saw Soviet Russia as the primary threat to both Europe and Portugal. In 1965, Salazar’s most dangerous and committed political opponent, the communist agitator Humberto Delgado, was found murdered just across the border in Spain.

The Portuguese colonial empire spanned the globe and covered millions of square miles. To Salazar and many other nationalist allies, Portugal was only a small and irrelevant country without her colonies, many of which were under her control for 400 years. “Salazar was the most stubborn and implacable 20th-century European colonial leader,” Gallagher says. Combined, the colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Goa, Timor, Cape Verde, Sao Tome, and Macau, known collectively as the Ultramar, were larger than Spain, France, England, Italy and Germany. Angola, in particular, was growing rapidly. Portuguese settlers grew from roughly 45,000 in 1940 to 175,000 in 1960. At the height of the struggle to retain Portuguese Africa, Lisbon had over 100,000 troops deployed to the continent. Over 8,000 Portuguese soldiers lost their lives trying to hold on to the empire between 1961 and 1974. The most strategic and enduringly important colonial asset Lisbon possessed was also the smallest and most remote. The Azores are an archipelago of nine islands of less than one thousand square miles located just less than one thousand miles off the coast of Portugal. The Azores were a critical refueling point in the middle of the Atlantic that gave Salazar leverage over his vastly more powerful western allies for decades. Britain, Portugal’s most long-standing and strategic ally (treaties signed in 1661 and 1899 committed Britain to defending Portugal’s colonies), was granted access to the Azores in 1943 (yet Lisbon flew flags at half-mast for Hitler in 1945). Portugal and Salazar ultimately survived World War II by taking a cautious, wait-and-see approach. “Let things be to see how they work out” was his “golden rule,” according to Gallagher.

American foreign policy towards Portugal has long been “messy and disorganized,” Gallagher says, which often worked to Salazar’s advantage. The ambassadorship to Lisbon was not a prestige assignment and often fell to unqualified men more easily manipulated by the regime. However, none other than George F. Kennan served in Portugal during World War II. Gallagher calls Kennan “a rare soulmate” to Portugal’s benevolent dictator, who once called Salazar “the nearest approach in our time to Plato’s philosopher-king.” Portugal’s status as a founding member of NATO with possession of the strategically important Azores allowed the country to punch above its weight against the “undisciplined giant” across the Atlantic.

In 1968, while sitting in a deck chair awaiting a haircut, Salazar’s chair collapsed and he hit his head on the stone floor.  Roughly a month later he suffered a brain hemorrhage and slipped into a month-long coma. He would never fully recover. For the final years of his reign he was largely incapacitated. He died on July 27, 1970. Salazar, the all-powerful dictator of an imperial nation for nearly four decades, died possessing only a small bank deposit and a three-bedroom apartment in a drab Lisbon neighborhood. Even though he died in the jet age, Salazar had only once flown in an airplane and made only trip outside of the Iberian peninsula. There’s no denying that one of the longest serving autocrats in European history was a man of simplicity, sincerity and determination.

The Estado Novo fell on April 25, 1974 without a shot being fired in its defense. Calls for democracy at home and decolonizaiton in Africa ultimately undermined the edifice that Salazar had created and tended to. Sweeping nationalizations and land seizures promptedly occurred. “No other Western country had ever seen such a radical switch in economic relations,” Gallagher says. A left-wing version of Salazar’s corporatism captured the country; the power of the state over the economy and civil society far surpassed that of the Estado Novo. By 1977 Portugal had the worst unemployment rate (25%) and the highest inflation rate (30%) in all of Europe as the country struggled to absorb some 700,000 people returning from the now liberated colonies. As of today, over a third of Portugal’s ten million citizens receive some sort of pension from the state. Much of Salazar’s political legacy in Portugal has been erased, but his reputation for honesty, simplicity and patriotism continue to fascinate his people. “Nothing against the Nation, All of the Nation,” was his motto – and the Portuguese love him for it.