page_title: António de Oliveira Salazar
section_title: Maintaining the regime
hierarchical_section_title: António de Oliveira Salazar / Politics and Estado Novo / World War II / Maintaining the regime
caption_attribution_description: English: Badge of PIDE - Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (International and State Defense Police), the Portuguese secret police from 1945 to 1969 Português: Identificação da PIDE - Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, polícia secreta e política de Portugal de 1945 a 1969
context_page_description: António de Oliveira Salazar GCTE GCSE GColIH GCIC was a Portuguese statesman who served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He was responsible for the Estado Novo, the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled Portugal until 1974.
  A trained economist, Salazar entered public life as finance minister with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the Portuguese coup d'état of 28 May 1926. The military of 1926 saw themselves as the guardians of the nation, but they had no clue how to address the critical challenges of the hour. Within one year, armed with special powers, Salazar balanced the budget and stabilized Portugal's currency. Restoring order to the national accounts, enforcing austerity and red-penciling waste, Salazar produced the first of many budgetary surpluses, an unparalleled novelty in Portugal. In four years he showed himself to be an even more accomplished political wizard than an economic one. He civilianized the authoritarian regime when the politics of more and more countries were becoming militarized. Salazar's aim was the depoliticization of society not the mobilization of populace.
context_section_description: In spite of the Salazar regime's use of censorship and inhumane imprisonment of political prisoners in order to suppress dissent, Life magazine in July 1940 spoke of him with approbation, describing him as a "a benevolent ruler" and adding that 
  "unambitious, Salazar took the dictatorship by Army request and holds it by popular will. (...) The Salazar dictatorship is easygoing and paternalistic, with wide freedom of speech allowed to its enemies. (...) Friends of democracy may deplore Salazar the dictator but they cannot deny that under the Republic Portugal made an unholy mess of itself and Salazar pulled it out." 
  A reporter from the National Geographic Magazine was surprised with the liberties he enjoyed while in Lisbon, a level of freedom that, according to the reporter, was not available in any other European capital.
  In October 1945, Salazar announced a liberalisation program designed to restore civil rights that had been suppressed during the Spanish Civil War and World War II in hopes of improving the image of his regime in Western circles. The measures included parliamentary elections, a general political amnesty, restoration of freedom of the press, curtailment of legal repression and a commitment to introduce the right of habeas corpus. The regime started to organise itself around a broad coalition, the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), which ranged from ultra-Catholics and fringe elements of the extreme right to the Portuguese Communist Party. Initially, the MUD was controlled by the moderate opposition, but it soon became strongly influenced by the Communist Party, which controlled its youth wing. In the leadership were several communists, among them Octávio Pato, Salgado Zenha, Mário Soares, Júlio Pomar and Mário Sacramento. This influence led the MUD to be outlawed by the government in 1948 after several waves of suppression. Restrictions that had been temporarily lifted were then gradually reinstated.
  As the Cold War started, Salazar's Estado Novo remained rigidly authoritarian. Salazar had been able to hold onto power by virtue of the public's recollection of the chaos that had characterised Portuguese life before 1926. However, by the 1950s, a new generation emerged that had no collective memory of this instability. The clearest sign of this came in the Portuguese presidential election of 1958. Most neutral observers believed that the candidate of the democratic opposition, Humberto Delgado, would have defeated the candidate of the Salazar regime, Américo Tomás, had the election been conducted fairly. Delgado was well aware that the president's power to sack the prime minister was theoretically the only check on Salazar's power. He famously stated that if elected, one of his first acts would be to dismiss Salazar. Delgado was able to rally support from a wide range of opposition viewpoints. Among his supporters were some controversial figures, namely the press campaign manager Francisco Rolão Preto, a former Nazi sympathiser and former leader of the Blue Shirts, who had been exiled by Salazar in the 1930s. Official figures credited Delgado with one-fourth of the votes, in total approximately a million–well behind Tomás. Salazar was alarmed enough by the episode that he pushed through a constitutional amendment transferring election of the president to the two parliamentary bodies, which were both firmly under his control. Delgado was expelled from the Portuguese military and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy before going into exile. Much of his banishment was spent in Brazil and later in Algeria, as a guest of Ahmed Ben Bella. Later, in 1965, he was lured into an ambush by the PIDE (the regime's secret police) near the border town of Olivenza. Delgado and his Brazilian secretary Arajaryr Moreira de Campos were killed while trying to enter Portugal clandestinely. An official statement claimed that Delgado was shot and killed in self-defence, despite Delgado being unarmed; his secretary was strangled.
  In 1968, Salazar suffered a brain hemorrhage when he fell in a bath. As he became incapacitated, Pre
caption: The PIDE's badge.
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