National Union (Portugal)

The National Union (Portuguese: União Nacional) was the sole legal party of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, founded in July 1930 and dominated by António de Oliveira Salazar during most of its existence.
Unlike in most single-party regimes, the National Union was more of a political arm of the government rather than holding actual power over it. The National Union membership was mostly drawn from local notables: landowners, professionals and businessmen, Catholics, monarchists or conservative republicans. The National Union was never a militant or very active organization.
Once Salazar assumed the premiership, the National Union became the only party legally allowed to function under the Estado Novo. Salazar announced that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party. The NU became an ancillary body, not a source of political power. At no stage did it appear that Salazar wished it to fulfill the central role the fascist party had acquired in Mussolini's Italy; in fact, it was meant to be a platform of conservatism, not a revolutionary vanguard.
The National Union's ideology was corporatism, and it took as many inspirations from Catholic encyclicals such as Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno as well as from Mussolini's corporate state. Unlike fascist parties, the National Union played no role in the government - it only served as a tool for the selection of National Assembly deputies, as well as a way to provide some legitimacy to non-competitive elections that Salazar's regime regularly held. The National Union was set up to control and restrain public opinion rather than to mobilize it, and ministers, diplomats and civil servants were never compelled to join the party.
According to António Costa Pinto, the National Union was a moribund party, created by a governmental decree rather than by political activists, and which was "dominated by the administration, put to sleep and reawakened in accordance with the situation at the time". He describes the party as "an empty, undermined space into which were formally sent those who wanted to join the regime and which, once full, was closed". Pinto notes that the army was kept away from public life, and political activity was prohibited outside public life. This included the National Union, which lacked any kind of political activism. Therefore the party lacked an ideology, and did not mobilize the masses. Pinto argues that it was the opposite, as "in fact demotivation was openly encouraged". He concludes that the party had a "non-fascist nature" and argues that it "neither reached power at all nor, once created, fulfilled functions of control and monopoly of access to power or mobilization of the masses, which, in general, the fascists did."
Scholarly opinion varies on whether the Estado Novo and the National Union should be considered fascist or not. Salazar himself criticized the "exaltation of youth, the cult of force through direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, [and] the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader" as fundamental differences between fascism and the Catholic corporatism of the Estado Novo. Scholars such as Stanley G. Payne, Thomas Gerard Gallagher, Juan José Linz, António Costa Pinto, Roger Griffin, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and Arnd Bauerkämper, as well as Howard J. Wiarda, consider the Portuguese Estado Novo conservative authoritarian and not fascist. In his The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton express the same view, writing that Salazar's regime was "not only nonfascist, but voluntarily nontotalitarian". On the other hand, Portuguese scholars like Fernando Rosas, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Manuel de Lucena, Manuel Loff and Raquel Varela think that the Estado Novo should be considered fascist.
The party was founded in 1930 during the Ditadura Nacional period. Officially it was not a political party but an "organization of unity of all the Portuguese". Salazar in the speech that launched the party, was vague in terms of its role, and he incorporated all the parties supporting the dictatorship, whether republican, monarchic or Catholic. Its first organic principles expressly declared that “all citizens, regardless of their political or religious beliefs” would be admitted as long as they adhered to the principles of Salazar’s speech of 30 June 1930.
The National Union was formed as a subservient umbrella organization to support the regime itself. It was the only party legally allowed under the Estado Novo regime; all other political parties were banned and persecuted, this later included the National Syndicalists, led by Francisco Rolão Preto, who were originally supporters. In 1934 Salazar arrested and exiled Francisco Rolão Preto as a part of a purge of the leadership of the Portuguese National Syndicalists. The Portuguese National Syndicalists broke into factions, some going into exile while the majority ended up joining the National Union. Salazar denounced the National Syndicalists as "inspired by certain foreign models" (meaning German Nazism) and condemned their "exaltation of youth, the cult of force through direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, [and] the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader" as fundamental differences between fascism and the Catholic corporatism of the Estado Novo.
The first leader of the National Union was the Interior Minister Colonel Lopes Mateus. The composition of the Central Commission indicated that the party was meant to support the regime rather than militate for it. Salazar became president, and Albino dos Reis, a former member of the Cunha Leal ULR, was nominated Vice President. The first Central Commission was composed by Bissaia Barreto, João Amaral, a judge and an integralist monarchist, and Nuno Mexia, who had been linked to the Union of Economic Interests (União dos Interesses Económicos) in the 1920s. Appointment to lead the party meant either "retirement" or a prestigious pause from government duties. The absence of youth was a characteristic of the National Union, particularly in the 1930s. At the first Congress, 68% of the delegates were over 40 years old.
According to historian António Costa Pinto, the National Union is an example of extreme weakness among dictatorships with weak single parties. There was no internal party activity until 1933. From 1934 onwards, after the creation of the regime’s new institutions, the National Union embarked on a period of lethargy from which it did not emerge until 1944. This lethargy can be partly explained by the affirmation by the regime that it did not attribute great importance to it beyond its utility as an electoral and legitimating vehicle.
Lawrence S. Graham and Harry M. Makler wrote that the party "scarcely existed", and added: "This single party appeared to be absent in national life. Filled with prominent people, it did not include the masses, and it showed itself only transiently during electoral periods." Graham and Makler also argue that this points to "the absence of a true fascist movement" in Portugal, noting the weak, amorphous and disorganized character of the National Union, unable to organise youth organizations and militias present in fascist movements.
The Estado Novo also created state bodies for propaganda, youth and labour, but they were not connected with the party. In 1931, the official newspaper of the National Union, Diário da Manhã. Its first issue was published on 4 April 1931. Using Diário da Manhã, the National Union called for national unity and cooperation, arguing that the "foreign institutional system" of the [[First Portiguese Republic "had proved to be incompatible with the necessities, interests, qualities and even flaws of the Portuguese nation". It contrasted the supposed stability of the Estado Novo, as opposed to the pre-1926 republican government which "transformed the country‟s public life into something like a tribal African disorder".
In 1938 Salazar recognized that National Union's activities “were successively diminished until they had almost been extinguished”. With World War II's end, the National Union came to life again. In October 1945, Salazar announced a liberalization 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 opposition to Salazar started to organize 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 moderate opposition controlled the MUD, 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.
The opposition Movement of Democratic Unity was legal between 1945 and 1948, but even then, the political system was so heavily rigged that it had no realistic chance of winning.
The party won all seats in elections to the National Assembly of Portugal from 1934 to 1973. Opposition candidates were nominally allowed after 1945 but prematurely withdrew in the 1945 and 1973 legislative elections. In 1970, two years after Salazar had been replaced as a leader and prime minister by Marcelo Caetano, the name of the party was changed to Acção Nacional Popular ("People's National Action"). Subsequent to Salazar's retirement, the party faced formal competition in the 1969 legislative election. However, the conduct of this election was little different from past contests, with the ANP winning all constituencies in a landslide.
Under Caetano, the party and the regime further softened its rule - the police is reported to "have become more respectful of legality [...] and would spare systematically moderate opponents", and the People's National Action proclaimed that it would move "toward a degree of pluralism". Censorship was softened, political debates occurred, while strikes and demonstrations came to be tolerated. Caetano also permitted the formation of a non-state labor movement - the General Confederation of the Portuguese Workers. Compared to Salazar, Caetano presided over "a far more open, more pluralist, more socially just system".
The most important ideological change that Caetano implemented was reforming Salazar's syndicalism - in 1969, Caetano gave the state syndicates a right to elect their own leadership without government approval. Graham and Makler wrote that this reform proved revolutionary: "Within months the sindicatos, which for decades had been trade unions in name only, began to be transformed from amorphous government agencies into genuine instruments of the workers. For the first time opposition elements, including Communists in the case of some sindicatos, swept the union elections, and the elections were allowed to stand." Wage disputes were also reformed, and the workers' syndicates would not select their own representatives in the disputes, granting independent bargaining power. Caetano also introduced a vast range of new social programs, and ensured their enforcement.
Caetano has been described as a "frustrated liberal" who was willing to but unable to implement the process of democratization, and who was thwarted in his reforms by the salazarista forces. Ultimately, he was unable to move forward with his reforms, and he came to preside over "liberalization without democratization". The political gridlock that Caetano encountered, together with the colonial wars, growing factionalism and the growth of independent labor movement, resulted in "the total incapacity of the Caetano regime to find a political solution."
The party had no real philosophy apart from support for the regime. The National Syndicalist leader, Francisco Rolão Preto criticized the National Union in 1945 as a “grouping of moderates of all parties, bourgeois without soul or faith in the national and revolutionary imperatives of our time”.
As a result of its lack of ideology, it disappeared in short order after the Portuguese Revolution of 1974. It has never been revived, and no party claiming to be its heir has won any seats in the Assembly of the Republic in modern Portugal.