Portugal Embraces Democracy, 50 Years After the Carnation Revolution

LISBON—Maria Brites took one more carnation in her hands from a table covered in them. She carefully set the flower in a glass box. Brites, an accomplished 76-year-old art teacher, has made dozens of these graceful souvenirs for Portugal’s museums to preserve the memory of the so-called “Carnation Revolution” which changed her own and her country’s life. It was April in Lisbon and outside, tourists teemed through the streets in the capital of a liberal democracy ranked among the freest nations in the world. Joined by her two adult daughters, Maria began to sing “Grândola, Vila Morena.” Fifty years ago, the fascist regime installed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar banned other songs by its author, Zeca Afonso, for his opposition to the dictatorial regime. On April 25, 1974, conspirators played “Gradola Vila Morena” on the radio at 12:20 a.m. The song’s powerful melody and lyrics signaled the beginning of the revolution.

“Land of brotherhood,” the lyrics exclaim, “the people are the ones who rule within you, oh city!”

Exactly half a century later, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese gathered in Lisbon to chant “No to fascism.” Banners strung throughout the city featured happy people hugging with the caption, “Europe is for you.” According to the Migrant Integration Policy Index, Portugal has the second-most favorable citizenship regime in the European Union, in terms of naturalization rates.

Over this period, Portugal has not just shed its dictatorial past, it has become a leader of multilateral democracy. Think of the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon, which helped to manage the bloc after it enlarged from 15 to 27 states, as well as Portuguese native António Guterres ascending to secretary-general of the United Nations in 2017. This spring, an absolute majority of Portuguese—81 percent—told pollsters that they were proud of the way that Portugal became a democracy. This process involved not just ending its dictatorship at home, but also liberating its remaining colonies in Africa.

When I visit Portugal and observe this pride in action, my mind inevitably goes to post-Soviet countries that failed to keep their liberal democracies and rolled back to dictatorial regimes in the decades after the fall of USSR. During my 24 years of covering news in the region, I interviewed many people in Russia, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia who told me they felt nostalgic for a strong leader like Joseph Stalin. It seemed to me as if they were suffering from the loss of historical memory. Russia targets leaders of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group Memorial that worked hard to preserve painful memories, documenting hundreds of thousands of KGB cases and gulag victims, including the names of 44,000 people executed on personal order of Stalin. But the Portuguese do not hide their history, nor do they miss Salazar. Why? As millions of Ukrainians suffer from a war spurred on by Russia’s imperial ideology, I wanted to find out.

The PCP was founded in 1921 as a legal party, but in 1926 it was forced underground by the far-right Estado Novo regime. Salazar came to power in 1932 and continued severe repression of anarchists and communists. Lisbon’s former prison, Museu do Aljube, lists the names and photographs of Portuguese opposition members imprisoned, tortured, or executed by the regime in the 1930s. The underground did not stop its struggle for over four decades of Europe’s longest dictatorship, though, and the working class and communist underground played a decisive role in preparing for April 25.

Portuguese communists, whom Moscow denied paying, were widely celebrated for the Carnation Revolution’s victory. Their involvement meant as soon as the people of Portugal embraced freedom from the dictatorship, they had to choose a side in the ongoing Cold War. The same year of the revolution, 1974, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev visited Fidel Castro in Cuba. Brezhnev was pushing European governments, the United States, and Canada to sign a document about security in Europe, recognizing the Soviet military victory in World War II, the acceptance of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and forced incorporation of Baltic states.

Fortunately for Portugal, the United States played a cautious role in Portuguese internal affairs, while the Soviet Union accepted the choice Portuguese people ultimately made to embrace the democratic path. “By the fall of 1974, communists tried to take over the power but our people made a different choice—we chose democracy,” Brites said.

Portugal signed the Helsinki Accords, along with nearly all other European governments, Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union in Helsinki on Aug. 1, 1975, confirming the acceptance of post-1945 borders. Later pro-Soviet regimes took power in Portuguese former colonies in Africa, including Angola. After the revolution, Portugal gave independence to Angola, a colony for nearly 500 years (and a source of slaves for Brazil), withdrawing its military forces by November 1975.

On a recent afternoon, I talked about liberal values with immigration lawyer Gilda Pereira, who grew up in Angola where her family enjoyed a wealthy and successful life before the revolution. Portugal’s presence in Angola began with the arrival of the explorer Diogo Cão in 1482, and although Portugal officially changed Angola’s status from a colony to an oversea province in 1951, its landlords continued to use forced labor at local plantations.

I expected somebody who grew up affluent in a former colony might be less in favor of the changes in Portugal but Pereira’s face was illuminated with a big smile when she talked about the revolution and how it transformed her country. The founder of a successful law firm in Lisbon who employs more than a dozen women lawyers, Pereira said she felt “zero nostalgia” for the dictatorship and loved Portugal’s active civil society and its passion for freedom. Portuguese human rights defenders are respected, she said, and investigative journalists are acclaimed.

“I am glad we let Angola and other colonies free, I am happy we have the rule of law, that we are true democrats,” she told me. Under Salazar, Pereira explained, she and her team of women would lack basic human rights. Progress continues, and this year, Portugal has risen to 17th in the Global Gender Gap Index ranking of equality, up from last year’s 32nd place.

Local freelance reporter Claudia Maques Santos explains Portugal’s choice this way: “I think it has to do with memory and sense of freedom.” For many Portuguese, recalling the era of authoritarian rule is far more painful than it is aggrandizing. Maria Brites echoed this, telling me she was “utterly unhappy” under Salazar and his successor in the provincial town where she taught art and raised her daughters. The dictatorship forbade divorce, and hers was a miserable marriage: “Every month he picked up my salary at school,” she said of her husband, “as all men were allowed to do that to women. We had no rights.”

On the morning of April 25, 1974, Brites’s father called to tell her that the revolution had happened, and she rushed to Lisbon to see it for herself, even though, she said, her husband tried to stop her with threats. Arriving in Lisbon, she felt what she described as “complete happiness, freedom to say what you felt like.”

Improbably for a democratic revolution, Portugal’s transition began with a coup, as military officers who opposed the regime rose up against it, in no small part because of the country’s imperial adventures abroad. Under Salazar, Portugal was paying an immense human cost fighting to maintain its African colonies. Over lunch in April, Col. Aprigio Ramalho, one of the officers who led the revolution, told me that the trips he made to Mozambique and Angola under the dictatorship were part of what galvanized his action. Portugal had waged war in Africa for 13 years, and thousands of Portuguese men had died there. “The failing African wars were the turning point for the revolution,” the colonel told me. The analogy to Ukraine was not lost on him: “Russian military men should read their oath well. We did. We were sworn to defend the people, or Portugal, our country, but not the dictatorship.”

Isabel Graca, a history professor at Almada Senior University, told me, “We made the choice to be free: No woman under Salazar could travel abroad without her husband’s permission. … As a student, I ran away from the police many times. We were banned from gathering in groups of more than three people. Punishment was severe.”

For women in particular, the civil liberties they could not have under dictatorship were far more critical than the distant territories that fascist Portugal claimed to control. This is exactly the situation citizens face in today’s Russia, where millions of people suffer from poverty, domestic violence, corruption, and a poor health system and where none of Putin’s imperialistic ideas and promises to build the “new world order” together with China and Hungary can distract from daily miseries.

A woman walks past a mural reading, “Join the PCP,” during the Portuguese Communist Party Avante Festival in Seixal, outside Lisbon, on Sept. 4, 2020. Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

Pedro Magalhaes, a senior researcher at Portugal’s Institute of Social Sciences, told me that Portugal has little reason to worry about the role of communists in its political life. On the contrary, he said, “Communists have been reliable democratic actors, involved in revising the constitution, controlling law-abiding unions, and having representatives in parliament.”

A woman holds a red carnation as people demonstrate during the Carnation Revolution’s 50th anniversary at Avenida da Liberdade in Lisbon on April 25. Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP via Getty Images

This year, Portugal’s far-right party Chega won 48 seats in the parliament. They have been accused of racism: In 2020, the party’s founder, André Ventura, was fined for discriminating of Roma community. That same year, he wrote on social media that Black lawmaker Joacine Katar Moreira should go back “to her own country.” But local democrats are not worried. “Chega is being left alone at the parliament, no one makes alliances with them, neither left- nor right-wing parties,” Marques Santos told me.

Nearly half of Portugal’s population earn less than 1,000 euros a month, many complain about their country quietly becoming an immigration hub, majority want a reduction of emigration. But in spite of the social issues, Portugal continues to resist to the extreme far-right agenda. June poll showed Chega getting 12 percent of support, which was a drop from 18 percent it received in the election.

“Portuguese people have a genuine love for freedom,” Magalhaes said.