In essence, the Portuguese revolutionaries of 1974 were repeating the mistake of the agrarian radicals of the Spanish republic in the Thirties: in seeking to impose a collectivist land reform based on southern social conditions upon the privately-owned and more efficient smallholders of the north, they turned the latter against them. In the Constituent Assembly elections of April 1975 the Communists were held to just 12.5 percent of the vote. Right-of-center parties did better, but the big winner was the Portuguese Socialist Party, founded in exile two years before by Mario Soares, who campaigned very effectively on the slogan ‘Socialism, Yes! Dictatorship, No!’ and won 38 percent of the vote.
The MFA and the Communists were unhappy with the outcome of the vote, and Cunhal openly acknowledged that if the parliamentary route to power was blocked, an alternative path might have to be taken— as he put it to an Italian journalist in June 1975, ‘There is no possibility of a democracy like the one you have in Western Europe… Portugal will not be a country with democratic freedoms and monopolies. It will not allow it.’ From April to November tensions rose. Foreign commentators warned of an impending Communist coup, and Portugal’s NATO allies and western European trade partners held out promises of aid and affiliation if the country abjured Marxist revolution.
Matters came to a head at the end of the year. On November 8th the Constituent Assembly in Lisbon was besieged by building workers and for two weeks there were rumors of an imminent ‘Lisbon Commune’ and even a civil war between north and south. On November 25th groups of radical soldiers attempted a putsch. Initially they had the tacit support of the PCP, but when it became clear that the bulk of the armed forces and even some of the left-wing officers themselves were opposed to the uprising, even Cunhal backed off. As some of the MFA leaders were later to acknowledge, the outcome of the April 1975 elections had discredited in advance the goals of the revolutionary officers: the Left could have parliamentary democracy or a revolutionary ‘transition’, but not both.
In February 1976 the Portuguese military, still in effective control of the country nearly two years after their coup, officially handed over power to the civilian authorities. The country was to be governed under a Constitution approved in April 1976 and which continued to echo the rhetoric and ambitions of the post-’74 political mood, committing Portugal to a ‘transition to socialism through the creation of conditions for the democratic exercise of power by the working classes.’ In the legislative elections of that same month, the Socialists once again came first, though with a slightly reduced vote, and Mario Soares formed Portugal’s first democratically-elected government in nearly half a century.
The prospects for Portuguese democracy remained cloudy—Willy Brandt was just one of many sympathetic contemporary observers who saw in Soares another Kerensky, an unwitting stalking horse for undemocratic forces that would replace him at the earliest opportunity. But Soares survived—and more. The armed forces remained confined to barracks, the role of their politicized fringes increasingly marginal. The Communists’ vote actually rose—improving to 14.6 percent in 1976 and thence to 19 percent three years later, as the economy deteriorated and Soares’ moderate policies frustrated his party’s left-wing, to whom he had promised the coming destruction of capitalism in a Socialist Portugal—but at the price of abandoning their insurrectionist ambitions.
In 1977 the Parliament passed an Agrarian Reform Law that confirmed the land collectivization of the immediate past but confined it to the South, with restrictions on the amount of land that could be expropriated from existing owners. This move ended the risk of rural conflict and a conservative backlash, but it could do little in the short run to alleviate the economic mess that democratic Portugal had inherited. Deprived of cheap raw materials from its former colonies (and the captive market they had provided for its otherwise uncompetitive exports), unable to export unskilled labour to Western Europe as in the past, and constrained under the terms of vital IMF loans to balance its budgets and practice fiscal rigor, Portugal suffered years of unemployment and under-consumption.
The military had not completely left the scene: under the 1976 Constitution a ‘Council of the Revolution’ composed of non-elected representatives of the armed forces retained a right of veto, and in the course of 1980 it rejected twenty three pieces of legislation, including a plan by the right-of-center government elected that year to denationalize domestic banks. But they offered no objection when parliament revised the constitution in the course of the next two years, reducing the power of the executive (abolishing the Council of the Revolution itself in 1982), and quietly removing the anti-capitalist emphasis in the original document.
For the next twenty years the Socialists and their opponents, centrist Social Democrats led by Anibal Cavaco Silva, were to alternate in office. Mario Soares himself, his anti-capitalist rhetoric long-since abandoned, ascended to the country’s Presidency in 1986, the year Portugal was admitted to the European Community. The country remained strikingly poor by West European standards, a tribute to Salazar’s enduring legacy. But against all expectations Portugal had avoided both a ‘White Terror’ and a ‘Red Terror’. The Communists, while still popular in the rural south and the industrial suburbs of Lisbon, remained unrepentantly hard-line under the ageing Cunhal, who stayed in charge until 1992. But their influence was permanently diminished. The repatriated colonials never succeeded in forming a far-right party of embittered nationalists. In the circumstances, the emergence of a democratic Portugal was a very considerable achievement.
To a visitor crossing from France into Spain in, say, 1970, the chasm separating the two sides of the Pyrenees seemed immense. Franco’s thirty-year long reign had accentuated the social backwardness and cultural isolation in which Spain had languished for much of the past two centuries, and his authoritarian regime appeared even more at odds with modern European political culture than it had at the outset. At first sight the Sixties appeared to have passed Spain by altogether: rigid censorship, strict enforcement of laws regulating public dress and behavior, an omnipresent police and draconian penal laws for political critics all suggested a land frozen in time, its historical clock set permanently at 1939.[229]
On closer inspection, however, Spain—or at least northern Spain and the cities—was changing quite rapidly. Franco was a rigid and truly reactionary dictator, but unlike his neighbor Salazar he was also an economic realist. In 1959 Spain abandoned the autarkic practices of the past two decades and, at the instigation of a group of Opus Dei ministers, adopted a National Stabilization Plan intended to stifle the country’s endemic inflation and open it up to trade and investment. The initial economic impact of the Plan was harsh: devaluation, budget cuts, a credit freeze and wage restrictions—all firmly and uncompromisingly enforced—brought inflation down but forced tens of thousands of Spaniards to seek work abroad.
But the private sector, hitherto constrained by corporatist regulations and a longstanding policy of import substitution, was freer to expand. Tariffs were reduced; Spain joined the World Bank, the IMF and the GATT, and was admitted to the OECD as an Associate Member (in 1962 Franco even applied—unsuccessfully—to join the EEC). The timing of Franco’s new economic policy was propitious. The Spanish domestic economy had been protected against competition in the early years of Europe’s post-war boom, but was opening itself to foreign commerce at just the right moment. Starting in 1961, GNP began to rise steadily. The percentage of the labor force employed on the land—one worker in two in 1950—fell precipitatelyas rural laborers from the South and West moved north to work in factories and the burgeoning tourist trade: by 1971 only one Spaniard in five was left in agriculture. Already, by the mid-Sixties, Spain had ceased to qualify as a ‘developing nation’ under UN criteria.
Franco’s ‘economic miracle’ should not be overstated. Spain was not burdened by the residue of empire and thus faced none of the economic or social costs of decolonization. Most of the foreign cash flowing into the country in the Sixties came not from the export of Spanish-produced goods, but rather from overseas remittances by emigrant Spanish workers or else holiday-makers from northern Europe: in short, Spain’s economic modernization was largely a by-product of other nations’ prosperity. Outside of Barcelona, the Costa Brava, parts of the Basque country and (to a lesser extent) Madrid, the transport, education, medical and service infrastructure of the country still lagged far behind. Even in 1973, per capita income in the country as a whole was still lower than that of Ireland and less than half the EEC average.
Nevertheless, the social consequences of even limited economic modernization were significant. In a time before television Spain may have been largely shielded from the
