Right turn in Portugal?
Ben Pimlott
'Soares is dead,' proclaims the slogan on a Lisbon wall, 'Long live Mario Soares!' In fact, the predicted resurrection of the Portuguese Prime Minister, after the defeat of his minority Socialist government almost seven months ago,, has been a long time in coming; and the expected outcome of this first `normal' crisis of democratic Portugal — a new Socialist administration but with several members of the conservative opposition brought into the Cabinet — is hardly a formula with a future. Yet the oddest aspect of post-revolutionary Portugal is not the back-scratching of the left and the centre, but the absence, until recently, of a vocal, unashamed right.
Before the 1974 coup d'etat it was fashionable in some Lisbon circles to express a cautious desire for a parliamentary system. During the 'Red Summer' of 1975, it was a fairly brave man, except in the Catholic north, who publicly denounced socialism. Today it is notable how many people there are who take comfort in describing themselves as 'social democrat'. In a country that has exchanged the most openly corporatist for the most explicitly socialist constitution in Western Europe, to be right-wing is not yet acceptable. Nevertheless, old values and habits of thought are not far submerged, and it may be a weakness, not a strength, that in the present system they have not found adequate expression.
Portugal actually has two major parties which get conservative backing. The Party of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS — included in the new coalition) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD), which together hold more seats than Soares's Socialists, are both vigorously anti-marxist.
In its leadership, CDS (as Soares put it) is Giscardien — a potent alliance of high intellectuals and Catholic squirearchy; PSD is populist, with closer affinities to the post-war French Mouvement Republicain Populaire — based on Church, small-holding peasantry and urban middle class. But neither party will admit to being on the
right, and the issue is not merely one of semantics. When the CDS leader, Professor Freitas do Amaral, calls himself a man of the 'centre' he means that he is a committed democrat and will have no truck with the old right which held that order, prosperity and empire were incompatible with universal suffrage; also that his party supports economic planning ('more socialist than the Socialists' was how CDS deputy leader Amaro da Costa, in pursuit of a Socialist CDS coalition, was putting it privately just after the government fell). Both CDS and PSD (which once tried to affiliate to the Second International) are newly created bodies which have inherited the popular support that used to go to Salazar and Caetano — or would have done if elections under the dictatorship had been more than stagemanaged charades. Yet it is doubtful whether they really represent either traditionalist, or emergent, anti-left opposition in Portugal.
One man who is convinced that they do not is former General Kafilza de Arriaga, who has recently formed an Independent Movement for National Reconstruction (MIRN) to fill the gap. Arriaga is a man with a past. Whether he has a future is an interesting question. A symbol of the old, haughty hierarchy that many imagined had vanished for ever, he is no stranger to what the Portuguese call politico-military affairs. Once a minister under Salazar and tipped for the premiership, he became commander-in-chief of Portuguese forces in Mozambique, where he was renowned for his hawkish views on the war and his popularity among the troops. In Lisbon he was seen as an 'ultra' opponent of Caetano, and the Prime Minister may have tolerated the radical and moderate officers of the Armed Forces Movement (which eventually carried out the 1974 coup) as a counter-weight to Arriaga. Today, Arriaga cheerfully denies having plotted violence against Caetano: though he readily admits having urged the President to sack him.
Sixteen months in Caxias prison during the revolution without trial or charge have not increased Arriaga's affection for the Communists and the left; nor have they diminished his interest in the political process. Hence the setting up of MIRN, with expensive offices in Lisbon's Avenida da Liberdade (Liberty Avenue) and an appeal to a sense of pride in Portuguese language, culture and origins `that now has Brazil as its great exponent and that is capable of reviving and developing in Angola, Mozambique and other former Portuguese territories as soon as Marxism has been driven from them.' Arriaga says that MIRN is not extremist or right-wing. `We merely wish to bring about a convergence of all the non-marxist forces in this country, and also to see the replacement of incompetent ministers with statesmen.' And if such statesmen do not naturally emerge? `Then it may be that pluralist democracy will be abandoned.' Is he saying that this should happen? 'It may be necessary to save thc country.' Does he envisage for himself the role of a Portuguese de Gaulle? 'That is one possibility.'
It would be misleading to suggest that Kaulza de Arriaga is a serious threat to
Portuguese democracy, or indeed that he
necessarily means any harm to it. Equally it would be foolish to dismiss what he stands for: the large section of the Portuguese population that has not done well out of the revolution. There are well over half a mil lion refugees from Portuguese Africa, most of whom endorse Arriaga's mythology about the end of empire. There are also landowners and businessmen who lost much (but by no means all) of their property through occupations and expropriations, and have seen little in the way of compensation; officers, civil servants, bankers, industrialists and managers who were purged by the left and have never been reinstated; and peasant farmers in the north who resented the interference of the Communists in 1975, and now blame harsh economic conditions on a traditional enemy —southern, Lisbon-dominated government.
'When the revolution came,' a retired merchant seaman, on a small pension, told me, 'prices went sky-high.' Actually price rises have been less steep for most of the time since the April 1974 coup than in the last few months before it, but few people remember. And with real wages down some 15 per cent on a year ago, the basis for a Portuguese Poujadism undoubtedly exists. 'Democratic freedoms are wonderful for politicians, and for journalists like me,' says Nuno Rocha, who started the successful conservative weekly 0 Tempo during the revolution. 'For most ordinary people who have less money than before, the advantages are less obvious.' Comparisons are being made more and more with the illfated First Republic of 1911, which got through forty-five governments in fifteen years and ended with a military dictatorship.
There has been no serious strike in Portugal for eighteen months, and TAP airline pilots, who have recently taken action against their employers, can scarcely be regarded as a vanguard of the work ingclass. Only peeling posters and fading graffiti serve as reminders of how recently it was that a major political confrontation could bring 100,000 demonstrators into central Lisbon. But it would be premature to assume on the basis of the present calm that political wounds have healed, or that the era of power in the streets and in the barracks is conclusively over. The only really safe prediction about Portugal is that things are unlikely to stay the same: and, with the right beginning to gather strength, that the volcano, though dormant, is by no means dead.
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