50 years of the Portuguese  revolution

Europe’s oldest dictatorship was overthrown half a century ago today.  Mike Phipps reviews The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell, by Alex Fernandes, published by Oneworld.

APRIL 25, 2024

LABOUR HUB

“On 25 April 1974, a group of junior officers in the Portuguese armed forces led a military coup that, in a scant few hours, achieved the total surrender of the Portuguese government,” writes Alex Fernandes at the start of this riveting narrative. “In doing so they toppled the oldest dictatorship in Europe and ended a brutal colonial war that had raged for thirteen years on three fronts in Africa.”

It was the first day of what would be a protracted and turbulent revolution. But it was also the culmination of many failed rebellions and acts of resistance since a military dictatorship took control of the country 48 years earlier and proceeded to suppress all opposition with the utmost brutality, filling its prisons with thousands of political activists.

Fernandes highlights some of the resistance to the dictatorship, including daring prison escapes and the hijacking in 1961 of a commercial aircraft, whose pilot was ordered to fly low over Lisbon and other cities so that anti-dictatorship leaflets could be dropped onto the population below. Growing student unrest was another focus of political opposition. Its brutal repression would have a lasting effect on those who experienced it and constitute a tipping point.

The arrival of students from Portugal’s colonies also had a radicalising effect within the country’s universities. The army too began to change, as young men from a working class background joined. Men like Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, later the leader of the Armed Forces Movement, saw it as a route to better opportunities, and got “a first glimpse of what life is like outside of a suffocating dictatorship.”

The anti-colonial struggle played a critical role in the lead-up to the Carnation revolution. In 1961, industrial action by cotton workers in Angola was met by aerial bombardment and a  ground assault by the Portuguese military that left thousands dead. Riots and massacres followed and a full-scale colonial war ensued. A second front was opened in Guinea in 1963 by national liberation activists under the leadership of  Amílcar Cabral. In 1964, FRELIMO opened a third front, launching their first offensive in the north of Mozambique. The army, made up of badly equipped, poorly fed young soldiers and directed by out of touch senior officers, began taking heavy casualties. By 1973, a significant majority of Portugal’s male population of ‘recruitable’ age was fighting in these conflicts.

Fernandes takes us through the growing opposition among junior military officers – “the captains” – the development of their political programme and the formulation of plans for a takeover. Meanwhile the more conservative General Spínola, himself no stranger to atrocities in Portugal’s colonies, begins to position himself as the nation’s saviour. He publishes a book that falls short of calling for independence for Portugal’s overseas territories, but nonetheless “sends shock waves through the military establishment.”

Days before the revolution, Spínola agrees to the Armed Forces Movement’s programme and agrees to join the incoming junta, if the seizure of power is successful. The hours leading up to this constitute a gripping narrative in the author’s hands. On the night of the coup, the head of the Army Cavalry School, 29-year old Salgueiro Maia, has his men woken from their beds and addresses them:

“Gentlemen, there are various kinds of state. Liberal states, social democratic states, socialist states, and so on. But none is as bad as the state we live under now! So, whoever wants to come with me, let’s go to Lisbon and end this son of a bitch of a situation. Opportunities to enter into the annals of history only arise once in life. Anyone who’s willing to join me, arm yourselves. Whoever doesn’t want to go can stay here.”

All 500 men volunteer enthusiastically. The same happens in military barracks across the country.

Lisbon wakes up to find the city occupied by the military, under the control of the Armed Forces Movement, with its programme being broadcast to the world. When a cleaner tells Salgueiro Maia, who has positioned his tanks on Lisbon’s main square, that she has to get to work urgently, she is confidently told: “Don’t worry – today, and every  year going forward, 25 April will be a national holiday.”

As commanders still loyal to the regime find themselves outnumbered and their men refuse to battle the insurgents, resistance to the takeover crumbles quickly and thousands of civilians pour out onto the streets. Within hours, the soldiers are wearing carnations in their lapels and have placed them in the barrel of their guns – a clear indication of their peaceful intentions.

Realising the impossibility of the situation, Prime Minister Caetano calls General Spínola, who denies being involved with the conspiracy, and offers to transfer power to him, rather than ‘the streets’. The Armed Forces Movement leadership agree, rather than see bloodshed.

Blood is shed, however, outside the headquarters of the secret police, when a crowd that has assembled and chants “murderers” is met with a hail of bullets from the windows and balconies. Four are killed and over forty wounded.

With Caetano gone, the leadership of the Armed Forces Movement meets with General Spínola to discuss the political way forward. Spínola wants changes to the Movement’s programme, despite the fact that it has only recently been modified at his request. One officer responds: “Our armoured cars and troops are still all out on the streets. If it needs to, this coup will carry on.” The discussion is postponed while Spínola addresses the country.

In the days immediately following, “the signs of a new landscape for the working class begin to emerge,” suggests Fernandes.  Workers in the Mague metallurgical plant in Alverca, the only workers on strike at the time of the coup, have their demands met at once by a management suddenly terrified of their workforce. A few days later, families occupy vacant properties in the Lisbon neighbourhood of Boavista and refuse to leave – followed by the occupation of thousands of empty, government-owned properties over the next few weeks amid the creation of residents’ commissions, particularly within the large shanty towns. In workplaces, the priority becomes the removal of managers tied to the old regime, a task carried out by emergent workers’ councils.

As agreed with the Armed Forces Movement, General Spínola dismisses vast swathes of the senior military and political hierarchy. Socialist and Communist exiles return and are included in the new government; new parties emerge. But friction remains between the Movement and Spínola over the issue of decolonisation. As strikes spread across the country, Spínola’s first Provisional Government, which wants to break the agreement to hold early elections to a Constitutional Assembly, collapses.

By September, Spínola is calling on the silent majority to “defend itself from the extremist authoritarians” – the communists. It’s a signal for the right to mobilise in force, but the Armed Forces Movement leadership out-mobilise and the counter-revolutionary demonstration is cancelled. Spínola resigns, denouncing the “general climate of anarchy”.  Five months after he was originally meant to, General Francisco da Costa Gomes, the Movement’s choice,  takes over as president. The decolonisation process accelerates.

On 11th March 1975, Portuguese Air Force planes and helicopters bomb and strafe the HQ of the 1st Light Artillery Regiment, a body that is staunchly loyal to the Armed Forces Movement. It’s the start of a counter-coup by former president Spínola, but it proves abortive. Tens of thousands take to the streets and his book, once a bestseller, is publicly burned. Rather than get bogged down in reprisals, the Revolution nationalises the banks and other major companies.

Constituency Assembly elections see the Socialists come top with 38% of the vote, the centrist Social Democrats second with 26% and the Communists third with 12%. Divisions within the left are sharpening, particularly between the established parties and militants on the ground, but also within the Armed Forces Movement itself.

The ‘Hot Summer’ of 1975 sees the extension of the Revolution into the countryside with the takeover of big farms – 10,000 square kilometres of estates in the Alentejo are confiscated. But in the more conservative north, where the Catholic Church remains highly influential, there is a backlash against the left, with 200 attacks on Communist centres in particular.

By late autumn, it’s clear that “Lisbon has become the Red Commune, ungoverned and ungovernable,” as Fernandes puts it. Many moderate leaders relocate to the north, where the situation is less anarchic. “In a country paralysed by a year and a half of strike action, the government follow suit,” refusing to  continue performing its duties until the president can guarantee the conditions in which to do them. With significant unrest within the military, a state of emergency is declared within Lisbon and on November 25th the radical army units threatening a takeover are forced to surrender.

It’s a triumph for the moderates and a routing of the revolutionaries. The militant armed wing of the Movement is dissolved and Otelo de Carvalho stripped of power. The Revolution is effectively over.

But its legacy endures – to an extent. Many of its reforms bear similarities to the Popular Unity movement in Chile (1970-1973), but unlike the latter, the Portuguese Revolution was not drowned in blood. It had a profound impact on neighbouring Spain, whose transition to democracy began just as the Portuguese Revolution came to an end.

“Portugal also fulfilled its pledge to grant full independence to its colonial territories,” noted one analyst recently. “There were no attempts to establish a system of neocolonial rule which could have allowed the country to maintain political influence, or to grant Portuguese businesses control over sectors of the economy in former colonies.”

The constitution that was adopted in Portugal in 1976 was radical and the Socialists topped the poll in the first free legislative elections in half a century. Through the 1980s, however, most of the nationalisations were overturned and Portugal became a conventional, capitalist, European liberal democracy. Today the country is subject to the same political trends as elsewhere in Europe, including the resurgence of the extreme right. This has specifically Portuguese characteristics, including nostalgia for the years of dictatorship and empire.

“In the wake of the right’s resurgence, and the revolution’s contested legacy, it might be tempting to accuse the revolution of failing to live up to its own ideals. But this is a fatal mistake,” concludes Fernandes. “The Portugal of 1976 was undoubtedly, in a million distinct ways, better than the Portugal of 1973. The revolution killed, decisively, two of the most vicious elements of Portuguese history – the centuries-long colonial project, and the vile carceral apparatus that kept the population under the regime’s boot for nearly five decades. For women, for workers, for immigrants, for the poor, for the masses – things are better.”

For its pacy narrative and evocative detail, this book is the best account I have read of the Revolution, particularly recommended for new readers with little knowledge of these events. The memory of the Portuguese Revolution needs to be kept alive, to show what is possible when people decide to challenge even the harshest political regimes in the most difficult conditions.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.