The Portuguese Far Right

Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945-2015)

Riccardo Marchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315409917
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Fascisme et totalitarisme

The book discusses the far right in the contemporary Portugal (1945-2015) within three different periods: the end of the authoritarian regime of António de Oliveira Salazar (1945-1974), the transition to democracy after the coup d'état of April 25th (1974-1982) and the democratic regime until the present (1982-2015). The analysis focuses on political groups and parties, social movements, ideologies, intellectuals and publications acting at the extreme right of the political spectrum of the Portuguese authoritarian regime and of the democratic regime, both on a national and international level. The book also contextualizes the Portuguese far right within the political thought and the organisational models of the wider European extreme right.

A qualitative in-depth case study and the outcome of ten years of research, this book offers analysis of historical and contemporary primary sources, previously unexplored archives and in-depth interviews. Assessing the extent to which the behaviour of the far right is altered in different political environments and situations, this book makes an innovative and unique contribution to scholarship on the extreme right within southern Europe and will be of interest to students and scholars researching extreme right politics, as well as European history and politics more generally.

Part I

The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime (1945–1974)

1 The far right intellectual milieu at the end of the Second World War (1945–1960)

At the beginning of the 20th century in Portugal, a wide variety of movements were founded by right-wing republicans and royalists. These movements were very different from the doctrinarian point of view and for the degree of radicalism and political solutions proclaimed (Leal 1999: 167–174). This right-wing wave can be further divided by three particular kinds of nationalism. The first was the conservative one represented by the Liga Nacional (1915–1918), the Centro Católico Português (1917–1932), and the Cruzada Nacional Nuno Alvares Pereira (1918–1938). The second was the counter-revolutionary one under the Integralismo Lusitano (1914–1922) and the Acção Realista Portuguesa (1923–1926). Finally, the third was a fascist-like one, spearheaded during the 1920s and the 1930s by the Centro do Nacionalismo Lusitano and by the Movimento Nacional Sindicalista (Leal 2015: 115–116).¹

These right-wing organizations were at the forefront of the intellectual and armed opposition against the First Republic (1910–1928), supporting the ephemeral dictatorial parentheses, such as those from Joaquim Pimenta de Castro in 1915 and Sidónio Pais from 1917 to 1918 or the Monarchy of the North of Henrique Paiva Couceiro in 1919 (Meneses 2004: 194–207). With the military coup on 28 May 1926, they competed for the conquest of space in the shadow of the new political situation (Adinolfi and Pinto 2014: 155–157). Many leading figures of these organizations – conservative Republicans, royal integralists, Catholics, fascists – ascended to power when António de Oliveira Salazar was nominated to be the President of the Council of Ministers on 5 July 1933 (Rodrigues 1997: 92; Torgal 2009: 14). However, Salazar’s strongly centralized government and the Catholic church’s newly given role for social intervention and youth development weakened the influence of the extreme right in the regime and in society (Raimundo, Ferreira, and Carvalho 2009: 99; Pinto and Rezola 2008: 154).

Indeed, the creation of the New State ended up representing the largest blockade for the autonomy of the extreme right within the regime (Meneses 2016: 84). A part of this political family ended up as such becoming incompatible with the regime, which came to be synonymous with the figure of Salazar himself. Some renowned integralists and national syndicalists (Quintas 2004: 17–18) shone as oppositional figures. It is in this manner that national syndicalism is paradigmatic in how it attempted to mobilize the working classes through a fascist style, going beyond the classic civil and military elitist basis as its nationalist foundation. Its external success at the fringes of the regime and its critique of the New State elicited a reaction from Salazar: in July 1934, the national syndicalist movement was forbidden by lawful decree, and in February 1935, it came to a full stop with the coup’s failure. The limits imposed on the extreme right accentuated even more the number of nationalists discouraged with the possibility to realize an autonomous revolution. They ended up joining rank and file in the New State (Pinto 2000: 220–221; Pinto 2007: 69–72).

The difficulties facing the extreme right got worse with the start of the Second World War. In the 1930s, the regimes in Lisbon, Rome, and Berlin shared common elements in their ideologies and followed a similar authoritarian model, which appealed to the large legions of right-wing people in Portugal towards fascism and National Socialism. However, with the onset of war, solidarity prevailed with the historic British ally within this political group.² This position was reinforced by Portugal’s neutrality in the war as decreed by Salazar. As a result, during the first half of the 1940s, the affinity right-wing Portuguese people had for fascism waned, even those who were as a rule anti-democratic. In the spring of 1945, the political and intellectual milieu that had sided with the Axis during the war was in a clear minority. This minority was exacerbated by the masquerade promoted by Salazar to preserve the authoritarian regime and the Portuguese colonial empire in the new international context led by the democracies that had won in the west and the emerging bipolar world order. This was composed of promoting the New State as a model of “organic democracy”, de-politicizing the youth organization Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa) and the paramilitary organization Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa) (Meneses 2016: 398–406; Teixeira 2003: 106; Pinto 2003: 43).

Seen from this angle of institutional prudence that Salazar conveyed, and the permeability shown in the democratic model by some of the right-wing supporters of the regime, the stampede of radical hosts was countered by a handful of intellectuals linked to the newspaper A Esfera (1940–1945). It was a body of Germanophile propaganda during the war (Telo 1990: 34). In February 1946 they published the weekly newspaper, A Nação, directed by José O’Neill. The mind behind the weekly was Alfredo Pimento, the renowned intellectual of royalist Portuguese nationalism.

Alfredo Pimenta (1882–1950) was a prominent figure of the Portuguese extreme right in the 20th century. His intellectual path was symptomatic of the nationalist generation in Portugal between the 19th and 20th centuries and also of the doctrinal line that moulded the most radical right wing in Portugal up until at least the 1970s. Born to a family of agrarian landowners in the north, Pimenta had always been attracted to who the current radical thinkers of the time were. His first political readings were the fathers of revolutionary anarchism: Pierre Kropotkine, Mikhail Bakunin, Jean Grave, Élisée Reclus, and Charles Malato. His concept of anarchism was filtered, however, by the thoughts of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, which helped paved the path for Pimenta towards a vitalist and anarchic aristocraticism. This phase influenced his relationship with Catholicism in addition to his interest in the figure of Jesus Christ in light of the clinical studies on historical figures, in vogue at the time following Cesare Lombroso’s work.

However, the most fruitful area for his intellectual maturity was his philosophical speculation on the path towards truth, which was an area greatly influenced by the work of August Comte. As a result of this influence by Comte, Pimenta – who in this period graduated in Law at University of Coimbra – became convinced that metaphysical speculation was useless and that the scientific approach to social and political phenomena was necessary. The objective of a scientific approach, to him, was to unravel mechanisms subjacent to empirical reality and create functional structures that would contribute towards community well-being. As such, this epistemological passage led Pimenta to abandon anarchism and embrace positivist Republicanism. In this concept, the central role is not attributed to the masses, but rather to the elite of the elite inside the community, who are granted the right to govern the people and for the people, in a climate of order and discipline. Pimenta, however, became disillusioned with this Comtean approach, and became increasingly more sceptical on achieving truth through data and scientific concepts that provide differing and even contradictory models.

Confronted with the observation of mortal inability to achieve the most efficient and absolute political model through scientific speculation, the young intellectual concluded that the only truth – whose existence he had never questioned – did not belong to the immanent dimension, but instead to a transcendental one. With this in mind, Pimenta turned back to his religious faith. He considered religion the only way to reach truth: that is the truth revealed by God and experienced within the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church.

Only when taken into a transcendental context can truth be absolute, since in nature truths are merely relative, strictly associated to historic contingencies and in constant dialectical confrontation. This is why Pimenta began studying Catholic faith from the primary sources, free from interpretations accumulated over the centuries. He applied this methodology to the study of national history and the origins of the Portuguese nation. The idea is to hold within itself the transcendent truth and engage in dialectics inherent in life as action and struggle. To forgo action and fighting would be to desert and reject life. In a fight, all intellectual and material forces must be mobilized to impose their truth over the truths of others. The goal is to recruit as many people as possible because the number is power and convergence of spirits and the individual truths generate a spirit and a stronger truth: the national community. The nation seen from this perspective is the historically determined truth and equipped with a “will of power”. In this sense, the adequate political model to the nation is not an ideal type, always valid in time and space. To the contrary, the model is determined by history: in the Portuguese case, it is the traditional monarchy that created the nation-state in 1128 with the expansion of the former “Contado portucalense”.

Pimenta’s move from positivist Republicanism to traditionalist monarchism was closely tied to his personal experience. The first Republic (1910–1926) founded in the debris of the constitutional monarchy (1820–1910) brought about a period of political instability, social conflict, a financial-economic collapse, and mass mobilization through the revolutionary myths of positive liberties and universal suffrage. Pimenta hated this perspective, as following Comte’s example, he always favoured the elites to lead national politics and not the masses stirred by Utopian ideas. This switch to monarchism was not immediate, however. In the first years of the Republic, Pimenta still belonged to the Partido Evolucionista, whose project of national redemption finally sank with the fall of General Pimenta de Castro’s dictatorship (January–May 1915), provoked also by the inanity of the conservative Republican forces. After having abandoned Republicanism, Pimenta immediately dismissed the idea of constitutional monarchism, which was the lead-up to the First Republic, and embraced a traditional monarchy, non-democratic and anti-liberal, the same that the nation had been founded on in 1128. During his Republican phase, Pimenta criticized only the Jacobin excesses of the most radical factions, whereby he appointed the principal enemy to be the principle of democracy itself. This principle undermined, naturally, the monarchy with its constitutionalism, and added in an element of uncertainty in the religious domain, through the dogmas of liberty, tolerance, and state secularism with its separation from the Roman Church.

In 1915, Pimenta was already a part of the right-wing Portuguese counter-revolution and during the First World War he supported the Central Empires. In particular, he began collaborating with the Nação Portuguesa, the journal of the Integralismo Lusitano, although he never formally joined the group. As a matter of fact, Pimenta came to blows with the Integralists in the 1920s, particularly with the key figure of António Sardinha. Their divergences worsened especially on the issue of dynastic succession. This issue led Pimenta to definitively break off from the Integralismo Lusitano and to found on 8 December 1923 the Acção Realista, the successor of the Acção Tradicionalista Portuguesa in 1921 (Leal 2014).

Pimenta’s uncompromising stance and controversial character turned him into a well-known figure, but also rather polemical for the right wing that had joined the ranks of the New State from the 1930s on. In the first decades of the regime, the nationalist intellectual emphasized these characteristics of his, with his sights aimed on restoring the monarchy and rejecting any kind of liberalizing reform. This doctrinal action inside the regime, along with his support of the Axis Powers during the Second World War, ran counter to the trend of the rest of the Portuguese right wing, establishing Pimenta as the leading radical figure for the 1930s and 1940s.

As a result, the founders of A Nação invited Pimenta to join them in 1946 with the intention to re-spark the fight from the war years in this new “trench” of the Portuguese extreme right. As apologists of a right-wing vision of fascism, the group, A Nação, spread classic ideas of authoritarian nationalism: to defend the regime and its leader against internal traitors, the idea of permanent revolution as a third way between right and left, and the need of a renewed corporative and justicialist impulse for the regime. However, it was the Axis defeat in 1945 that set the tone for the weekly, making it the vector of the extreme right battles in Portugal. In this sense, several European intellectuals collaborated with the journal such as the Italian Leo Negrelli, the Swiss Paul Gentizon, and the French refugees in Portugal Jacques Ploncard d’Assac and Jean Haupt (Marchi 2009a: 80).

The main subjects tackled in the weekly were democracy and its double-sided capitalistic or sovietic model; Christian Democracy as theorized by Jacques Maritain considered the instrument of international communism; and the subversive actions engendered by Zionism, masonry, and international finance, all of which were the true causes of the Second World War. In this regard, anti-Zionism is always seen as anti-Semitism at its heart. With its bearings rooted in conspiracy theories from the book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, A Nação aligned with the European extreme right more than the classic Portuguese nationalism, presenting Jewish people as alien figures to the nation, producers of chaos (French Revolution in 1789 and the Russian Revolution in 1917), apologists of internationalism (capitalism, communism, United Nations Organization), and averse to the idea of the West as the material and spiritual peak of human civilization.

That A Nação sided with the European extreme right was apparent through the campaigns of the weekly newspaper in support of the victims of purges after 1945 and against the so-called “New World Order”. Regarding the “New World Order”, the weekly edited a book in 1947 titled Um novo direito internacional: Nuremberg (A new international right: Nuremburg), penned by a Nazi German living in Portugal, Karl Wisemann, under the pseudonym João das Regras. A Nação as such regularly published biographies of leading figures among the defeated of 1945, such as Joseph Goebbels, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, José António Primo de Rivera, Philippe Pétain, Robert Brasillach, and Jean Bassompierre.

The radicalism expressed in A Nação and Pimenta’s continual collaboration with them isolated the weekly on the extreme right within the New State. According to information from radicals themselves, the weekly had a substantial following over the course of its two years in publication, with roughly 20,000 readers, 5,000 subscribers, and was able to rally between 200 and 500 people for their public events, both in Lisbon and Porto (Marchi 2009a: 86). The weekly was criticized, however, by the right wing in the regime and by institutional figures due to its role as pro-fascist propaganda in this new historical phase. This resulted in making the weekly a point of reference for the emerging generation that felt an affinity for fascist nationalism at the beginning of the 1940s and becomes part of the intellectual-political militancy in the second post-war period.

The most relevant group from this time period was comprised of students who favoured monarchism at the University of Coimbra. They collaborated with A Nação for their youth page, and in December 1946, they founded the bi-weekly Mensagem, resulting in 20 issues published between 1946 and 1950. The journal was led by Caetano de Mello Beirão, son of Caetano Beirão, who aided Pimenta with Acção Realista in 1923. The initial group that founded Mensagem banded together former integralists with young monarchists, among whom were differing viewpoints. As such, the main core of the university students was rather heterogeneous, and represented the major strains of monarchist conservatism in favour of the New State, with two tendencies of particular note. The first can be seen through Henrique Barrilaro Ruas, director of the Centro Académico da Democracia Cristã de Coimbra (CADC), which was nationalistic, Catholic, and interested in designing the future of the Portuguese regime, ensuring the return to monarchism. It recognized, however, new political realities in the wake of the War, in particular the favour of the Catholic Church for democracy as a political model. The other tendency also wished to return to monarchism, but following a different path of nationalism, inspired by the fascist revolutions between the World Wars. This last component was led by the journal’s director, Caetano de Mello Beirão and his comrades Amândio César, António José de Brito, and Florentino Goulart Nogueira, all of whom were to later be heralded due to their militancy in the Portuguese extreme right in authoritarianism and in democracy.

The fascist component in Mensagem led the journal to tighten ties with A Nação, sharing the ideology of the European extreme right in the post-war period and claiming intellectual liability with Pimenta. This development created conflicts between the two factions within Mensagem, and led the nationalist Catholic faction to resign from the journal. The dispute was exacerbated due to Pimenta’s theory on how authoritarian monarchy could be compatible with fascist and national-socialist principles. Moderates did not accept his proposal, based on the combination between the principles of counter-revolution and the fascist revolution. For Barrilaro Ruas’ group, this formula was inadequate for the complexity of modern society – for the radicals, however, this became the guiding principle of their political and intellectual endeavours. Consequently, the doctrinal references of the radical faction were based in the masters of European counter-revolutions and in the Portuguese integralists, with a particular preference for the intellectuals in the Acção Realista (Alfredo Pimenta, Caetano Beirão, João Ameal, and Fernando Campos) and the theories of Italian fascists (Giovanni Gentile, Ugo Spirito, Arnaldo Volpicelli, and Alfredo Rocco).

Pimenta’s influence on young radicals can best be seen in the epistolary exchange between him and his disciples in the second half of the 1940s (Marchi 2016). In a letter dating to November 1944, Amândio César recognized Pimenta’s role in not just his own development from Marxism to nationalism during the Spanish Civil War, but also in his full support of fascism at the beginning of the Second World War. In May 1946, Goulart Nogueira also attested Pimenta’s contribution towards his full affiliation to anti-democratic, Germanophilic, monarchist, and Catholic positions. In January 1948, António José de Brito thanked Pimenta for his continual efforts to encourage young people during the war to keep them close to the side of fascism and National Socialism. In January 1947, Caetano de Mello Beirão also thanked his teacher for staying true to himself and his values at the end of the war as many Portuguese nationalists drifted from the cause. He also confirmed the support of his group in Pimenta’s campaign against the democratic inclinations of several monarchist supporters of the regime.

How supporters of the New State reacted at the end of the Second World War shaped in great part a generation of young nationalists, both moderate and radical, all concerned with the uncertain political climate felt in Portugal. As democracy had prevailed in the aftermath of the War, those who opposed the regime felt bolstered by their victory. On the contrary, the nationalistic milieu was at odds with the viability of the authoritarian regime alongside...