The Portuguese Far Right: Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945–2015) 9781138218987, 9781315409931

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Historical periodization and book structure
The object and the objectives of the research
The conceptual question
Methodology
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)
2 The far right at the outbreak of the war in Africa (1961–1968)
3 The right-wing opposition to the Marcello Caetano government (1968–1974)
Part II The far right during the transition to democracy (1974–1982)
4 The far right resistance during the revolution (1974–1975)
5 The far right resurgence in the “democratic normalization” (1976–1982)
6 The metapolitics as the new strategy to modernize the far right (1982–1985)
Part III The far right during the consolidated democracy (1982–2015)
7 A new cycle in democracy: the groupuscular and subcultural far right (1985–1999)
8 The new party strategy at the dawn of the new millennium (1999–2015)
9 The identitarian movement in Portugal
Conclusions
At the end of the New State
Transition to democracy
Consolidated democracy and new millennium
Index

Citation preview

The Portuguese Far Right

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 25 April (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 organizational models of the wider European extreme right. A qualitative in-depth case study and the outcome of 10 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. Riccardo Marchi is Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies at the University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors: Nigel Copsey, Teesside University, and

Graham Macklin,

Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo.

This new book series focuses upon fascist, far right and right-wing politics primarily within a historical context but also drawing on insights from other disciplinary perspectives. Its scope also includes radical-right populism, cultural manifestations of the far right and points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right. Titles include: Searching for Lord Haw-Haw The Political Lives of William Joyce Colin Holmes France and Fascism February 1934 and the Dynamics of Political Crisis Brian Jenkins and Chris Millington Cultures of Post-War British Fascism Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson (eds.) Tomorrow Belongs to Us The UK Far Right since 1967 Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley (eds.) The Portuguese Far Right Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945–2015) Riccardo Marchi Never Again Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976–1982 David Renton For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

The Portuguese Far Right Between Late Authoritarianism and Democracy (1945–2015) Riccardo Marchi

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Riccardo Marchi The right of Riccardo Marchi to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-21898-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-40993-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Introduction Historical periodization and book structure  4 The object and the objectives of the research  8 The conceptual question  9 Methodology 10

1

PART I

The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime (1945–1974)17 1 The far right intellectual milieu at the end of the Second World War (1945–1960)

19

2 The far right at the outbreak of the war in Africa (1961–1968)

35

3 The right-wing opposition to the Marcello Caetano government (1968–1974)

55

PART II

The far right during the transition to democracy (1974–1982)69 4 The far right resistance during the revolution (1974–1975)

71

5 The far right resurgence in the “democratic normalization” (1976–1982)101 6 The metapolitics as the new strategy to modernize the far right (1982–1985)

121

vi  Contents PART III

The far right during the consolidated democracy (1982–2015)131 7 A new cycle in democracy: the groupuscular and subcultural far right (1985–1999)

133

8 The new party strategy at the dawn of the new millennium (1999–2015)155 9 The identitarian movement in Portugal

165

Conclusions At the end of the New State  182 Transition to democracy  185 Consolidated democracy and new millennium  189

181

Index193

Acknowledgements

The post-doctoral fellowship was granted by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) – SFRH/BPD/103212/2014 and UID/CPO/03122/2013.

Introduction

Considering the extensive literature on the extreme right in Western democracies, Portugal is often one of the most overlooked countries due to this political phenomenon’s irrelevance (Davis 1998; Ignazi 2003a: 144, 154; Backes 2011). In particular, the explicative factors for the extreme-right’s marginality are common to Western democracies like Portugal, Spain, and Greece: late persistence of authoritarian right-wing regimes followed by transitions to democracy and the consequent electorate mistrust, paving the way for a nostalgic recollection of the past (Ignazi 2003b: 1; Norris 2005: 65–66). In the Portuguese case, these factors were worsened due to the way the transition to democracy fell apart, making the extreme right’s reorganization all the more difficult after the fall of authoritarianism (Linz 1998: 40). Although the radical right wing did not have a stronghold in any of these three southern European countries, they deserved more attention from the national and international scientific community. Studies on the European right wing focusing on Spain in particular mushroomed in the last part of the 20th century, thanks to work from national historians such as Xavier Casals y Meseguer, José Luis Jiménez Rodríguez, Ferran Gallego, Pedro Carlos González Cuevas, and foreigners like Paul Preston and Sheelagh Ellwood. More recently, Spanish radicalism has garnered new interest from political scientists and historians due to the window of opportunity offered by the international economic crisis to the anti-system parties. Comparative studies on the recent populist outbreak have registered the greatest success of left-wing populism in comparison with the right-wing variant. Within this latter political spectrum, they confirmed the absolute marginality of the traditional, Francoist, and anti-democratic extreme right (Alonso and Kaltwasser 2015: 3–6). In much the same way, the recent collapse of the Greek political-economic system modified the scenario of the marginalization felt by the Hellenic extreme right since the downfall of the regime in 1974 (Kapetanyannis 1995: 135), thereby renewing the scientific community’s interest in the subject. With LAOS part of the national government in 2007, and especially Golden Dawn entering parliament in 2012, an increasing number of analyses were made as an attempt to explain a phenomenon that had been considered as a non-issue for so long. With a rise in immigration and unemployment, certain attitudes deemed as xenophobic and

2  Introduction nationalistic in the public eye were provided as possible answers, alongside the disappearance of competitors on the right of the political spectrum in the general context of the crisis of the party system which favoured the return of the old far right in Greece (Ellinas 2013: 556–559). Differing from Spain and Greece, Portugal has remained on the fringe of European extreme right-wing studies. As a general rule, radical Portuguese, be they on the left or right, were unable to capitalize on the economic crisis facing the country since 2011, which has kept scientific interest low regarding populism in the country. Portugal did not even appear on the radar as a paradigmatic example on the lack of populism in favourable contexts. This aspect is part of a large-scale disinterest for right-wing radicalism since the end of the Second World War. The existing scientific literature on contemporary Portuguese radicalism within the confines of the right wing is uneven to say the least, without even marking a chronological continuum (Ramos 2012: 18–29). The extreme right-wing was mainly analyzed in very specific cases: the relevance of the supporters of absolutism (the Miguelists) in the liberal wars of the 1820s and 1830s, the nationalist intellectuals’ opposition during the First Republic (1910–1926), and their support or criticism in the case of National-Syndicalism to Salazar’s New State since 1933. On the contrary, the academic community paid little heed to the extreme right in the authoritarian regime after 1945 and to the democracy in 1974. Little literature has been written on these subjects in English, having been relegated to scientific articles and chapters in books. These texts offer a macro analysis of the topic, particularly at the end of the regime and the transition to democracy. The research monographs have been up to now only available in Portuguese, presenting a diachronic analysis of the Portuguese right wing (Pinto 1996) or focusing on radicalism at the end of the New State regime and in the transition to democracy (Marchi 2009, 2017). In the context of the transition, the underground work done by the extreme right in 1975–1976 is what attracted the most interest among academics (Cervelló 1994; Tíscar 2014) and journalists (Wallraff 1976; Dâmaso 1999; Carvalho 2017). The first studies on this subject aimed at an international audience were less concerned with descriptive exhaustiveness but more on explaining the marginality of the Portuguese extreme right wing. In his leading work on radicalism at the end of the New State, António Costa Pinto (1989: 70) attributed the inherent weakness of the extreme right to some flaws within the authoritarian model of the regime itself. One of these factors included the feeble power of the political party it had (National Union – União Nacional) in contrast to the State itself. Another was weak political mobilization of the masses, in addition to limited participation in paramilitary organizations (Portuguese Legion – Legião Portuguesa and Portuguese Youth – Mocidade Portuguesa), and the de-politicization policy after 1945. The same occurred again following the outbreak of the African War in 1961. In this broader context, the literature relays two central characteristics of the extreme right in the New State. The first of these is the mobilization of the few nationalistic groups in occasion of the African War, with the intent to impose a revolutionary tinge to the regime, without putting at risk the figure of Salazar (Gallagher 1983, 1992: 235). The other was the switch to radical opposition methods against Marcelo

Introduction 3 Caetano – Salazar’s successor following 1968 – whose attempt to liberalize the regime put the crumbling Empire’s stability in danger (Pinto 1995: 111, 113). As regarding the transition to democracy, the fall of the New State brought on by the military coup d’état on 25 April 1974 was largely the root of the Portuguese extreme right’s ideological marginalization (Pinto 1995: 114). In the aftermath of the coup d’état, however, the transition did not hinder the extreme right from being some of the first to create political parties (Gallagher 1992: 235). These extreme-right organizations’ promoters managed to avoid the first wave of arrests against the notables of the former regime, but they were particularly vulnerable to political purges and the repression brought on by the revolutionary forces over the course of the transition (Pinto 1995: 115; 1998: 1708–1710). The extreme right, did, however, gain back some support after the summer of 1975, taking full advantage of the mass reaction against the advance of the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português PCP) and the left-wing forces part of the revolutionary Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas MFA). The literature also points out how, at this stage, the far right underground and armed organizations played an important role, but subject to the broadest anti-communist resistance, animated primarily by the Catholic Church and by moderate parties (Cerezales 2007: 164; 2017: 689, 698). The circumstantial character of this renewed activism is proven due to the failure of the extreme right wing’s initiatives during the phase of Portuguese democracy being normalized and institutionalized. During it, the extreme right was unable to take advantage of the unrest felt by large portions of the population regarding the political and economic climate in the revolutionary period, losing all of its electoral potential to the mainstream anti-communist parties (Gallagher 1992: 238–239; Pinto 2006: 69; Marchi 2017: 453). Further evidence for their failure can be found in sociological factors in the young Portuguese democracy. Philippe Schmitter (1986: 7–8) pointed out how society favoured the forces in the centre-right during the transition to the detriment of the hard-liners of the former regime. António Costa Pinto (2005: 41–42) underlined the effect of Portugal joining the EEC in 1985. Thomas C. Davis and Piero Ignazi further highlighted the large public support for a liberal democracy, the welfare state to be developed, and the country’s modernization due to globalization processes (Zúquete 2007: 180). When compared with the transitional period, the phase of consolidated democracy put in place with the constitutional reform of 1982, led to a further waning interest in extreme-right factions. Studies have proven two dynamics within the extreme right, one of which was Portuguese far right’s rigid stance when faced with more innovative intellectual youth, influenced by the French nouvelle droit and the new Anglo-Saxon right wing at the start of the 1980s (Marchi 2016: 242, 251). The other – in the conceptual framework of the groupuscolarization of the extreme right (Griffin 2003: 30) – dealt rather with the rise of a new activist generation. It was characterized by ethno-nationalism that broke from the tradition of Portuguese nationalism through subcultural expressions that saw eye-to-eye with youth extremism as seen at the end of the 20th century (Marchi 2010: 64–66; Marchi and Zúquete 2016: 48).

4  Introduction The formation of the National Renewal Party (Partido Nacional Renovar PNR) at the start of the 21st century attracted more interest among scholars. The party was analyzed on the basis of three elements: first, its origin and historical path in light of the internal conflict among its many political lines that undermined its stability up to at least 2007. Next, its electoral performance was poor, even in light of the political and economic crises the country’s elites faced. Finally, its programmatic proposals were characterized by an ethno-cultural and identitarian nationalism in the context of the Lusophony (Zúquete 2007, 2013; Marchi 2010, 2012; Costa 2011).

Historical periodization and book structure Although few in number, these works allow a reconstruction of the political history of the Portuguese extreme right since the end of the Second World War up to modern times. As such, a comparison between the players that followed in its wake also allows one to trace the relevant historical events with respect to the object of this investigation over the course of its 70 years in two different regimes. Put another way, the history of this political family can be divided into three over-arching periods. The last three decades of the New State was the first, characterized by the struggles Salazar faced until 1968 and those by Marcelo Caetano until 1974, with the African War as a continual theme. This was followed by the years of democratic transition from 1974 up to the start of the 1980s, the brunt of which here is focused on the 19 months’ from the revolution up to November 1975, and later democratic institutionalization in the second half of the 1970s. Finally, the three decades of consolidated democracy, from the end of the 20th century to the start of the 21st century represent the third period. The book follows these events chronologically, and as such, divided into their respective three parts, each one dedicated to the aforementioned over-arching period, with three chapters per period, focusing on specific moments in time, politically significant for the evolution of the extreme right. In the first part which pertains to the end of the New State from 1945 to 1974, the first chapter is dedicated to the period from 1945 to the start of the 1960s. This chapter presents a generation of intellectual youths from the extreme right in the immediate post-war period who formed politically under the doctrinarian influence of Alfredo Pimenta, a vital figure for the monarchical extreme right, a veteran of Portuguese nationalism, and unavoidable figure of the pro-Axis faction within the regime during the war. This book then analyzes the editorial initiatives of the radical intellectuals and the debates that took place within them, in particular regarding the political climate after fascism had been defeated in 1945. The book will also analyze the survival strategies these factions and groups undertook to preserve the authoritarian regime and whatever alternatives could be found to avoid democracy from taking root. The second chapter of the first part approaches the second generation of staunch nationalist activists from the moment the Portuguese African War began in 1961 to Salazar’s step down from power in 1968. Without forgetting the influence still

Introduction 5 felt by the generation that came before, the focus is rather to what extent these youth factions were radicalized as a result of the African War. In addition to this, their methods to mobilize through student organizations in contrast with the antiSalazar opposition that was on the rise, and the criticism the New State faced due to its immobility are also analyzed. Each group is characterized by their own ideology, their connections with the regime, and their international relations with other European extreme-right forces. All these subjects are looked at in the bigger picture of the Europe extreme-right forces opposing de-colonization attempts in Africa. The third chapter presents the oppositionist strategy by the extreme right during Caetano’s period in power, from September 1968 until April 1974. In this regard, the radical political milieu is analyzed in its different factions within the regime that would later converge into a general right-wing opposition to the liberalization policies championed by Caetano. Here, a third generation of radical activists that emerged from the University of Coimbra is presented on the basis of two main subjects: defending the pluri-continental Empire threatened by Caetano’s liberalization efforts and putting up resistance against left-wing radicalization. Furthermore, the comparison between radical right-wing members between Lisbon and Coimbra also highlight ideological and organizational innovations within the Portuguese extreme right with the onset of European neo-fascism, which marked the generation of the late 1960s and 1970s. As for the second part of the book, the years between 1974 and 1982 are divided into three chapters, with the first specifically dealing with 1974 and 1975 and the extreme-right resistance to the revolutionary process after the military coup d’état on 25 April 1974. This brief period can be defined by two critical moments in the transition: first, by trying to organize and consolidate right-wing parties in the immediate aftermath of the coup d’état, and the second by the armed underground fight during the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso – PREC) until November 1975. The chapter takes a deeper look into the strategies used during these two moments by the extreme right with the goal to contrast the efforts made by the PCP and the extreme left, the MFA (Armed Forces Movement, the author of the coup d’etat) to lead the transition process. The extreme right is looked at here through its subjection to General António de Spínola’s failed strategies (political on 28 September 1974 and military on 11 March 1975) and armed resistance in PREC, including the far right connections with international extreme-right forces during their exile in Franco-led Spain. The second chapter is dedicated to the events between 1976 and 1982, looking at how the extreme right attempted to become part of Portuguese democracy’s institutionalization process. This phase opens with the military loss of the extreme left and the political defeat of PCP at the hands of a moderate faction in the MFA during the armed conflict on 25 November 1975. This event marked the end of PREC and allowed the extreme right to give up underground activities and pave new paths towards institutionalization. In this sense, the chapter takes a deeper look at the extreme right’s projects in two distinct areas. The first was a return to propaganda and spreading the word through editorial initiatives and forming

6  Introduction political parties, think tanks, and youth groups, with the specific aim to gather enough strength to oppose the hegemony of the centre-right party Social Democratic Centre (Centro Democrático Social CDS). This analysis provides evidence of the strategy and political contribution of the extreme-right pressure groups and parties at the time of the legislative elections in 1976, 1979, and 1980, as well as the presidential elections of 1976 and 1980. Particular attention is given to the relations between the extreme-right and the centre-right parties (PSD and CDS) at the start of the moderate coalition Democratic Alliance (Aliança Democrática AD, composed by PSD, CDS and People’s Monarchist Party PPM), whose success would silence the desires of the radicals. Finally, the chapter approaches the process of co-optation of several important figures of the extreme right who came from the New State and the period of democratic transition on behalf of the centre-right parties – this de-radicalization would come to have relevant consequences for the future of the Portuguese far right. The third chapter deals with the meta-political strategy initiated to modernize the extreme right at the end of democratic transition. This period reached its highest point in the first half of the 1980s, led by intellectual youth who came from the authoritarian regime, influenced by the European and North American new right and the innovations led by European neo-fascism. The chapter presents how the extreme right’s new editorial projects aimed to spread its renewed message and ideologies through the anti-Marxist audience in Portugal at the end of the 1970s. The analysis indicates how closed off the national right wing was to these innovations, highlighting the divergences that already existed at the heart of the extreme right with the onset of the liberal-conservative “new right”, inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the anti-liberal “new right” inspired by Alain de Benoist. In the final section of the book, dedicated to the period of Portuguese consolidated democracy (1982–2015), the first chapter goes into greater detail on the subject of both the groupuscular and subcultural right wing that arose in Portugal in the mid-1980s and the end of the 20th century. This chapter also deals with the greatest cultural and generational change in the history of the Portuguese extreme right: the replacement of the extreme right from the authoritarian regime with a new generation of radical activists who grew up in the 1980s. From a sociological perspective, the flux of African immigrants from the former overseas provinces after decolonization and their concentration in metropolitan areas in both Lisbon and Porto provoked an outbreak of xenophobic tendencies, particularly among the youth who, in the suburbs, ended up integrating into the skinhead subculture. This nationalist attitude ended up being developed by youth in lower classes, in stark contrast to the bourgeoisie youth that fuelled the nationalist organizations in the New State. The consequence from a cultural point of view was that the myth of Portugal as multiethnic and multi-cultural came crumbling down, with the ethnocentric idea that Portugal is European and white being adopted instead. The chapter puts this socio-cultural change in context with the rest of Europe, comparing the two most important extreme-right youth movements that, in the 1980s, embodied the two different souls of Portuguese nationalism.

Introduction 7 Finally, the second chapter presents the new strategy undertaken by the Portuguese extreme right at the dawn of the 21st century (1999–2015). From this perspective, when analyzing the National Renewal Party (PNR), one can witness the varying components that made up the Portuguese radical milieu from the old Salazarists to the skinhead youth. The tension between these two factions is paid particular attention to in terms of political culture, identity, and strategies. In this way, the chapter depicts the evolution of the party’s strategy to take advantage of the right-wing wave in Europe at the start of the century. Finally, with regards to the third and final chapter, the object of the analysis is the Portuguese identitarian movement that developed in the last decade alongside the PNR, which was in line with homologous currents within the European extreme right. The growing ethno-nationalist and identitarian tendencies of the younger militants in Portugal are depicted in two aspects: the first is the ostracism they suffered by veterans of radical nationalism who were still hostile to racialist viewpoints. The other focused on foreign influences imported by Portuguese identitarians and the network of international contacts forged by the Portuguese organizations. In parallel, the rivalries that existed in the ethno-nationalist camp and the relations between its movements and the PNR are highlighted, putting them in the context of the identitarian European milieu. Even though the time frame analyzed in this book comprises a period of 70 years, it is possible to identify some general features of the Portuguese extreme right between late authoritarianism and democracy. Concerning mobilization, the extreme right was never a mass phenomenon, but rather an elite one. From a sociographic viewpoint, these elites originated predominantly from the bourgeoisie (low, medium, and high). From a geographic perspective, the main source of radical militancy were the bourgeois families from the country’s two major urban centres (Lisbon and Porto). The children of the provincial bourgeoisie that joined the Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra universities merged with the latter. The student milieu of bourgeois extraction constantly provides new generations of nationalist militants and feeds the restricted nucleus of radical intellectuals. Both will reproduce, throughout the extreme right’s historical trajectory, the classical topics of Portuguese nationalism and import the ideological references of the European extreme right. In fact, the younger generation represents the main actor in the translation of the extreme right’s political culture into mobilization and militant action. In terms of political culture, their worldview is mainly rooted in counter-­revolutionary antiliberal monarchism, in traditionalist Catholicism, in imperial ­nationalism based on the discoveries’ identity myth, in Portugal’s civilizing mission as well as its multi-racial and pluri-continental destiny. This latter aspect, central to the extreme right’s mobilization, is characterized by the alleged specificity of ­Portuguese expansionism grounded by Christian universalism that opposes the other European powers’ colonialism, based on mere material exploitation, and the imperialism of the Soviet and North American superpowers. Although with democratization the multi-racial perspective is progressively replaced by ethno-nationalism, the issue of identity constantly remains central in the extreme right’s political agenda, to the

8  Introduction detriment of monarchical doctrinal and counter-­revolutionary postulates that were marginalized throughout the years. This general, sociological, and ideological identity persists through the decades, despite registering some notable exceptions. Thus, the bourgeois origin of the extreme right does not preclude the presence of lower class elements stemming from the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas. In the late authoritarianism, these minorities within the ultranationalist minority are ideologically formed into the regime’s paramilitary organizations (Portuguese Youth/Mocidade Portuguesa and Portuguese Legion/Legião Portuguesa). After 1945, the official structures lose strength but continue to represent a reservoir of radicalization and a move to political action during the crises of the New State (war in Africa, student protests, overthrow of the regime). During the transition, the young people coming from the anti-communist bourgeoisie and from the strongly Catholic countryside demonstrated the strongest reaction to the left-wing radicalization of the revolutionary process. In the consolidated democracy, the children of the urban peripheries and of the urban petty bourgeoisie, oftentimes composed of families of returnees from Africa, are the most attracted to radical political imported subcultures. Consequently, there is a general dynamic of proletarianization of the Portuguese extreme right throughout the analyzed 70-year period, with a certain impoverishment of the ideological elaboration that is not compensated by a substantial qualitative and quantitative improvement of the mobilization.

The object and the objectives of the research The work at hand here reconstructs the political history of the Portuguese extreme right from the end of the Second World War up to the present. The historical context is represented by the late authoritarianism (1945–1974), the transition to democracy (1974–1982), and consolidated democracy (1982–2015). The relevance of this study lies in the fact that the Portuguese extreme right is presented for the first time in a diachronic perspective over the last 70 years. This depiction of events has never been delineated in a continual format, not even in the literature available in Portuguese. Furthermore, this study presents other data which has not yet been published in Portuguese literature. The aim is to identify all subjects that occupied the political space of the right wing from the authoritarian to the democratic regime. These subjects are described in their organizational form, ideological identity, and repertoire of actions in their relations with each other and with the regimes (or their internal components) in which they played a role. The focus was on political-historical factors that would shape how these subjects came about, how they developed over time, if they succeeded or failed, and the legacy they had or which they passed down to their successors. The descriptive side of this provided a consistent set of data that proved useful for the comparative analyses between Western radical right-wing parties in the context of both late authoritarianism and democratic transition. The explanatory dimension also provides relevant elements for future comparative studies. In particular, the diachronic description of the Portuguese extreme

Introduction 9 right provides insight into the causes of radicalization in context of political crisis (be it colonial war, coup d’états, revolutionary processes, decolonization processes, or third wave of democratization processes). It also shows the substance of radicalism within an authoritarian regime and a democratic one, as well as how those coped and worked with them and other institutions of the regime. One can also see the progression of radicalism shaped by the move from authoritarianism to democracy, through a sudden rupture and revolutionary process as well. Considering the minor role of the Portuguese extreme right already highlighted by the existing scientific literature, this work seeks to strengthen the endogenous and exogenous factors of the extreme right that would determine why it remained inconsequential in the national political panorama’s long term. Although failure is a point at which all actors meet at in this political spectrum in the long run, the study also has the objective to characterize the different subjects who filled this spectrum, to explain the reasons that shaped their self-identification, or to the contrary, their forced placement in the extreme-right category.

The conceptual question Since the final decade of the 20th century, scientific literature has been much more prolific on the conceptual debate over the right wing. The attempt to define rather widely spanning categories through concepts like “extreme right” or “radical right wing” or “neo-fascism” produced an inarguable aspect of analytic fine-tuning, but it did not achieve a definitive consensus in the scientific community (Gregor 2006: IX). The lack of consensus has gotten worse in the last years due to the renewed fame of the term “populism”, following the electoral success of relatively new parties in the European parliamentary systems. The dispute lies mainly in the classification of all subjects belonging to the extreme right of the political spectrum as new faces of fascism, of its Weltanshauung and its objectives. Some authors have analyzed the most recent phenomenon of the extreme right as a sign of the “eternal return” of fascism (Mammone 2009: 175–177). Others, since the 1990s, have deemed it important to draw a boundary between neo-fascism and the radical or extreme right, for whom nationalism does not implicate anti-democratic viewpoints, territorial expansion, or refusal of the market economy (Karapin 1998: 218). For instance, Piero Ignazi (2003: 146) proposed to differentiate between the “old extreme right” (or the traditional extreme right) and the “new extreme right” (the post-industrial extreme right) depending on the claiming or the rejection of the fascist legacy by the subject being analyzed. An ulterior specification may derive from the refusal or acceptation of the rules to the democratic game in the opposition to the ruling regime: in the first case, one would speak of the “extreme right”, and in the second, rather the “radical right” (Mudde 2000: 12). Without wishing to intervene in any substantial way on this conceptual debate, this study uses the terms “extreme right”, “radical right”, or “right-wing radicalism” to refer to its objects of analysis. The term “nationalist” is also used for two reasons: first, it is a way to qualify the persons in this study as they most frequently defined themselves over the course of history; second, it is a very frequent

10  Introduction expression in the Portuguese political vocabulary to indicate the extreme right. On the contrary, the decision was made to avoid using the term “neo-fascism” as this refers to a very specific part of European radicalism after the Second World War. António Costa Pinto (1989: 67) recognized that the definition of “neo-fascism”, regarding Portugal, would interest specific groups and some intellectuals from the 1960s, marginal within the New State itself. Over the course of the book, certain elements of the Portuguese extreme right that adhered to the political culture of European neo-fascism will be pointed out. In the specific Portuguese context, the definition of “extreme right” or “radical right” is questionable as a concept that covers all persons relevant in this study. As will be seen, they were widely different one from the other, whether ideologically or how they got on with the regimes of which they were part. The contingencies of Portuguese political history allowed that they could all fit in the right wing of their respective political spectrum, whether they approved of it or not. During the New State, two factors determined the placement of these actors on the far right: from 1961, the uncompromising defence of the Portuguese empire in the African war, with continual streams of criticism aimed at the regime for the lack of revolutionary and nationalistic mobilization connected to this cause. From 1969, they could be further defined with their opposition to the reformist policies that Caetano pushed, mainly regarding the African territories. During the democracy, the criteria to identify the extreme right were the resistance against the process of decolonization in the democratic transition, and the non-acceptance of the so-called “arc of governance” (PS, PSD, CDS) as a pillar of the consolidated democracy. For these reasons, the term “extreme right” better explains the geographic placement on the left/right axis in both authoritarianism and democracy, than strict adherence to doctrine or modus operandi. This study will highlight which forces were inserted in this space due just to historical contingencies and which more as a result of identity and collective action. However, it is worth noting that all relevant figures of the Portuguese radical right after the Second World War were, ideologically speaking, part of the traditional extreme right, or at least an extreme right wing with its historic-ideological roots in the national revolutions in the inter-war period. At the very least it denied anti-fascism as an inherent part of its identity. The few political forces that did not adhere to this definition do not fit in any case the category of new extreme right. Even up to current times, no one political figure has come from Portugal that can be compared with the new extreme right that popped up in the rest of Europe (no matter how large or small) since the 1970s. This study identifies as such the most recent attempts as well on behalf of the traditional extreme right to take on the agenda and political discourse of the new extreme right and imitating their success.

Methodology The study at hand is sketched as a political history, based on data analysis over the course of 12 years of scientific investigation. In particular, the research was carried out over two periods, the first of which began in 2005 and ended in 2008,

Introduction 11 entailing the course of my PhD in Modern and Contemporary History at the Lisbon University Institute (ISCTE-IUL) on the extreme right at the end of the New State (1945–1974). The second phase began with a post-doctoral research fellowship on the extreme right during the period of Portuguese democracy, with both being supervised by Professor António Costa Pinto. Finally, I dedicated 2016– 2017 to gaining further insight on the extreme right in the transition to democracy, which I did as a researcher for the research fellowship of the Center for International Studies of the Lisbon University Institute (CEI-IUL). There, I was able to carry out my research on the years of 1976–1980 in particular, as those are key to understanding the failure of the extreme right in Portuguese democracy. The investigation followed a qualitative methodology with data collection from different sources for each of the respective periods detailed here. For the time spanning the end of the authoritarian regime, investigation began with some exploratory interviews of former extreme-right militants from the 1960s. These interviews paved the way to understand better the most relevant personalities and active nationalist groups from 1945 up to New State’s fall in 1974. They also shed light on three generations of militants, one after the other, over the course of three decades in the regime. The first of these consisted of young disciples of Alfredo Pimenta in the 1940s and 1950s, whereas the second was comprised of radicalized individuals who relentlessly defended the Empire at the time of the African War’s outbreak in 1961. The third, at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, also defended the empire, but with an extra focus on opposing Marcelo Caetano. With this clearer image of the extreme right over the course of three generations, the primary sources were collected in two different ways. To reconstruct the historical dynamic of these movements, data was collected at the National Archives of Torre do Tombo (ANTT), particularly in the Oliveira Salazar Archive, the Marcelo Caetano Archive, the Ministry of Internal Administration’s Archive, the PIDE/DGS Archive (the political police of the New State), and the Portuguese Legion Archive (the paramilitary organization of the New State). The PIDE/DGS archive proved to be the most fruitful. The political police of the regime did not consider the extreme right to be a danger to the New State, but it did however keep a close eye on the groups whose inception was not directly inspired by the regime. In reports produced by the PIDE/DGS it is possible to understand which extreme-right factions were extensions of the New State and which had formed apart from the regime, although the latter were pressured to be a part in their policy of counter-subversion. Even more meaningful were documents produced by the political police on the opposition forces, particularly students and intellectuals. The watch over anti-regime groups frequently went hand-inhand with reports on subjects who could potentially be used as counter-subversive instruments, in particular those from the radical right wing. Additionally, these reports allow not just greater insight on the history of the extreme-right organizations at the end of the New State, but also on their relations with the regime itself. Seen from this angle, the Portuguese Legion Archive was particularly useful to prove how the New State used its paramilitary structures to co-opt members of the extreme right or finance entire organizations at certain moments in time.

12  Introduction As for the Salazar and Marcelo Caetano archives, the most interesting documentation for the research at hand had more to do with interventions that were carried out by internal factions of the regime, or by its institutions (such as the Censorship) in order to curb the activities of the extreme right when this became detrimental to the system. There were fewer documents that proved direct relations between extreme-right individuals or groups and the two leaders of the regime. However, the large amount of letters sent between Pimenta and Salazar, within the documentation that does exist, is useful in order to understand the political ideas of the extreme right in the time and place. The archives also allowed access to publications that the extreme right did not hand over for the prior authorization of the Censorship and that the PIDE/ DGS intercepted. The official publications, on the contrary, were consulted in the Lisbon’s Periodical Library (Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa) and the National Library of Portugal. The analysis of all extreme right publications between 1945 and 1974 allowed for their ideology and political agenda to be outlined, along with improved knowledge of the national and international relations of this political family. Interviews with extreme-right militants from each of the three generations identified complemented this collection and analysis of data from archival sources. During the PhD’s investigation process, the network of witnesses was enlarged through the snowball method. This allowed for greater depth on sensitive subjects (like relations between the nationalist groups and the regime), particularly through informal conversations. The enlargement of the direct witness number also allowed access to the private archives. These archives thereby are also a testament to how hard it is to come by these sources, as the former militants did not take good care of their documents, with much of the material destroyed during the transition to democracy. These private archives also allow the material that was part of daily militant propaganda to be studied in greater detail, much of which failed to be controlled by the PIDE/DGS. As such, this grants access to more thorough knowledge on events that occurred in addition to understanding the extreme right’s ideology. The archival source changed radically later, however, during the transition period from 1974 to the start of the 1980s. The documents released by the revolutionary institutions – mainly for surveillance and repression against the extreme right – were not handed over to public institutions, and are therefore inaccessible. Furthermore, as a result of continual repression against the far right and having to carry out their operations underground, this led many of those in the extreme right to destroy personal records and material produced after 25 April 1974. The most useful sources on the transitional period are the newspapers that closely followed the radical right’s movements, both in an attempt to stop possible counter-coup d’états and to understand the strategy that the former supporters of the regime would implement in a new political situation. In the printing press world, publications that were connoted with the extreme right allowed their political agendas to be understood more clearly in 25 April’s aftermath, but proved less useful in mapping out their connections with each other, also on an international

Introduction 13 level. The fear of repression and need to appear as new actors on the political scene limited their freedom of speech in these sources. The situation changed with the democratization process becoming increasingly more normalized after 25 November 1975. The proliferation of right-wing newspapers and the attention given to any sign of reorganization within its confines contributed towards making the liberal, conservative, and even nationalist printing press a rich source of data and information. Regarding the data on the transition, the research material was enhanced through semi-structured interviews with key extreme-right militants who played an active part in both public militancy and underground work. This highlighted, however, the greatest issue when tackling the Portuguese extreme right. Those who were part of the armed resistance were reluctant to tell, in detail, how the underground groups carried out their operations. Neither did they share how they received their financial and logistic help, nor what their connections were with the three largest anticommunist parties in the parliament: the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista PS), the Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrático PSD), and the Social Democrat Center Party (Centro Democrático Social CDS). These parties have also always been unwilling to approach their connections with the extreme right during the so-called Ongoing Revolutionary Process (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso – PREC). Finally, regarding the consolidated democracy period, the investigation was based on the significant amount of documentation on the extreme right which was present in the judicial archives. Its subcultural and groupuscular character, with some expression in social marginality and criminality ensured that the extreme right was, in the last two decades of the 20th century, the subject of police investigations and judicial processes (the most relevant of which coming in 1989, 1995, and 2007). As such, material from the militants was apprehended, and the judicial archives (in particular from the Constitutional Court for the 1980s) are a key source on the study of this time in history. These important archives were complemented further by interviews with extreme right-wing militants from the 1990s and the start of the 21st century, namely skinheads, some of whom allowed access to their personal archives. In the last years, the José Pacheco Pereira Library and Archive Ephemera have become important in the field of archival sources. This archive is notable for making its content available online. The documents collected by José Pacheco Pereira are personally offered by political actors or by their heirs. The material on the extreme right has attracted increasing relevance for scientific investigations, not just for the period during the transition to democracy but also during Portugal’s consolidated democracy. At the end of the 1990s and the start of the 21st century, archival research lost much of its central role, seeing as how the latest expressions of right-wing Portuguese radicalism (in line with its like-minded Western peers) ended up on the Internet. Sites, blogs, and more recently, social networks, became the greatest source of data on this political area. These sources have great potential as well due to the possibility of being able to monitor them online daily and their internal dynamic changes.

14  Introduction Due to the variety of archival data consulted here, as well as references, it was decided that the most important documents for this work were identified through secondary sources (bibliographic references) where the reader may find a more detailed analysis on the original archives. For quotations taken from the printing press, on the contrary, primary sources were preferred.

Bibliography Alonso, Sonia and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2015). “Spain: No Country for the populist radical right?” in South European Society and Politics, 20(1): 21–45. Backes, Uwe (2011). “The unsuccessful parties: Ideologies, strategies and conditions of the failures”, in Uwe Backes and Patrick Moreau eds., The Extreme Right in Europe: Current Trends and Perspectives (Göttingen: Vendenhoeck & Ruprecht), 149–170. Carvalho, Miguel (2017). Quando Portugal Ardeu: Histórias e segredos da violência política no pós-25 de Abril (Lisboa: Oficina do Livro). Cerezales, Diego Palacios (2007). “Fascist lackeys? Dealing with the police’s past during Portugal’s transition to democracy (1974–1980)”, in Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 6(3): 155–169. Cerezales, Diego Palacios (2017). “Civil resistance and democracy in the Portuguese revolution”, in Journal of Contemporary History, 52(3): 688–709. Cervelló, Joseph Sanchez (1994). Cronologia das organizações de direita (Coimbra: Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril). Costa, José Mourão da (2011). “A nova extrema-direita na democracia portuguesa”, in Análise Social, XLVI(201): 765–787. Dâmaso, Eduardo (1999). A Invasão Spinolista (Lisboa: Fenda). Davis, Thomas C. (1998). “The Iberian Peninsula and Greece: Retreat from the radical right?” in Hans-Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall eds., The New Politics of the Right: Neopopulist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies (Nova Iorque: St. Martin’s Press), 157–172. Ellinas, Antonis A. (2013). “The rise of golden dawn: The new face of the far right in Greece”, in South European Society and Politics, 18(4): 543–565. Gallagher, Tom (1983). “From hegemony to opposition: The ultra-right before and after 1974”, in Lawrence S. Graham and Douglas L. Wheeler eds., In Search of Modern Portugal – The Revolution and Its Consequences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 81–104. Gallagher, Tom (1992). “Portugal: The marginalization of the extreme right”, in Paul Hainsworth ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (London: Pinter Publishers), 233–245. Gregor, Anthony James (2006). The Search for Neofascism: The Use and Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Griffin, Roger (2003). “From slime mould to Rhizome: An introduction to the groupuscolar right”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 37(1): 27–50. Ignazi, Piero (2003a), “The development of the extreme-right at the end of the century”, in Peter H. Merkel and Leonard Weinberg, eds., Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Frank Cass), 143–158. Ignazi, Piero (2003b). Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Introduction 15 Kapetanyannis, Vassilis (1995). “Neo-fascism in modern Greece”, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan eds., The Extreme Right in Western and Eastern Europe (London, New York: Longman), 129–144. Karapin, Roger (1998). “Radical-right and neo-fascist political parties in Western Europe”, in Comparative Politics, 30(2): 213–234. Linz, Juan (1998). “Fascism is dead: What legacy did it leave?” in Stein Ugelvik Larsen ed., Modern Europe After Fascism 1943–1980s (New York: Columbia University Press), 19–51. Mammone, Andrea (2009). “The eternal return? Faux populism and contemporarization of neo-fascism across Britain, France and Italy”, in Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 17(2): 171–192. Marchi, Riccardo (2009). Império Nação Revolução: As Direitas Radicais no Fim do Estado Novo 1959–1974 (Alfragide: Leya/Texto). Marchi, Riccardo (2010). “At the roots of the new right-wing extremism in Portugal: The national action movement (1985–1991)”, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11(1): 47–66. Marchi, Riccardo (2012). “The Portuguese radical right in the democratic period”, in Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins eds., Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe: From Local to Transnational (London: Routledge), 95–108. Marchi, Riccardo (2016). “The Nouvelle Droite in Portugal: A new strategy for the radical right in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 50(3): 232–252. Marchi, Riccardo (2017). A Direita Nunca Existiu: As Direitas Extraparlamentares na Institucionalização da Democracia Portuguesa 1976–1980 (Lisboa: ICS). Marchi, Riccardo and Zúquete, José Pedro (2016). “The other side of protest music: The extreme-right and skinhead culture in democratic Portugal (1974–2015)”, in JOMEC Journal, 9: 49–70. Mudde, Cas (2000). The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Norris, Pippa (2005). Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pinto, António Costa (1989), “A direita radical em Portugal, uma introdução”, Risco, 12: 67–85. Pinto, António Costa (1995). “The radical right in contemporary Portugal”, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan eds., The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (London, New York: Longman), 108–128. Pinto, António Costa (1998). “Dealing with the legacy of authoritarianism: Political purges in Portugal’s. transition to democracy”, in Stein Ugelvik Larsen ed., Modern Europe After Fascism 1943–1980s (New York: Columbia University Press), 1679–1717. Pinto, António Costa e Teixeira, Nuno Severiano (2005). “Portugal e a integração europeia, 1945–1986”, in António Costa Pinto e Nuno Severiano Teixeira ed., A Europa do Sul e a construção da União Europeia, 1945–2000 (Lisboa: ICS), 17–44. Pinto, António Costa (2006). “Portugal’s transition to democracy in the 1970s: The double legacy”, in Marietta Minotos ed., The Transition to Democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece Thirty Years After (Athens: Patakis), 49–73. Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (1996). A Direita e As Direitas (Lisboa: Difel).

16  Introduction Ramos, Rui (2012). “Órfãs da História? As Direitas e a Historiografia em Portugal”, in Riccardo Marchi coord., Ideias e Percursos das Direitas Portuguesas: As Raízes profundas não gelam? (Alfragide: Texto), 13–78. Schmitter Philippe C. (1986). “An introduction to Southern European transition from authoritarian rule: Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey”, in Philippe C. Schmitter and Guillermo O’Donnell eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule – Southern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins), 3–10. Tíscar, Maria José (2014). A Contra-Revolução no 25 de Abril (Lisboa: Colibrí). Wallraff, Günter (1976). A descoberta de uma conspiração: a acção Spínola (Amadora: Bertrand). Zúquete, J. P. (2013). “Between land and sea: Portugal’s two nationalisms in the twenty-first century”, in Paul Christopher Manuel, Alynna Lyon and Clyde Wilcox eds., Religion and Politics in a Global Society: Comparative Perspectives from the Portuguese-­Speaking World (New York: Lexington Books), 205–226. Zúquete, J. P. (2007). “Portugal: A new look at the extreme-right”, Representation, 43(3): 179–198.

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

20  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime 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

The far right intellectual milieu 21 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

22  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime 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 counterrevolution 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 far right intellectual milieu 23 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

24  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime 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 ever more scepticism on

The far right intellectual milieu 25 the remnants of fascism within it. With the Axis Powers having lost in 1945, the right wing merely accentuated their distance from the nationalist revolutions of the 1920s and 1930s, looking instead favourably at the conservative trends in Western democracies. They were not incompatible per se with the regime’s authoritarianism simply because they did not consider the New State a copy of fascism. As Caetano de Mello Beirão commented on, how nationalism was perceived by the youth in the 1940s was neither mobilizing nor revolutionary, it was rather apolitical, connected instead to the monarchic conservativism with which the country was associated, and influenced further still by the failure of the First Republic (Marchi 2016: 247). In this sense, the nationalist right wing did not consider Salazar to be the last defender of European fascism, but a good administrator of the State which had saved Portugal not just from the brink of financial disaster in the 1930s but also the World War. As such, in the post-war period, the idea that the New State could be renewed in a conservative and democratic way began to circulate among the right wing in the regime. In this climate of uncertainty, the radicals from Mensagem also pondered over the dangerous capability of the demo-liberal doctrines that infiltrated the nationalist camp. In particular, they debated over the “Salazarization” of New State, or how the authoritarian regime had become excessively associated with the figure of Salazar. The main problem is that the fall of Salazar inevitably will cause the fall of the authoritarian regime. In general, the extreme right put on airs to be loyal to Salazar, in spite of not completely identifying with the dictator. From the 1940s to the 1950s, young fascist intellectuals recognized the common roots in counter-­revolutionary thought, but claimed their intellectual autonomy with respect to Salazarism. Testimonies abound in this regard. Florentino Goular Nogueira affirms: I was never a Salazarist, and probably not for the same reasons as the screaming opposition parties, rather as a basis of my fascist principles and subsequent observation of the facts. (Vanguarda n°7, 1970: 4 in Marchi 2009b: 307) In the same way, António José de Brito underlines: We were never unconditional apologists of Salazar, nor careless enthusiasts of the “Situation”. We never were part of the crowd that sang his praises till the cows went home, nor ever did we proclaim the regime was perfect, a nec plus ultra whose fundamental bases didn’t need to be significantly modified. (Marchi 2009b: 307) The militants from the extreme right tied to historic fascism distanced themselves to some degree from Salazar’s political profile. This profile was founded on pessimistic Catholicism, on an almost monastic conception of the State’s administration, on an aversion to totalitarianism, and on rejecting mass mobilization as well as codifying a doctrinal and ideological orthodoxy.

26  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime Goulart Nogueira described Salazar’s rule as a genial embodiment of the virtues and mentality of the common person, of the proud conservative, of the farmers in the province with a touch of university professor. The Salazarist motto of “habitual living” is as such the negation of Mussolini’s motto of “live dangerously”. Faced with the dangers of the Salazarization of the New State, the intellectual youth of the extreme right wished to find an institutional solution that would guarantee the stability of the anti-democratic regime well after its founder’s death. These worries can be read between some radical youths and Pimenta (Marchi 2016). In a letter from February 1947, Caetano de Mello Beirão explained to Pimenta that they considered the New State transitory and imperfect. Even in May  1950, Amândio César found Pimenta’s critique in his 1937 work, Nas vésperas do Estado Novo, to be key: in spite of the regime’s anti-democratic character, Portugal suffered from the inherent imperfections of the Republican model imposed on a deeply monarchical nation. António José de Brito, in turn, emphasized the problems that arose as a result of authoritarian rule and a Republican system. The young fascist criticized the Caesarism of New State, because the figure of Caesar relied on support from the people, and as such, weakened the foundation of the State as a politically organized nation. As an alternative to the Salazarist Caesarism, radical youths from Mensagem supported restoring traditional monarchism, guaranteeing stability of the State. The proposed model, summarized, was a mixture of the classical doctrine of the Lusitanian Integralism (Integralismo Lusitano) and fascist traits: hereditary monarchism, Catholic, traditional, and organic; the king with full power, who governs but does not administrate; general courts, exclusively representative of institutions, corporations, and regions, with consulting and deliberative functions in some matters; and a corporative regime. With these doctrinal building blocks, Pimenta’s disciples made Mensagem the most radical university journal as they banded together against the alleged enemies of the Revolução Nacional (National Revolution) right after the War: the anti-Salazarists of the Movimento de Unidade Democrática (MUD), the progressive Catholics, the liberal monarchists, and the moderate nationalists. Founded in October 1945, MUD was the official organization that rallied the opposition against the New State together, from socialist Republicans to the communists. Until 1948, the regime authorized its existence to promote the façade of “organic democracy” invented by Salazar to face the international community’s criticism. The student section of the organization, the MUD-Youth, were the main targets by the radicals at Mensagem, as they considered it a tool of the left wing to politicize youth. In May 1947, active members of the extreme right participated in a manifesto called Posição, signed by 400 students against the Associação Académica de Coimbra (AAC) for having sympathized with the student and future socialist officer Francisco Salgado Zenha, arrested by the regime. According to the manifesto, Salgado Zenha was not merely a persecuted student, but a fervent supporter of the Partido Comunista Português (PCP), that is to say an agent of the Soviet Union. What transpired here is also useful to evaluate the balance of power among

The far right intellectual milieu 27 right-wing students linked to the regime: among the 400 signers of the manifesto, only 40 were militants of the extreme-right faction. As far as the Catholic is concerned, in February 1947, the Centro Académico da Democracia Cristã (CADC) opened fire against the group of Mensagem and blamed it, among other things, for taking inspiration in Pimenta, who had been marked as a dangerous writer by the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Cerejeira, in July 1943.3 The CADC clarified that any collaboration by its members with the radical right journal (at that time Henrique Barrilaro Ruas was still involved with Mensagem) did not imply a connection of the Catholic organization with the ideology expressed within. As a response, the radicals accused CADC of having succumbed to progressive European currents of Christian democratic Catholicism. This critique on the extreme right conveyed to Catholic organizations is a constant in the second half of the 1940s. In 1946, Florentino Goulart Nogueira warned Pimenta on having to intervene in the newspapers against the personalist philosophy of Jacques Maritain, who was becoming increasingly more influential for Catholics and monarchists in Portugal. In 1950, Antonio José de Brito told Pimenta of his intention to publicly criticize the CADC for having organized a pro-Jewish conference (Marchi 2016: 750–751). The radicals from Mensagem fought also against the liberal monarchists who wished to restore the monarchy in a democratic-constitutional mould as opposed to Salazar’s authoritarian republic. Young fascists did not want the monarchy to be restored as an anti-Salazar one, but instead as a transition within the order guaranteed by the authoritarian regime. In this intellectual confrontation, the radicals confronted some former members of the Integralismo Lusitano and national syndicalists who no longer adhered to fascist ideas during the War, and endorsed instead an anti-Salazarist monarchical regime. The controversy thickened further when the radicals denounced the monarchical newspaper Diário Nacional for being democratic, liberal, and masonic. When discussing these matters, Pimenta and his disciples pushed ahead with a campaign against the former integralists, in particular Luís Almeida Braga and José Pequito Rebelo, who already in 1944 had broken off connections with the extreme-right theorist since the publication of his pamphlet A propósito de António Sardinha. The pamphlet had been a severe critique to the most prestigious thinker of Integralismo Lusitano. Finally, regarding the moderate nationalist supporters of the regime, controversy broke out in 1948 when Acção Popular was founded as an internal group tied to the only party, União Nacional, and connected to the future successor of Salazar, Marcelo Caetano. The extreme right did not support this new group’s agnosticism regarding the monarchy/republic dichotomy. In fact, Acção Popular subjected institutional questions to cohesion between all nationalists in order to ensure the good governance of the State. To this effect, ambiguous words were used on purpose for the eyes of the radicals, such as “liberty in authority” and “constructive revolution”. For the extreme right, the only principles that the New State had to abide by were those from the counter-revolution, which, on 28 May 1926, liquidated the values from 1789 and restored tradition. In general, the extreme right feared any manoeuvres from Marcelist milieu or moderate monarchists, seeing as

28  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime they may have attempted to create a centrist, Christian Democratic force along the lines of the French Mouvement Républicain Populaire. In other words, among the radical nationalists, the Republican and moderate currents were gaining leeway over monarchists, traditionalists, autocratic, and anti-democratic factions. This process was symbolized by António José de Brito by Pimenta’s intellectual isolation from the general acceptance from many supporters of the New State, “of liberal ideas, democratic, Anglophile, American, and communist” that those in Mensagem were to fight wholeheartedly.4 At the end of 1947, the radicals from Mensagem openly asked Pimenta for help on elaborating a political counter-attack strategy on the internal enemies of the New State. Pimenta responded with three articles for the bi-weekly, later added to the book Cartas monárquicas escritas ao estudante Caetano de Melo Beirão (1948). For Pimenta, all the counter-revolutionary activists had to put their cards towards restoring traditional monarchy. This objective could not be achieved through means by which the monarchy achieved power legitimated from below (such as plebiscites, parliamentary decision, or collective manifestations of corporations), nor through revolution or coup d’états. The only viable alternative would be by decree, by which the republican institution recognized its limits and handed power over to the king. In other words, in authoritarian Portugal, political action had to be led not against the established powers, but against those who opposed those powers or internal factions in power that skewed them. Pimenta’s ideas ended up condemning young activists from the extreme right in a paradoxical position: calling on integralist monarchists faithful to a republic and asking them to be revolutionaries, but within the boundaries of the established order. After its initial crisis of whether or not it would survive after the War, the beginning of the 1950s represented a relatively calm period for the New State. With the onset of the Cold War, the Portuguese regime was able to secure its stability due to its role as a faithful partner to the Western bloc, as its adhesion to NATO as a founding member in April 1949 demonstrated (Marcos 2014: 336). Internally, Salazar strengthened the control of the dictatorship, repressing opposition forces, promoting the defascistization of the paramilitary forces (Mocidade Portuguesa and Legião Portuguesa) and de-mobilizing internal factions within the regime. A renewed activism from radical nationalism came to be registered only during the presidential elections of 1958. On this occasion, General Humberto Delgado – a military man with a history in the extreme right of the regime during the 1930s – competed against the candidate of the New State (Meneses 2016: 420–421). Delgado’s candidacy attracted a large part of the anti-Salazarist opposition from the left and right, and mobilized crowds during his campaign.5 Despite the final victory for the New State candidate, Almirante Américo Thomaz, the situation had a profound effect on Salazar and shook him to the core. The governmental remodelling done by the chief of the Government following the elections was a hard hit for the extreme right in the regime: among those removed was Fernando dos Santos Costa, the Ministry of Defence, who was a reference for radicals for his iron fist in repressing anti-Salazarists. The Santos Costa affair provoked some reactions from the extreme right, in particular in the summer of 1959, when some military men and civilians planned a backlash to convince Salazar to reintegrate

The far right intellectual milieu 29 the old Ministry of Defence. This was a mere flash in the pan, significant in how inefficient the extreme right was in the shadow of the dictatorship. In 1959–1960, a more consistent group of radicals arose from the nationalistic milieu of intellectuals and students. They came from paramilitary organizations of the regime and the National Security Intelligence Services (Serviços de Informação da Defesa Nacional), converging at the special office of the Portuguese Legion led by Dr. David Lopes Gagean. The group dedicated itself primarily to counter-subversive activity through the Frente Nacional organization and the newsletter Mão Vermelha (Red Hand) to speak out against the anti-Salazarist opposition and, above all, the moderate elements of the União Nacional and Salazar’s government. This structure proved to be a symptomatic result of the extreme right’s operational inconsistency: in November 1960, the secretary general of the Portuguese Legion, Carlos Gois Mota, ordered for the group to be disassembled, which was considered to be too autonomous and harmful for the regime’s liking. The extreme right in general was dealt a heavy blow from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, as Salazar’s regime became increasingly normalized. The radical milieu vegetated in doctrinarian quarrels in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Porto cafés. The nationalist students were unable to mobilize their fellow students due to academic elections, as such handing more and more power over to the left to control the student-led bodies. In the intellectual milieu, a sense of defeatism and decline was felt. This feeling was aggravated further by the lack of support from the Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI) with how José Manuel da Costa and Eduardo Brazão managed the organization and by the creation of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian in 1956 which supported the intellectual opposition. At this time, the youth of the extreme right from Mensagem had reached intellectual maturity, but their input had been reduced to individual collaborations in the official press of New State (such as Diário da Manhã), or regional newspapers (Diário do Minho), or journals predominantly Catholic or monarchical (A Voz). Some had even taken it upon themselves to publish their own initiatives, such as Praça Nova, founded by António José de Brito in 1960. However, they rarely acted together and marked position vis-à-vis the other right-wing factions in the New State. The most emblematic case of this occurring was in the Primeira Semana de Estudos Doutrinários (23–25 January 1959), organized by the youth in Causa Monárquica. Here, Caetano de Mello Beirão, Fernando Guedes, António José de Brito, and Florentino Goulart Nogueira presented statements that brought forth monarchical thought with fascist principles, which caused many Catholics and advocates for the monarchy to react, unified by the idea that fascist totalitarianism was a threat to Portuguese nationalist ideology. On 17 March 1960, a group led by Caetano de Mello Beirão protested the debut of a play by Bertolt Brecht at the Teatro Capitólio in Lisbon. Police rapidly intervened and arrested a couple dozen of extreme right-wing militants, letting the play continue on, demonstrating yet again how radical supporters were cast off to the margins during Salazar’s regime. A more considerable effort was made by Caetano de Melo Beirão in the spring of 1962: he founded the Círculo de Estudos Alfredo Pimenta, presided over by João Ameal, a veteran of the Portuguese extreme right (Acção Realista) and renowned thinker of the New State. The Círculo’s goal was

30  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime to create a radical pressure group within the New State as well a Portuguese reference for the European extreme right. On this last regard, António José de Brito participated on behalf of the Círculo in both Incontri Romani della Cultura (11–14 May 1962 and 27–30 September 1963). The events were organized by the Centro di Vita Italiano, presided over by the neo-fascist journalist Giano Accame and Ernesto de Marzio, the deputy of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). Despite the regime’s inaction, this period also provided some windows of opportunity for the extreme right. In particular, the internal crisis from Delgado in 1959, which jolted the New State, was followed by and exacerbated by another three crises, both at the national and international level. On 14–15 December 1960, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization (UNO) led by an Afro-Asian majority voted three resolutions to compel Portugal into providing information on its overseas provinces, considering them non-autonomous territories in the eyes of the international organization. This was in effect the prelude to the diplomatic offensive that would lead the Salazar regime to its fall in 1974. After just three months, on 15 March 1961, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA) led by Holden Roberto perpetrated the massacres in the North of the country that would cause the beginning of the African War. A year later, on 24 March 1962, the most severe academic crisis after the War exploded at the University of Lisbon against Salazar’s regime (Raby 1988: 134). The new diplomatic-military fronts convinced the regime to mobilize internal factions intent on closing ranks around Salazar’s political resistance. This policy of betting on new energies included also the extreme right. The aim was to re-conquer the base of the regime and to limit the fall of the consensus. With reductions in censorship on propagandistic initiatives for those who supported the regime, this allowed the extreme right to have their two most important editorial initiatives of their own come to fruition in the 1960s: the newspaper Tempo Presente (1959–1961) and the weekly Agóra (1962–1969). The same historical contingencies based on these two editorial experiences provoked the radicalization and entry into political activism of a younger generation that would introduce, in Portugal, the themes and aesthetics of the contemporary European far right. Tempo Presente was headed by Fernando Guedes, and its forefront writers were António José de Brito, Florentino Goulart Nogueira, Caetano de Mello Beirão, Amândio César, and António Manuel Couto Viana. The editorial project was subsidized by the Secretary of State for Information (Secretário de Estado da Informação) César Moreira Baptista, nominated in 1958 in the context of the political mobilization of the regime. The regime’s sponsorship was represented by SNI’s compromise in getting half of all printed copies of each published journal and keeping the texts free from the control of the Censorship Services. Tempo Presente reflected well within its pages that generation’s political culture and their belonging to the European extreme right, as António José de Brito’s text in honour of Robert Brasillach expresses: Fascism was for us the . . . greatest find of all, the unforgettable revelation of our youth, . . . with its ethos of comradery, its taste of greatness, its disdain for bourgeois values, its call for courage and discipline, its high idealism. (Tempo Presente n°10, 1960: 10–13 in Marchi 2009b: 30)

The far right intellectual milieu 31 The newspaper shared a marginal European political identity in comparison with the conservative nationalism of the New State and became the vector not only of the extreme right’s classic themes but also of its more avant-garde tendencies at the start of the 1960s. Tempo Presente celebrated totalitarian corporatism for a totalitarian State – universal nationalism against chauvinistic nationalism, where the concepts of Europe, the West, and Eurafrica, were just steps towards a universal Imperium mundi. However, it was in art and literature that Tempo Presente went hand-in-hand with the extreme right’s avant-garde preferences: geometric abstractionism in painting, poetry, including experimental Brazilian poetry (Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos), English avant-garde poets (Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein, Thomas Ernest Hulme, Thomas Stearns Eliot, James Joyce, David Herbert Lawrence), Italian avant-garde (Giovanni Papini), literature (Rainer Maria Rilke, Knut Hamsun), and theatre (Paul Claudel). Particular attention was given to authors who had been damned from the 1930s and 1940s, which Tempo Presente portrayed not just as mere victims at the hands of the wrathful victors, but as giants of the arts, such as Ezra Pound, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach. The magazine actually draws an interesting parallelism between these Nonconformists of the inter-war period and the contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s: the teddy boys, the English and American authors of the Angry Young Men and the Bit Generation (Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd, Jack Kerouac). In just 27 numbers, published up to July 1961, Tempo Presente managed to lay its footprint on the history of the extreme right’s press by offering an international array of cultural quality, unusual for the Portuguese extreme right after the Second World War. The weekly Agóra did not have the same cultural content as Tempo Presente, and can be seen as one of the regime’s propagandistic resources to mobilize public opinion towards going to war. This new editorial initiative was the result of the collaboration between different parts of the extreme right from the 1930s, 1940s, and after the Second World War. Both Raul Carvalho Branco, a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and José O’Neill, the former director of A Nação, ran the weekly. The extreme-right student from the group of Mensagem in Coimbra, Ruy Alvim also had an important role at the beginning. These efforts had been financed initially by some of the extreme right within the regime, such as António Júlio de Castro Fernandes, a banker and ideologist of Portuguese corporativism, and Almirante Henrique Tenreiro, the head of the naval brigade for the Portuguese Legion. Agóra’s publication was ensured by the typography of the official newspaper of the regime Diário da Manhã. The first phase of this new weekly, from 1962 to 1967, did not bring much new that the former nationalistic A Nação newspaper did not have before. The main subjects at hand were the warning against the internal traitors to the regime, rallying against progressive Catholicism as an instrument of communism, against liberal democratics as instruments of North American imperialism, and against international Zionism. In line with the tendencies of the European extreme right, the anti-Americanism of Agóra evolved from a vindictive response to the loss in 1945 to a more refined analysis of the geopolitical consequences of the John

32  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime Fitzgerald Kennedy presidency for Portuguese, European, and Westerner interests in Africa. Emphasizing the USA’s genesis as a European colony in North America, the weekly denounced the cynicism of the current conviction of the E ­ uropean colonialism in Africa by Washington. This condemnation intended, however, merely to replace Portuguese presence in Africa with the neo-­colonialism of multi-national companies. For this reason, the weekly called for Portugal to leave NATO and to take back control North Americans had over the airbase in Lajes (Azores). Agóra represented as well Portugal’s node in the European network of the extreme right, thanks to the collaboration of intellectuals like Dominique Venner (Jeune Nation), Joseph Ortiz (Front National Français), Blas Piñar (Fuerza Nueva), Germans from Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NDP), and Italians from Ordine Nuovo (Marchi 2009b: 192). From 1967 to its editorial finish in 1969, Agóra was headed over by Florentino Goulart Nogueira, assisted by the team of Tempo Presente, but was unable to match the innovative cultural impact from the 1959 journal. Agóra under Nogueira’s watch limited itself to introduce the fascist mysticism in the national extreme right. The goal was to go beyond a simply chauvinistic, conservative, and reactionary nationalist dimension, and push it towards a universal one instead. This markedly fascist turn coincided with the ever more critical stance against Marcelo Caetano as successor of Salazar in 27 September 1968. The extreme right’s adversion to Caetano had been bubbling up for years already, at least since his presidency over the moderate Acção Popular in the 1950s and sacking of the University of Lisbon’s dean at the time of the 1962 academic turmoil, in protest of the regime’s repression. In fact, in 1969, António José de Brito published the anti-Marcelist pamphlet Sobre o momento polítical actual, which compiled the right wing’s criticisms on the new President of the Council.6 In spite of the weak innovative potential of Goulart Nogueira management in comparison to Tempo Presente, Agóra’s radical fascism played a crucial role as a meeting point between the generation of the early post-war period and the generation of the 1960s. This junction was efficiently represented by Agora publishing on 4 November 1967 a supplement entirely dedicated to fascism, which symbolically collected testimonies from three generations of Portuguese radicalism. These generations included the one that grew up during the Second World War and went into political-intellectual activism after 1945, the generation of the first half of the 1960s, and the youngest generation, which entered political combat when approaching the 1970s. In both Tempo Presente and Agóra a new generation of radical youth emerged, whose intellectual propensities no longer identified with the official press of the regime. They did, however, collaborate in the Encontro section of the Diário da Manhã, with texts on Charles Maurras, Louis Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Robert Brasillach, Ernst Junger, Ezra Pound, and Julius Evola. In this regard, Jaime Nogueira Pinto, in his text Fascism 67 as a supplement for Agóra, identified the European background of his generation. He remarked on the influence from counter-revolutionaries such as Donoso Cortés, Charles Maurras,

The far right intellectual milieu 33 and Alfredo Pimenta, and from the philosophers Giovanni Gentile, Ernst Krieck, René Guenon, and Julius Evola. Also important was the Spenglerian decadence in texts by Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle along with the vitalism of works by Georges Sorel, Ernst Junger, Ezra Pound, Tommaso Marinetti; and finally, the discovery of criticisms on modernity by French Hussards Roger Nimier and Jean René Huguenin (Marchi 2009b: 200). Fascinated by the European culture of the extreme right, these youths from the 1960s became activists as political nationalists which defended the Portuguese empire during the African War not just through journals and newspapers but also in the structuring of political organizations with links to the galaxy of movements and parties of the extreme right in Europe.

Notes 1 In particular, conservative nationalism included both Republicans and royalists, liberals as well as anti-liberals. The Integralismo Lusitano (1914–1932) and the Acção Realista Portuguesa (1923–1926) were based on Miguelist thinkers between the 18th and 19th centuries, with the former’s greatest exponent being António Sardinha, and the latter’s Alfredo Pimenta. For the fascists, the Centro do Nacionalismo Lusitano was founded in 1923 by João de Castro Osório, inspired by a Republican model, with the Movimento Nacional Sindicalista in 1932 overseen by Francisco Rolão Preto, with monarchical leanings. 2 In 1890, the British Ultimatum put an end to the expansionist Portuguese projects in Africa: the creation of a territorial continuum from the Angolan coast to the Mozambican coast (the pink map). This represented the biggest crisis for the nationalist milieu in relation to the former Portuguese ally on the eve of the 20th century. 3 Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira (1888–1977) was a childhood friend of António de Oliveira Salazar and considered to be the emblem of the alliance between the Catholic Church and the New State regime. 4 Arquivo Municipal Alfredo Pimenta, Folder António José de Brito, File n° 10–29–21–189. 5 The former National Syndicalism leader Francisco Rolão Preto was the head of press services for General Humberto Delgado’s candidacy. 6 Soon after the fall of the regime, Freitas da Costa would publish the book with the revealing title Acuso Marcello Caetano (I accuse Marcello Caetano).

Bibliography Adinolfi, Goffredo and Pinto, António Costa (2014). “Salazar’s new state: The paradoxes of hybridization in the fascist era”, in António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 154–175. Leal, Ernesto Castro (1999). Nação e Nacionalismos: A Cruzada Nacional D. Nuno Álvares Pereira e as origens do Estado Novo 1918–1938 (Lisboa: Cosmos). Leal, Ernesto Castro (2014). “Acção realista Portuguesa: An organization of the anti-liberal right, 1923–26”, in Portuguese Studies, 30(1): 47–66. Leal, Ernesto Castro (2015). “Nacionalismo e antiliberalismo em Portugal: Uma visão histórico-política (1820–1940)”, Historia Critica, 56: 113–135. Marchi, Riccardo (2009a). Folhas Ultras: As ideias da direita radical portuguesa 1939– 1950 (Lisbon: ICS).

34  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime Marchi, Riccardo (2009b). Império Nação Revolução: As direitas radicais portuguesas no fim do Estado Novo 1959–1974 (Alfragide: Texto). Marchi, Riccardo (2016). “A reacção intelectual anti-republicana como berço da extremadireita estudantil do segundo pós-guerra”, in Diogo Gaspar dir., Outras Vozes na República 1910–1926: Atas do Congresso Nacional de História e Ciência Política (Lisbon: Cadernos do Museu da Presidência da República), 744–754. Marcos, Daniel (2014). “Between the Atlantic and the Empire: NATO as a framework for Portuguese – American relations in early Cold War (1949–1957)”, in Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 12(3): 324–341. Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de (2004). Portugal 1914–1926. From the First World War to Military Dictatorship (Bristol: HiPlam). Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de (2016). Salazar: A Political Biography (New York: Enigma Books). Pinto, António Costa (2000). The Blue Shirts: Portuguese Fascists and the New State (New York: SSM). Pinto, António Costa (2003). “Twentieth-century Portugal: An introduction”, in António Costa Pinto ed., Contemporary Portugal: Politics, Society and Culture (New York: SSM), 1–46. Pinto, António Costa (2007). “Chaos and order: Preto, Salazar and Charismatic appeal in inter-war Portugal”, in António Costa Pinto, Roger Eatwell and Stein Ugelvik Larsen, eds., Charisma and Fascism in Interwar Europe (London, New York: Routledge), 65–76. Pinto, António Costa and Rezola, Maria Inácia (2008). “Political Catholicism, crisis of democracy and Salazar’s new state in Portugal”, in Matthew Feldman, Marius Turda and Tudor Georgescu eds., Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (London, New York: Routledge), 141–156. Quintas, José Manuel (2004). Filhos de Ramires: As origens do Integralismo Lusitano (Lisbon: Editorial Nova Ática). Raby, D. L. (1988). Fascism & Resistance in Portugal: Communists, Liberals and Military Dissidents in the Opposition to Salazar, 1941–74 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Raimundo, Filipa, Ferreira, Nuno Estêvão and Carvalho, Rita Almeida de (2009), “Political decision-making in the Portuguese New State (1933–39): The dictator, the council of ministers and the inner-circle”, in Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 8(1): 85–101. Rodrigues, Luis Nuno (1997). “The creation of the Portuguese legion in 1936”, in LusoBrazilian Review, 34(2): 91–107. Teixeira, Nuno Severiano (2003). “Between Africa and Europe: Portuguese foreign policy, 1890–2000”, in António Costa Pinto ed., Contemporary Portugal. Politics, Society and Culture (New York: SSM), 85–118. Telo, António José (1990). Propaganda e Guerra Secreta em Portugal 1939–45 (Lisbon: Perspectivas & Realidades). Torgal, Luís Reis (2009). “Salazar and the Portuguese “New State”: Images and interpretations”, in Annual of Social History, 2: 7–18.

2 The far right at the outbreak of the war in Africa (1961–1968)

The national and international crises at the start of the 1960s – the UN’s antiPortuguese offensive in 1960, the start of the African War in 1961, the academic crisis in 1962 – had a strong impact on the collective imagination of the Portuguese extreme right, particularly for the younger political activists as a result of these events. The UN’s vote in December 1960 had already been a clear sign of hostility on behalf of the international community. On 15 March 1961, the turning point became even clearer: the Kennedy administration sided with the UN for the resolution to Portuguese colonialism in Angola, with the United Kingdom and France abstaining from voting (Schneidman 2004: 15–16). The massacres of the UPA in the north of Angola on the same day and the quick spread of armed conflict for the rest of the oversea provinces in Mozambique and Guinea in the following months awoke in the nationalist milieu a sense of Portuguese isolation among the communist, capitalist, and non-aligned blocks. This sentiment had already been aggravated since the presidential elections of 1958 and its repercussions on students, particularly at the universities of Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra, which became the largest stages to protest the New State. Anti-Salazar students could set about their tasks here due to the work already done, largely by left-wing communist students, who had infiltrated and controlled academic organizations, taking over strategic positions to politicize the student body. The efficiency of this strategy came to be known as the 1960s went on, principally during the academic crises of 1962 and 1969. For the former, in 1962, the demands of the student movement were more political in comparison to those in the 1950s, although not as radical as at the end of the decade. Student syndicalism focused mainly on elitism in university teaching and excessive governmental control. In the crisis of 1969, on the contrary, the politicization of students was already evident and the claim passed the corporate plan to the plane of the anti-regime and anti-colonialist struggle (Accornero 2016: 52). Taken in this context, the New State’s weakness can be represented by Marcelo Caetano: during the academic protests in 1962, he was the University of Lisbon’s dean, and resigned as a sign of protest against the regime’s oppression against the students. In 1969, he was the President of the Council, and responded to the political protests by replacing the minister of Educação Nacional, José Hermano Saraiva, for the reformist José Veiga Simão. At the same time, he imposed

36  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime security guards on university campuses and remained stalwart in keeping military defences in the colonies, which directly affected the students who could be sent to war in Africa after finishing their studies. In fact, the destiny of the overseas empire was the defining factor in Portuguese youth becoming radicalized, either by being anti-regime or nationalist, leading to different choices in intellectual and political activism. Jaime Nogueira Pinto remembers how his generation, born after the Second World War, grew up in the decadence of authoritarian regime, shaken by an international offensive and changing views from within. This Spenglerian idea of decadence led a part of Portuguese youth face-to-face with fascism: The first fascism, the fascism of our adolescence, which did us skipping school to rebuild the world in “secret meetings” and printed flyers; fascism in the name of which we’ve fought skirmishes and met comrades. We learned there the ethos of friendship, that a comrade is a blood brother because he thinks like us, because he lives and fights at our side. We learned joy and hope which has never left us. Also to fight with determination; but without hate, simply. (Agora, 4 November 1967: 13 in Marchi 2009: 199) This romantic perception of fascism, different from the conservative and stale nationalism of the New State, permeated throughout the activist generation of the 1960s. Like the generation before them, the radicalized youth had a particular relationship with Salazar  – such can be confirmed from various sources by avid members of the extreme right. Jaime Nogueira Pinto attested: “I was not a Salazarist, at least not in the way that the term had come to be accepted”. Such a statement was rather frequent among activists of the extreme right, and as such, over the years, they became convinced that “Salazar . . . was not a fascist but a reactionary, which is, as Drieu la Rochelle said best, the absolute opposite”. Radical nationalists admired Salazar’s dedication to work and his modest life, but did not praise the prudent administration of the State and the regime’s conservatism. Rather, they saw in Salazar an intransigent defender of the Empire, where the challenge to the international community was expressed with the motto “us proudly alone”, synonymous with the communitarian revolution. In the words of Jaime Nogueira Pinto: Salazar is for me and those of my generation . . . born after the second World War, educated in the 1960s when Europe and the West were sorry for and blamed the best they had been, the man up against decadence, the man of the inflexible will when faced with the facts, at the constant service of truth. . . . It’s important for me (and today for almost everyone. . .) the Salazar from April 1961, the Salazar of the resistance, the unshaken Salazar before an unimaginable number of obstacles and challenges. This is the pride in being Portuguese, in belonging to the only ones who challenged and defeated the onslaught of the “winds of history”. (Política n°14–15, 1970: 2 in Marchi 2009: 308)

The far right and the war in Africa 37 This judgement is shared by another prominent element of the generation of 60s, José Valle de Figueiredo: All youngsters who grew up politically in the 1960s opted for a national revolutionary path in which Salazar appeared to be the greatest way to ensure the “transformation of the State” in its most authentically nationalist, communitarian, and social way. It’s just that a sober and realistic look at the facts and veiled intentions showed us how to understand and distinguish the reactionism from the conservatives of the system and the revolutionarism from the man who had determined its orientation. In other words, the Portuguese youth, which had opted for joining together the homeland and revolution, knew perfectly well with data that had come to light, that Salazar had fought for a revolutionary community to bring up to the end the consequences inherent in the establishment of the New State. (Política n°14–15, 1970: 3 in Marchi 2009: 308) For the new generation of extreme right activists, the War in Africa triggered radicalization and mobilization. For them, the destiny of an entire civilization was at jeopardy. A civilization built over the course of centuries, by the navigators and architects of cathedrals and empires, in mythic Christianity of counter-reform, in the works of poets and painters, partaking in one and the same culture, race, and spirit. Their wish to preserve this tradition acquired a political valance thanks to the study of counter-revolutionary Portuguese authors such as João Ameal, Fernando Campos, and Alfredo Pimenta, but also in their readings of Donoso Cortes, Georges Sorel, Charles Maurras, René Guenon, Julius Evola, Tommaso Marinetti, Giovanni Gentile, Ernst Kriek, Ernst Junger, and Ezra Pound. In Portuguese schools and universities an eclectic generation emerged, which was interested in the Marxist socialism of Lenin and also in Drieu La Rochelle’s fascist socialism. The influence from novels by Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Jean René Huguenin, Roger Nimier, and Jean Larteguy also permeated their ideologies, in addition to films by Ingar Bergman, westerns by John Ford, in the “Citizen Kane” by Orson Wells, or in “Lawrence of the Arábias” by David Lean. This generation was as such the bearer of reactionary and revolutionary identity at the same time. Reactionary responses were a result of their sensitivity on the alleged bourgeoisie betrayal of their national history’s grandiosity learned at home and in the regime’s propaganda. The revolutionary aspect comes into focus when taking into consideration the activist minority, which was also disciplined in restoring the principles of the aristocracy and authority against egalitarian individualism, material consumerism, and technocratic domain. This sentiment of revolt against decadence was also a stab at the leading class of the New State, whose conservative and stagnant nationalism did not understand what spurred the anxieties felt by the younger generations. The radicalization of this generation was expressed well in the words of Jaime Nogueira Pinto: “without fearing words and consequences, here we are, here we war, in this fascism 67, and we are twenty years old. So, what does it matter to us if you are against us when your children will be with us?” (Marchi 2009: 200).

38  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime The reference to street activism was significant: in the 15 years following the end of the Second World War, the fascist sympathizers of the Portuguese extreme right had been limited to intellectual expression in journals of culture and politics supported by the regime, and, as such, relied on the precarious balance between the factions of the New State. To the contrary, the new generation from the 1960s, radicalized from the African War, no longer settled for simple doctrinal expressions of their ideas. Despite sharing conservative, Catholic, counter-revolutionary values from the New State, and admiring radical Portuguese nationalism from the first half of the 20th century (Integralismo Lusitano, Acção Realista, and national syndicalism), this generation could not identify with the official, rigid structure of the regime. It was deemed as passé, with its patriotic rhetoric regarding their discovery myths and civilizing mission, insufficient for contemporary needs of political formation and revolutionary mobilization. These youths sought out their cultural references outside of the traditional sources of Portuguese authoritarian nationalism. Some of them did it by personal conviction, others due to the extremism typical of their age. Fascinated by universal fascism for mass mobilization and by the mystique of the warriors, they read up on texts from the Spanish writers Onésimo Redondo, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the French Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and the Romanian Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. In this sense, they shared the same cultural patrimony of hundreds of other radical right-wing youths in other Western European countries. The onset of the African War in 1961 meant the point of no return for this Portuguese generation. The war destabilized the old symmetry among Salazarists and non-Salazarists and created new bonds. On the one hand, there were those in and out of the New State who considered the Empire to be Portugal’s destiny regardless of the authoritarian regime; on the other, there were those who considered the Empire’s crisis to be a mirror image of the regime’s, and thought of it as an opportunity to reform or oust the New State. Those on the extreme right who staunchly defended the Empire thought, however, that their enemies were both the Marxists as well as the technocrats who would reform the regime. They found allies not just among unwavering Salazarists, but also in liberal Republicans, progressives, and anti-Salazarist monarchists, attached to the Empire a pre-existing and independent reality to the New State because of their past heritage and the shining moments of Portuguese history. The transversality of the front for the defence of the Empire convinces the young militants of the extreme right of the fact that the revolution no longer responds to the left/right dichotomy, but instead to a convergence of elites devoted to defending national integrity as an ethical vision of politics. It is also for this reason that the main inspiration of these activists was not the elite from the New State, but the civil and military fighters of the French Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS). They believed that Portugal was being pushed into a crisis similar to that which Belgium and France had experienced, in both the Congo and Algeria respectively. For them, the anti-European offensives in Africa were the last consequences of the lost war in 1945 by the Axis Powers: they were as such the last stages of global strategy for the annihilation of Eurocentrism and for the definitive expulsion of

The far right and the war in Africa 39 Europeans from Africa on behalf of Sovietic and North American imperialism. However, the European counter-offensive was not limited to just military resistance on African fronts, but also needed action in the Metropolis. According to theorists on revolutionary war, the internal front was the fundamental side for the final victory, hence the Portuguese extreme right felt committed in providing for this internal front. The youngest activists responded to the call for defending the Empire through the structuring of a galaxy of organizations characterized, similarly to their European counterparts, by fragmentation, by personalism, and by internal conflict. Some of these organizations were founded spontaneously by high school and university students, whereas others broke off from previous groups. Sometimes this was done so by interference of some specific sectors of the regime or by initiative of factions within the paramilitary organizations of the New State. In any case, they found themselves at odds not just with the support and instrumentalization of complacent sectors in the New State, but also with obstacles from the authorities whenever their revolutionary volunteerism caused problems for the regime. Their main battlegrounds were the Universities of Lisbon, Coimbra, and Porto, with left-wing students coming more and more to the forefront in the fight. The mood at the time became increasingly more difficult for a nationalist initiative constrained between propaganda on the street, academic strikes and boycotts, and physical confrontation with the opposition. In the realm of the extreme right, the most important organization arose immediately at the start of the 1960s under the name of Jovem Portugal (JP). Its founder, Zarco Moniz Ferreira, a student of the University of Lisbon (Faculty of Letters) and worker at the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, had been in contact with the national extreme-right milieu since the end of the 1950s, as well as European neo-fascist organizations. Moniz Ferreira was a typical example of a Portuguese activist in the 1960s who favoured street activism through an organized hierarchical structure more than doctrinal speculation, pertaining to the strict intellectual ultra-nationalist circles from the immediate after-war period. His first attempt to structure the youngest activists went back to 1958–1959 with the foundation of the Ordem Nova movement, which began with a bulletin that published with a small group of colleagues in Lisbon. The initiative, however, went belly up due to there not being enough people from the radical Portuguese milieu joining. Even in its beginning phases, the handful of radical militants linked to Moniz Ferreira were clearly dissatisfied with the excessive intellectualism from the pro-fascist generation, coming from Mensagem and now occupied with the even more pretentious magazine Tempo Presente. Even more acute was their dissatisfaction with the more extensive milieu of the extreme right in the regime. They blamed the extreme right for its immobilism, its endless bull sessions in Lisbon and Porto cafés, its stifling patronage on the youngest comrades muzzled in official organizations of the New State (Portuguese Youth and Portuguese Legion) or in ephemeral groups created in the backstage of the regime, such as the Frente Nacional (1959). To escape the stranglehold of the national extreme right, Moniz Ferreira was in contact from an early point with European neo-fascist organizations,

40  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime mainly the Italian Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and the Ordine Nuovo, the French Jeune Nation, the Swedish Nordiska Rikspartiet (NRP), and the Austrian Kameradschaftsring Nationaler Jugendverbände (KNJ). By the end of the 1950s, Moniz Ferreira was already part of the European extreme right. On 5 April 1958, he participated in the fifth assembly of the transnational movement Nouvel Ordre Européen by Gaston Armand Amaudruz, where he was tasked to coordinate, with Italian, Belgian, and German comrades, various European youth movements in the Young European Legion (Marchi 2009: 73). In August 1959, he was part of the Congress of European National Revolutionary Youth, organized by Ordine Nuovo, with the Belgian and French colleagues. In a letter from 2 January 1959, Moniz Ferreira himself explained to António José de Brito what compelled him to international activism: “Throughout Europe has been lately as an awakening of our ideas and are mainly young people who take the vanguard”. For that reason, the young Portuguese leader lamented the lack of Portuguese nationalists in transnational networks of the extreme right, regretted the wrong idea of the foreign comrades about Portugal as a fascist regime and stressed the difficulty to introduce the European neo-fascist ideology in the Portuguese nationalist milieu. After the failure of the Ordem Nova, the window of opportunity to take on organizational force came as a result of the anti-Portuguese offensive in December 1960 by the UN. The JP movement, which had been in the making in those moments, was released to the public in March 1961, with a pamphlet speaking out against the international organization: Representatives of hordes just out from cannibalism as a food system and from the law of the jungle as a juridical political system, supported by the mentally backward, excrements of an absurd world on its way to decomposition, they allow themselves to criticize our civilizing action, by denying our right to remain in Africa. (Marchi 2009: 72) Thanks to the quick reaction to the UN campaign’s impact on the Portuguese pride, JP was able to enlist an embryonic nucleus of militants. The leader Moniz Ferreira was, however, first and foremost concerned with enlisting for the European neo-fascist movement, and as such assumed the Celtic cross as an official symbol. This identity was not entirely accepted across the board and was subject to varying internal diatribes over the course of the movement’s life. The neofascist character was also not accepted by the competing nationalist organizations, loyal to the classic Portuguese nationalism that did not manage well with foreign models of a fascist or national-socialist type. Be that as it may, the movement did succeed in making headway in Lisbon, Coimbra, and to a lesser degree, Porto. In the capital, JP was joined by a consistent group of workers coming from Almada, a working-class area to the south of the river Tagus. This event allowed the movement to create an activist foothold comprised of students and workers exceeding

The far right and the war in Africa 41 the normal composition of ultranationalists, as it included the petty bourgeoisie, middle class, and liberal professionals. The movement, however, was never able to make significant moves among the working class despite its persistent propaganda in justicialism and national syndicalist content. In Porto, JP made some headway in high schools due to the efforts on behalf of one of the future intellectuals of radical nationalism: Jaime Nogueira Pinto. In Coimbra, however, Moniz Ferreira was able to reach an agreement with José Valle de Figueiredo’s group whose role in running the movement allowed JP to find its way in the historic university. Outside of these three urban centres, Jovem Portugal’s influence was limited, only being able to reach those who already identified with their message in small numbers, making it as such impossible to ensure any kind of significant or continual activity. As for action taken to the streets, the movement was run exclusively through distributing propaganda, including posters and collages on walls. All activities were partially carried out underground with the help of some sectors in Salazarist institutions and despite the official non-tolerance of organized political movements by the regime. The same can be said regarding openly illegal activity. There are two cases that are most telling in this regard. In March 1964, the Academic Association of the Lisbon University, which was controlled by the left-wing Student Movement, was attacked. Later, in May 1965, the headquarters of the Sociedade Portuguesa de Escritores (SPE) was destroyed for having given an award to Angolan writer Luandino Vieira, an independentist connected to the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular para a Libertação de Angola). In the latter case, Jovem Portugal took part in an operation comprised of the most radical sectors of the regime, including elements from the Portuguese Legion and nationalist intellectuals who were critical of the oppositional SPE gathering strength. As for its underground activities, the one that characterized this generation best was its aid for French refugees from the OAS in Portugal. In particular, activists from JP provided the French with fake identity documents and homes where they had shelter. When Georges Bidault, president of the National Resistance Council linked with the OAS milieu, passed through Lisbon in 1963, JP’s activists acted as bodyguards for the French politician (Marchi 2013: 158–159). In those years, Portuguese radical activists were constantly in touch with the OAS French refugees in Lisbon who in 1966 founded the Aginter Press. This news agency sided by the political organization Ordre et Tradition and its paramilitary branch Organisation de l’Armée Contre le Communisme International (OACI) was led by Yves Guerin Serac (alias Yves Guillou). Aginter Press developed propagandist counter-subversive campaigns along with covert operations under the non-conventional war strategy in several countries in and out of Europe (Albanese and del Hierro 2016: 128–129 and 150). The activity of the Portuguese militants was, of course, constantly monitored by the regime’s authorities, including by the PIDE, allowing immediate intervention whenever the movement’s autonomy resulted in something less convenient and more harmful.

42  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime In addition to direct action, propaganda was Jovem Portugal’s primary method of diffusing their message over the course of the five years it ran. The movement was able to produce a considerable series of publications, including the page “Jovem Portugal” in the weekly Agóra (March–May 1961), Ofensiva (four publications from December 1960 to March 1961), Ataque (May–June 1961), Ecos Nacionalistas (June 1961–May 1962, November/December 1964, May 1965), and Renovação (December 1963 to May 1965). Ataque became the movement’s official speaking piece thanks to the New State’s financial support. This support, however, was interrupted abruptly by Salazar himself due to a critical article from 1963 on military management in the African War and the social injustices caused by the regime’s colonial policies and that explained the armed revolt of blacks and mestizos as pro-independence fighters. Jovem Portugal’s newspaper content, however, always walked a fine line between prudence in the apologia of fascism and ostentation of European extremeright symbols. As an attempt to not neglect their base of conservative nationalists from the regime, and to radicalize the youngest members at the same time, their publications reproduced the traditional ideas of the European right wing, but also the boldest interpretations of revolutionary nationalism as regarding European presence in Africa. Ataque in particular viewed capitalism and communism as the most dangerous enemies for Portugal, with this backed up with the UN’s anti-Portuguese policies, underlined even further by Zionism. Alongside this classic conspiracy theory rooted in anti-Semitism, Ataque shows also more heterodoxy analyses on Portuguese presence in Africa. In particular, the newspaper admonished the New State’s African policies as colonialist and at the service of a monopolistic capitalism. It was here that Jovem Portugal called for a revolution that would put the Euro-African myth as a pluri-continental bloc to fruition, with white leadership, where Europeans could set about their Christian civilizing mission in a multi-racial context as opposed to the US and USSR imperialism. This position reflected the stance of the French extreme right involved in the OAS’ fight in Algeria. As a matter of fact, Jovem Portugal did not have any particularly innovative principles. The movement shared, as was the case with other radical nationalist organizations, the idea that their homeland was being attacked by imperialists from both superpowers (the USA and USSR), both on an international level (UN) as well as national (pro-independence African guerrillas and communist/democratic oppositionists). It did, however, proclaim to be against any kind of internationalism, be it capitalism, communism, Zionism, or masonry. The JP rejected socio-economic models that these systems used, instead falling back on Phalangist national syndicalism ideology. The movement proposed to create vertical syndicates for each branch of the national economy, in which exploitation and class struggle would be overcome by collaboration between professional categories. In this system, the State would have the role of a coordinator for the greater good of national well-being. The national-syndicalist model works also as an alternative to the corporativism of the New State. In this sense, Jovem Portugal did not hold back on its criticism of the leading national class. The New State’s elite was accused of having betrayed the

The far right and the war in Africa 43 revolutionaries on 28 May 1926 and having withdrawn themselves from defending the Empire. In particular, the movement spoke out against the regime’s disastrous handling of the student protests in 1962, which discredited even more its official youth organizations (Portuguese Youth) and pushed students into leftwing movements. They also blamed right-wing student organizations that arose in this period, such as against the moderate and liberal Acção Académica. They were of this opinion as the group supported a model of neo-capitalist development for Portugal and the overseas provinces. As well, the Frente dos Estudantes Nacionalistas adhered to the New State’s national corporativism without thinking twice and the Jovem Europa for wanting to go forward with a project for a European nation completely at odds with the reality of a pluri-continental Portugal. The Jovem Portugal movement, which had arisen during the tense political climate of 1960–1962, with the onset of the African War, the student protests, and the international diplomatic offensive, suffered when Portuguese politics began to return to normal. The decrease of the student contestation with the New State’s repression in addition to the regime’s initial war-like rhetoric (“To Angola quickly and in force”) changing to a more routine operation at war like simple police operation, slowed down the movement. The Moniz Ferreira’s leadership continued the spiral downward, with 1963–1965 representing the group’s ultimate decline. Moniz Ferreira tried to react proactively, reorganizing its structure and making it closer to the regime’s institutions controlled by the radicals, looking for anything to keep the movement going strong. In May 1965, however, Jovem Portugal’s activists were given the chance to join the ranks of the Portuguese Legion through the constitution of the Academic Legionary Organization (Formação Legionária Académica FLA). Moniz Ferreira was also offered to head the FLA, but Jovem Portugal’s entrance to the group only stifled further the movement’s progress. Many of its members did not accept such a close connection to the regime’s structures, which had already been severely discredited among the youth. The FLA as a project remained as such on paper due to its artificial character, whether on behalf of the Portuguese Legion or the radical nationalists. With that in mind, Jovem Portugal was officially over by the end of 1965. In the first half of the 1960s, the faction in Coimbra from Jovem Portugal acted in a rather autonomous way with the radicals’ leader there being José Valle de Figueiredo. He was not a tried and true politician like Moniz Ferreira, but he had made his debut as a poet in various literary magazines at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. Despite being green around the collar, he read doctrinal texts of monarchical and Republican Portuguese nationalism through a fascist lens, particularly with O Corporativismo Fascista (1938) by António Júlio Castro Fernandes and two works by João Ameal, both from 1932, Panorama do Nacionalismo Português and A Revolução da Ordem. In addition to these works, he read theses from former fascist students in Coimbra from Mensagem, such as the Primeira Semana de Estudos Doutrinários (1959) and the book from António José de Brito, Destino do Nacionalismo Português (1962). Valle de Figueiredo learned in this literature where classic Portuguese nationalism met and diverged

44  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime with the fascist revolution of the 1920s and 1930s. In Tempo Presente’s last publication, he published his first political article with the title “Europa, sentido e acção” (Tempo Presente, n°27, July 1961, p. 82), inspired by the fascist universalism of the Italian journal Antieuropa (1930) by Asvero Gravelli. In this phase, Valle de Figueiredo was already a leading political activist for the nationalists in the University of Coimbra. In Coimbra, the conservative and monarchical nationalists had already had their presence consolidated in the student bodies. However, the right wing lost their footing with their inaction. Too condescending with the policy of the regime, they lost the capacity to represent the students’ wishing for reform, letting the left wing lead the way, which ultimately led to the 1962 student protests. Symptomatic of this turn to the left at the university was the Assembleia Magna, organized in October 1960 to discuss the right of self-determination, as recognized by the General Assembly of the UN, for people in non-European lands part of the Portuguese empire. In the assembly, the nationalists were defeated by a majority of students who called for an apolitical character of the Academia, rejecting any kind of condemnation of the UN. This resulted in roughly a thousand students from the right to sign a manifest to protest in December 1960. The extreme-right faction of the Academy, organized by Valle de Figueiredo, supported the initiative. At this point in time, however, the extreme right was not yet clearly structured. At the start of 1961, Valle de Figueiredo reached an agreement with Moniz Ferreira on Jovem Portugal’s leadership, and transformed the group into a JP section in Coimbra, although maintaining a considerable level of autonomy. The first political initiative of JP in Coimbra was the solidarity campaign with general Raoul Salan, one of OAS’ founders, sent to jail due to his participation in an attempted coup d’état in April 1961. The students in Coimbra, just like in Lisbon, identified with the French fight in Algeria and against General Charles de Gaulle’s capitulation to American and Soviet imperialism. They considered white people to remain in Africa as the last stronghold for European civilization, profoundly shaken still since the defeat in 1945. For the radicals in Coimbra, those who fought for OAS were like the young veterans in the First World War who became conscious of their role in society and felt spurred on by this first wave of avant-garde and revolutionary fascism. This anti-bourgeois sentiment of the OAS’ combatants provided an example in Portugal to fight against subversion and against the small-minded political elite of the New State. The first propagandistic actions were felt immediately – at the start of 1961, PIDE reported a series of violent confrontations among left-wing students and activists from Jovem Portugal. The confrontations became even more bitter in the following year, when the radicals took sides with the University of Coimbra’s dean, Guilherme Braga da Cruz, who was close to the regime’s extreme right. The dean was criticized by the student body Associação Académica de Coimbra (AAC) for not having supported the university in its solidarity campaign with the students in Lisbon, victims of police repression. Right-wing students, however, sided with the dean and accused the AAC for having been controlled by

The far right and the war in Africa 45 communist students. The anti-communist mobilization was promoted primarily by the Catholics of the CADC, but the extreme right was able to quickly occupy the front line during the moment of violent shock with the left wing. The student protests in 1962 were also a window of opportunity for the radicals in Coimbra for their own definitive organization. This was so as the regime’s need to let anti-subversive propaganda in the university flow in easier allowed the group to publish the journal Combate (12 publications between 1962 and 1965, sided with the weekly supplement Acção and by the notebooks Combate Estudos). Institutional support for this militant press was guaranteed with help from the civil governor of Coimbra, with exemption from the Censorship’s control and with anonymous editorial collaboration by Professor Arnaldo Miranda Barbosa, another member of the teaching staff close to the radical right wing in the regime. The writing style in Combate was characterized by its insistence of a common thread for the pre-fascist movements of 1914–1918, the OAS fighters in Algeria, and the Portuguese soldiers in Africa. The heart of the journal was, however, to speak out against the student leaders’ strategies, connected to the Partido Comunista Português (PCP) to head the Student Movement from the corporative claims to openly subversive and anti-Portuguese stances. On the subject of academic subversion, Valle de Figueiredo would publish the booklet Reforma universitária e política académica (1972) with an analysis on the evolution of student uprising in Coimbra from 1962 up to the start of the 1970s. For the extreme right, student disputes could be divided in two clear categories, the first of which from 1962 to 1965 and the second from 1968 on. The first period was characterized by a tone of student syndicalism whose claims were merely corporative, whereas the second went beyond the strict realm of a university, dabbled with political connotations and on the lookout for the fall of the regime. This progression was not by chance, reflecting instead the predefined communist project to infiltrate and radicalize the student masses, and intending to have a revolution. The PCP established this strategy in his IV Congress from 1946, which is why he dissolved the party’s youth organizations to put its activists in the student and in the regime official organizations. Over the years, this “infiltration” had an effect on two particular subjects: the first was the AAC’s demand for a neutral, non-political approach whenever it was necessary to take political sides when defending Portugal, and indirectly, the New State. The other was how the African War was to be perceived as a fight of African people against fascism and not as a Portuguese fight against North American and Soviet imperialism. Faced with this evidence, the group from Combate collected a wide assortment of counter-information on the student community, sharing information provided by elements of the regime’s security bodies, in particular the PIDE. Combate’s campaign, however, did not use the typical reactionary tones of conservative nationalism – the newspaper recognized, however, the students’ fair corporative claims, criticizing how the regime had abandoned the youth, condemning New State’s betrayal of the revolutionary project on 28 May  1926, which had been becoming increasingly more bourgeois, conservative, and stagnant. On the

46  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime occasion of the official celebrations of the national revolution, in Braga, on 28 May 1963, Valle de Figueiredo openly presented the following accusations, as an official guest of the authorities representing the students from Coimbra: [Since 1945] we have been forgetting, by outside pressure, that we once were part of the national revolution, concealing everything and forgetting everything that could bore the triumphant democracies. Little by little our customs and doctrines have been fading, and the men responsible for this claiming to be organic-democrats. The tough mood indispensable to all revolutions had fallen to the wayside. Reactionary forces, those counter-revolutionary and socially conservative, started by sabotaging the power of the State, restoring the bourgeois order that deny in the facts the rights conquered in the law by the people and the workers. Social justice has been ruined and the junction work-capital was the formula needed to scam the legitimate and sacred rights of the people under the veil of the law. (Marchi 2009: 157) The speech’s tone at the official ceremony of the New State represented how far the radicals in the regime and the freedom of speech they had been granted could go. Their fascist positions, however, were in the 1960s still not the standard for the right-wing students in Coimbra. On the contrary, their positions reflected a minority with good cultural and political preparation, but scarcely able to radicalize the Catholic nationalists, monarchists, or Salazarists in the Academia. A sign of this isolation was Combate’s refusal in being part of the right-wing academic lists in both the 1963 (Independent Academia List – Lista Independente Académica) and the 1964 elections (Academia Reunion List – Lista Reencontro Académico), both won by the left. In 1964, the Ministry of National Education refused to approve the organs of self-government of the students once again controlled by the left and imposed the Administrative Commissions on the Coimbra Student Association (Commisões Administrativas on the Associação Académica de Coimbra CA/AAC) which would be kept as such until 1969. The regime handed over the leadership of the CA/AAC to the right-wing students, including the extreme right-wing faction. After an intense discussion among radical activists on the opportunity to be an instrument of the regime, the Combate group decided to accept the invite, and Valle de Figueiredo became the vice-president of the CA/AAC. The experience did not produce great results, however: inaction on behalf of the academic right wing rendered CA/AAC into a mere instrument of control for the regime, without the radicals being able to take advantage in any clear way of this window of opportunity. Indeed, the extreme right in Coimbra displayed having a clear idea on oppositionist strategy in the universities as well as on mistakes on behalf of the New State for the younger generations. However, the group was unable to elaborate on a credible alternative. In this sense, the Combate group settled on a political project not appealing for the students: the corporative University shaped by the mediaeval model, in which professors and students would participate in

The far right and the war in Africa 47 handling the Academia, in a hierarchical structure, with the idea to educate future patriots of the Empire. In the second half of the 1960s, the extreme right at the University of Coimbra began acting outside of the academic milieu. Some of the leading members of the Combate group participated in cultural editorial initiatives: the newspaper Itinerário, the “Encontro” section published in Diário da Manhã, the weekly of the extreme right Agora, as well as less well-known publications like the bulletin Confidencial (1966–1967). Through these means, radicals were able to introduce in Portugal more structured analyses on the alleged global conspiracy which Valle de Figueiredo obtained through his connections with the European extreme right. In a series of articles published by Agora in October 1967, for example, the alleged Jewish conspiracy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was presented as well as the change in strategy for the construction of a world Government after the Elimination of the Zionist agent Trotsky by the nationalist Stalin. In the same way, the UN was a tool as such of Zionism controlled by the USA and USSR at the detriment of Europe and its values. This control structure worked in a pyramidal way: at the vertex, one could find the Zionist supporters of both capitalism and international Marxism (USA and USSR). They coordinated a diverse network of masonic lodges, of international financial organizations, of national and transnational agencies (centres of study, foundations, and special offices). In Europe, the most dangerous agent was the Bilderberg Group which, since 1954, was preparing a European super government (the European Economic Community EEC) as the first step for the world government. In Portugal, those who backed the antiPortuguese offensive in Africa were the Council of Foreign Affairs (CFA) from the USA, the American Committee on Africa, who financed the UPA terrorists in the north of Angola, the African-American Institute, and the Ford Foundation, financers of the terrorism in Mozambique. With this in mind, the radicals in Coimbra supported their anti-American positions, minoritarian among the right-wing supporters of the New State. Despite both Jovem Portugal and Combate’s relevance in the extreme right milieu, they were unable to appeal to all radical nationalist supports. During the student protests of 1962 at the University of Lisbon, the Nationalist Students Front (Frente dos Estudantes Nacionalistas FEN) also appeared which had a particular presence in the faculty of sciences. FEN was different from Jovem Portugal due to it being intrinsically closer to classic Portuguese nationalism (monarchical, integralist, Catholic) than to European neo-fascism, as their fascist expressions had more in common with the model taken on by the New State in the 1930s as a symbol, to the eyes of this youth, of the original revolutionary spirit of the regime. FEN also did not reject references to the loss in 1945 as in 1963 they organized a meeting among young Portuguese nationalists and Otto Skorzeny, the legendary national-socialist fighter taking refuge in Spain. Along with Jovem Portugal, FEN was part of physical confrontations with the left-wing students and in assaulting the headquarters of all anti-Salazarist opposition. What was different from JP, however, was that FEN also developed an institutional activity more akin to the regime’s structures, which allowed them to get closer access to the Portuguese

48  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime right wing. This was also helped thanks to events like international conferences with official organizations from the Franco regime (the University Groups of Phalange and the Sindicato de Estudiantes Universitários), or the annual national celebrations on 10 June, with academic authorities also taking part. The greatest linking point between the FEN and the regime was best seen in its own foundation as promoted directly by the Minister of the Interior thanks to the financial support by the Subsecretariat for Youth and Sport of the Minister of the National Education. The New State’s intention was to control groups of young nationalists to counter-balance the growing influence of the opposition forces due to the student protests in 1962. FEN was, however, unable to build steam outside of the University of Lisbon in spite of the logistic and financial support from the regime. In 1964, the same was also attempted at the University of Coimbra, which also failed due to the presence of the Combate group. The direct sponsorship of the regime was also the reason for their downfall – after the student protests, the Salazarist institutions themselves that had urged them on at that point now aimed to shut them down. The pretext was the internal struggle within the FEN between the moderate and radical components of the group regarding the last president Vasco Meirelles (a former activist of the Combate group and future agent of the PIDE/DGS in Africa). Taking advantage of these squabbles within the organization which was no longer in tune with the regime, the Ministry of the Interior, Alfredo dos Santos Junior, who had been part of the right wing of the New State, intervened, on the side of the moderates. Through police intimidation, threats, and disciplinary sanctions, the Ministry obliged the radicals to let go control of the FEN. The organization transformed, as a result, into the Nationalist Students Center (Centro de Estudantes Nacionalistas CEN), the spokesman of generic patriotic nationalism, inspired by Catholic personalism. This would prove to be the tell-tale sign of the movement’s end. At the same time of JP and FEN, a Portuguese section of the pan-European movement Jeune Europe of the Belgian Jean Thiriart also appeared. Jovem Europa (JE) was founded in 1961 by a group of colleagues at the Liceu Camões in Lisbon and was led by Joaquim Caimoto Duarte, son of the Civil Governor in Faro (Algarve). In the first years of its life, the movement was limited to spreading its propaganda among the Portuguese right wing, an activity that reached its culmination with the publication of the Portuguese edition of the book by Thiriart in 1965, entitled Europa, um Império de 400 Milhões de Homens. In the same year, Caimoto Duarte left the movement as he did not see eye-to-eye with Jean Thiriart, with the movement then to be taken on by José Manuel Santos Costa. Under his guidance, JE became all the closer with the international network of the movement, taking part in meetings in France and Italy, as well as in summer camps in Spain. Their fervent activity was well structured in organizational terms, but the movement also failed in being able to find an audience beyond its few dozens of militants. When compared with other Portuguese extreme right groups and movements, Jovem Europa had the distinction of being the only one that rejected classic antiEuropean sentiments felt by the Portuguese right wing. JE actually supported the

The far right and the war in Africa 49 Portuguese empire in joining the European nation. For them, the European nation, fortified by its colonies, represented the only geo-political alternative to stand up to the imperialism in Washington and Moscow. Portuguese nationalists fully rejected this chance when considering Portugal’s accession to Europe as the first step of losing its sovereignty overseas. In fact, in March/April 1963, Agora published a series of harsh critics on Jean Thiriart, accusing his anti-Americanism of being a Soviet instrument to weaken nationalists in the West. These comments led PIDE as well to ponder over how dangerous the panEuropean movement could be, without intervening, for it considered the movement’s founder’s political position to be safe, as the son of a high officer of the regime. The differences noted here can best be emphasized during Jean Thiriart’s visit to Portugal in August 1966 – the conference organized in Porto by activists in Jovem Europa provoked steep controversy in the most important extreme right newspapers. The most prominent radical within the regime, particularly the intellectual from the extreme right, Carlos Eduardo de Soveral, former Subsecretary of the National Education in 1962, intervened, causing the Belgian leader’s events in Lisbon to be cancelled. This case showed how Europeanism still was something completely alien to radical Portuguese nationalism, and how this mind-frame was unable to be broken by any substantial innovation. Another example of this can be witnessed in Moniz Ferreira’s interview with the Italian journal Ordine Nuovo, journal of the neo-fascist organization of the same name). In it, the Portuguese leader, who was close to Italians, admitted how his Portuguese comrades were not available to take part in a common battle for the European empire, as that would risk Portuguese sovereignty in its own empire. These four most relevant organizations were flanked by a series of acronyms that popped up during the 1960s, all of them identified with the extreme right agenda. Some of these tiny organizations came about from isolated personalities without any consistent activism, such as the Viriatos and the Centuriões, which were formed by some young officials of the Army, back from Africa and close to the radical nationalist milieu. Others, however, were founded by former militants that had left the major groups, reproducing extreme right fractional tendencies in Portugal, having found out about them in right-wing bulletins from France, Italy, or Spain. This was the case for the Frente Nacional Europeia do Trabalho, founded by a former leader of Jovem Portugal, which served as a Portuguese analogue to the French movement of the same name, Front National du Travail (FNT) by Jean-Claude Jacquard, whose contacts with the Portuguese go back to the beginning of 1965. Other types of organizations also appeared at the time as young people from other political families within the regime’s right wing became radicalized. A clear example of this is the Real União Portuguesa (RUP), founded in 1961 by youth who supported the Royalist Cause (Causa Monárquica – the official association of the House of Bragança), which tightened relations during the university years with radical nationalists against left-wing students in favour of defending the Empire. This was largely inconsequential, however, as they did not bring anything new regarding their beliefs or ways in spreading them.

50  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime Something not just all of these radical organizations shared in the first part of the 1960s but also the ones that would follow them was the fluidity of the militancy. Going from one organization to another, or participating in activities of different ones was a common practice in the Portuguese extreme right. The nationalists in all their forms belonged to rather homogeneous ideologies, but their shortcomings were in elaborating common strategies and structural outlines. The sheer number of alliances, divisions, and fusions were a result of the leaders’ personalism as opposed to any ideological disagreements. This led of course to the organizations being unstable, losing the most passionate of their supporters when tensions after crises blew over. By the mid-1960s, none of these movements were in a position to pass the torch on to the coming radical generation. The last and most consistent attempt to do as such came in 1966, on the back of Portuguese Legion’s support, when former leaders of Jovem Portugal and those from Combate founded the National Revolutionary Front (Frente Nacional Revolucionária FNR). Their goal was to create a common space for all those who had been politically involved at the beginning of the decade. Rather, the attempt was to rebuild an area in decline as a result of the routine management of war in Africa and the end of the mobilizations within the Universities. Despite FNR’s reach in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Porto, the only result was the newspaper Frente being published, which took on the editorial line found in Combate and the publications of Jovem Portugal. Frente was most distinguishable for having brought to Portugal the ideas and battles of European movements, in particular with the publication of the section “Frente Europeia”, along with interviews conducted with intellectual French nationalists. In “Frente Europeia”, texts by Wolfgang Silling of the NationalDemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (NDP), Fabrice Laroche (pseudonym of Alain de Benoist from Europe Action), Pedro Carriça (Falange Española de la JONS), and Antonio Lombardo (Ordine Nuovo) were published. Luis Fernandes, a correspondent of the FNR, carried out the interviews in Paris, France; he also worked for the PIDE as an informer for the Portuguese community and as a bridge between Lisbon and PIDE agents working in the north of Africa. For the extreme right’s printing press, Luís Fernandes also interviewed Tixier Vignancour, SaintPaulien, Maurice Bardèche, and Saint-Loup. With the FNR’s dissolution in 1966, Luís Fernandes tried again to carry out an extreme-right initiative in Lisbon starting from the ranks and files of the Portuguese Youth, of which he was a member. In order to do so, he took advantage of the organization’s internal disarray, which came about due to reforms by the regime. This had been happening gradually since the Second World War’s conclusion, as the regime aimed in de-politicizing the youth organization. This provoked a strong reaction from the extreme right, namely in the 1960s, when nationalists felt that the youth were increasingly siding more with the left. On 9 April 1966, Agora published a protest manifesto, signed by 42 graduates of Portuguese Youth – the controversy got worse in November 1966, when the government withdrew MP’s right to provide training for young people (Decreto-lei n°47 311). The extreme right attempted to react with alumni from MP, the Former Officers League (Liga dos Antigos Graduados LAG), and the few deputies from

The far right and the war in Africa 51 the organization in the National Assembly (Assembleia Nacional) close to the radicals (Manuel Braancamp Sobral, Elmano Alves, Gonçalo Mesquitela). When, at the beginning of 1967, the graduates from MP went on the offensive again, the Ministry of National Education restored disciplinary measures and intervened with the Censorship to block their efforts. Dr. José Sollari Allegro, a former secretary of Salazar, who was also close to the radicals, also attempted to make a difference, but ultimately failed as well. Luís Fernandes, however, pushed on, as the solidarity felt among members of the MP encouraged him and others to go from corporative claims to political battle on the largest scale. This is how in 1967 the Movimento Vanguarda de Combate, later renamed the Movimento Vanguardista came to be, with its centres in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Porto. The political origin of their leader could be seen in the movement’s identity as well, as from the first issue of the official Vanguarda bulletin, he declared his beliefs openly as being that of the most pro-Salazar nationalist kind: They will call us fascists – and perhaps they are not wrong. This is why our Vanguardism is the Portuguese expression of the political consciousness of the European generation in the post-war period, which is part of a current of thoughts labelled as neo-fascist. (Vanguarda, n°1, 1969: 1 in Marchi 2009: 352–353) The movement focused on providing indoctrination as a way to fill the gap caused by the regime, considered its worst error. Political courses and conferences organized by the movement became moments of cohesion for the few radical activists there as well as a meeting point between this generation and those from within the regime’s institutions. In particular, the movement received financial and logistic support from the Ministry of the Interior Alfredo dos Santos Júnior, the Ministry of the Corporations José João Gonçalves Proença, the Ministry of the Foreign Affaires Franco Nogueira and, mainly, the Subsecretary of the State for the Youth (Subsecretário de Estado da Juventude) Elmano Alves, the Liga dos Antigos Graduados da Mocidade Portuguesa (LAG). An important support was guaranteed also by the Portuguese Legion, interested in reinstating the Formação Legionária Académica (FLA). In these years, an extreme-right organization operated within the Portuguese Legion: the Motorized Shock Force (FAC), composed by militants coming from the youth nationalist organizations and by some executives from the regime’s big firms or from the private sector. Although the Movimento Vanguardista did not bring anything new regarding radical ways of thinking or action, they were the first organization of the radical right in September 1968 that openly declared their opposition to the new President of the Council Marcelo Caetano. This stance would be what led them to have their financing cut and later censorship of their publications. Otherwise, the Movimento Vanguardista represented a bridge between the Portuguese extreme right and the European neo-fascism at the start of the 1970s. Thanks to Luís Fernandes’ international contacts, the MV was able provide a Portuguese contribution to the extreme-right European platform Western

52  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime Convergence (Convergência Ocidental), supported mainly by Italians from the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and French from groups that arose from the implosion of the Occident organization. Under this network, the MV participated in the European Youth Constituency (Constituinte Juvenil Europeia) in Rome (7–9 November 1969), with Italian comrades from the Giovane Italia and FUAN (both young organizations under the MSI), French from Mouvement Jeune Révolution (former OAS Métro-Jeunes), Ordre Nouveau, Groupe Union Droit, the Spanish from Fuerza Nueva and CEDADE. The Movimento Vanguardista would later organize from 23 to 28 August 1969, in the village of São Pedro de Sintra, one of the most important radical events of that time: the First Meeting José Antonio Primo de Rivera (I Encontro José António Primo de Rivera), with neo-fascist intellectuals participating from Portugal, France, Germany, and Italy. In 1970, however, the MV ceased to exist, not just due to the regime’s censorship, but also due to Luís Fernandes entering the Army as a parashooting military captain on the Mozambique front. As extreme-right organizations progressively disappeared in the second half of the 1960s, many activists left the political realm. Some went to Africa to serve in the military, others joined rank and file in the regime, and others simply wanted to pursue a professional life. For the radicals mobilized in Africa, the experience of war confirmed the regime’s inability to guarantee the future of the Portuguese empire, which was only encouraged further by Salazar’s successor, Marcelo Caetano in September 1968. Having returned from the African front, these war veterans from the extreme right tried to politicize former soldiers. In particular, in March 1971, Moniz Ferreira and Valle de Figueiredo carried out a conference at a ceremony for the Veteran Day (Dia do Combatente), organized by the Veteran League (Liga dos Antigos Combatentes). Both leaders stressed how the political and economic elite were unable to resolve situations at home whereas the military was handling issues overseas, with a call for soldiers to become a force of change in the regime. To carry this out, Moniz Ferreira and other comrades took advantage of the Veterans First Congress organized in 3 June 1973 by military men close to the regime. The radicals took control of the Secretariat of Lisbon within the organizational structure of the Congress. What the radicals wished to do was politicize the event with an anti-government backdrop. The attempt provoked reactions from not just other military milieus in Congress but also the regime itself. The extreme right ended up being removed from the organization of the Congress, demonstrating, once again, its limited room of manoeuvre also within the military milieu already undermined by a high degree of dissatisfaction with the regime. This confrontation between the extreme right and the politico-military elite behind Caetano was promoted by the generation of radicals coming from the beginning of the 1960s. However, Caetano’s rise to power determined a certain renewal also in the area of the far right, in terms of militants and leaders. In this sense, it led to a fracture between the old militants who were still active and a new emerging generation, radicalized as a result of the New State’s new policies. These new entrants became the loudest opponents on the right against Caetano,

The far right and the war in Africa 53 and this opposition kept growing from the moment he was announced President of the Council in September 1968.

Bibliography Albanese, Matteo and del Hierro Pablo (2016). Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century. Apain, Italy and the Global Neo-Fascist Network (London, New York: Bloomsbury). Accornero, Guya (2016). The Revolution Before the Revolution: Late Authoritarianism and Student Protest in Portugal (New York, Oxford: Berghahn). Marchi, Riccardo (2009). Império Nação Revolução: As direitas radicais portuguesas no fim do Estado Novo 1959–1974 (Alfragide: Texto). Marchi, Riccardo (2013). “Les réfugiés français d’extrême-droite au Portugal de Salazar (1945–1974)”, in Olivier Dard and Victor Pereira eds., Vérités et légendes d’une OAS internationale (Paris: Riveneuve), 143–165. Schneidman, Witney W. (2004). Engaging Africa: Washington and the Fall of Portugal’s Colonial Empire (Oxford: UPA).

3 The right-wing opposition to the Marcello Caetano government (1968–1974)

Caetano’s ascension to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers on 27 September 1968 provoked a wide array of reactions from the Portuguese right wing in the New State. The “ultras” from the extreme right were sceptical of Caetano, who was known for his weak positions in crucial moments for the regime, but conversely others in the regime, who were not necessarily critics, distanced themselves little by little when seeing how the first years of his government went. When dealt with an unclear, undefined political line from the new president, and growing vulnerability from within, those who had expected something to happen immediately were those who shared the concerns of the ultra-right-wing regarding the Empire’s destabilization as brought on by Caetano’s reforms (Lopes 2016: 511). This was how a semi-opposition to the regime appeared, but in the other direction from the democratically based Ala Liberal (Fernandes 2007). This group was cheered on by non-majority groups in the New State and were not directly represented in the government. They worked in broad daylight to change policies, not wishing to challenge the regime directly. Although the right wing gained headway by increasing their numbers, their ability to bring about change in the New State remained limited. Indeed, the prominent elements of Salazarism did not show any desire to lead the reaction to the regime’s decline. The elites and the base of support for this possible reaction were formed primarily by circles around Américo Thomaz, President of the Republic, by the military men around the general Kaúlza de Arriaga, and by activists of the radical nationalist groups (Pinto 1995: 336–337). One of the emerging leaders of the opposition on the right, José Miguel Júdice, described it as a social and political environment typified by suspicion or even hostility towards Caetano, but multi-faceted in its essence (Júdice 2000: 643– 644). This milieu was composed of two distinct fringes. One of them strongly identified with Salazarism – while the other was less reliant on the figure of the former President of the Council and more modern in its approach in opposing the new leader of the New State. The Salazarist group was composed of Salazar loyalists for a variety of reasons: for political reasons (nostalgia or pure conviction for the dictator’s authoritarianism); for social reasons of loss of social status with changes in regime; for ethical reasons in defence of Catholic-conservative values threatened by liberalization; and for economic reasons linked to Salazar’s

56  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime protectionism of the colonialist economy, which had guaranteed the accumulation of private fortunes. The independent fringe of the right opposition was more heterogeneous and shared the concern for the future of the Empire in the face of the new orientation of Marcello Caetano. In this context, several different groups rose to the forefront and made themselves be heard. One example was the Associação de Estudos e Análise Social Programa, headed over by Valle de Figueiredo, created as an alternative to SEDES (the think tank of the Ala Liberal); the traditionalist Catholics from the Centro de Estudos Sociaias Vector (CESV), presided over by António da Cruz Rodrigues, which has published the journal Resistência since 1969; the group of the journal Política, founded and led by Jaime Nogueira Pinto; the Comissão Eleitoral Monárquica overseen by Henrique Barrilaro Ruas; the Circulo de Estudos Ultramarinos; the Movimento Nacionalista do Ensino Secundário (MN); and the network headed by the Cooperative Livreira Cidadela from Coimbra. Some of the most independent groups of these oppositionists believed in classic Salazarism, like the Catholics from Vector and Resistência, but some of them, particularly the youngest activists, had a peculiar relationship with Salazar. At the start of the 1970s, they recovered the figure of Salazar as opposed to bleaching operated by the new ruling class of the New State interested in pointing out the new course of the regime. In particular, the extreme right censored the regime’s elite for having taken an uncritical stance on Salazar while he was alive and having forgotten him so quickly after his death. For the radicals, Caetano needed to marginalize Salazar to internationally sustain his own government. The formula “renovation within continuity” that Caetano used in order to manage internal balance within the regime was quickly disaccredited in the radicals’ eyes. Analyzing the composition of the list of the União Nacional at the October 1969 general elections, the radicals highlighted the progressive promotion of the Ala Liberal and the ostracization of the extreme right (Fernandes 2007: 700). The advancements the liberals were making under Caetano was of great concern to the extreme right, and it became one of their key arguing points as Africa became less important under a Western democratic liberal point of view. For the technocrats, war was not an unavoidable patriotic imperative, but a factor that had led to the regime’s instability to be resolved still. The extreme right considered the liberals to be an instrument of the international community to pressure Caetano towards autonomy for the overseas provinces, the first step of which would lead to their independence and later the integration of Portugal in the EEC. Among the most active factions of this autonomous right-wing opposition, the nationalist group of the Cooperativa Livreira Cidadele from the University of Coimbra played a central role. In fact, the renovation of the extreme right from the 1960s to the 1970s did not occur in Lisbon, whose proximity to centres of power of the regime does not favour change. On the contrary, it occurred in the University of Coimbra, where the outbreak of the academic crisis of 1969 in the wake of May 1968, represented a turning point for the radical milieu, both from the left and from the right. In the extreme left, many Maoist and Trotsky factions showed up, who were autonomous from the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 57 Português), with their discourse going beyond simple student syndicalism, which was typical of the 1962 student protests, and pointed towards the fall of the regime (Accornero 2016: 101; Cunha 1992: 164–166; Raby 1988: 240). In the extreme right, disillusionment still reigned supreme, however, considering the failure of the Administrative Commissions of the Student Association of Coimbra (Comissões Administrativas da Associação Académica de Coimbra – CA/AAC), where such revered spokespeople for Portuguese nationalism and future leaders of the right wing in the transition period, like Francisco Lucas Pires and José Miguel Júdice, had led from 1965 to 1969. The experience maturated by the radicals in the sterile CA/AAC allowed them, however, a capacity for analysis and action which the moderate right wing did not have when the 1969 student protests broke out. In light of the recent past, they rejected hierarchical and compartmentalized structures, typical from the beginning of the 1960s, and they preferred to have a flexible network, made up by independent members. This network attracted the largest number of students and worked less regarding indoctrination, but more in practical problems of the different university faculties. Their first instinct was to imitate the left-wing strategy: to win over apolitical students with corporative subjects and then politicize them later on nationalist and counter-subversive ones. Carrying this out, however, proved to be difficult considering how marginalized the right wing was in the Academia, one which was not even helped out with the direct support of teachers who were close to the radicals, like professor Arnaldo Miranda Barbosa, who sponsored the academic list Renovation and Reform Movement (Movimento Renovação e Reforma MRR) for the February 1969 elections. The space the right wing had to work with became increasingly narrower – during assemblies, the nationalists frequently found themselves to be in the minority, accused of being instruments of the regime against the student movement. This balance of power can be seen quite well in two particular cases: first, during the academic elections of February 1969, where the left won 70% of the vote as opposed to 23% for the right; and the student general assembly of May 1969, where the left’s call for a strike against exams got 3,500 signatures in contrast to just 190 votes from the rights and 40 abstentions. The political nature here is evident, since the strike in question was called upon in solidarity for colleagues who had been arrested after protesting the President of the Republic Américo Thomas on 17 April 1969. The exam strike that took place in the summer of 1969 was an occasion for the extreme right’s rebound. The nationalists took advantage of the discontentment felt by the nearly 400 students against the strike and organized groups to attack the Student Movement’s pickets, particularly in the Faculty of Law. By October 1969, the radicals had reached a significant position ahead of the opposition, and they created as such the Secretariat for the Organization of the Action and the Coordination of the Study Groups (Secretariado Organizador da Acção and Coordenador dos Grupos de Estudo). At this point, it was still an early stage for the network as conceived by the nationalists, with the Secretariat comprised of small centres in the Faculty, who were committed to physical defence against

58  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime the Student Movement, as well as analyzing the students’ specific concerns and Caetano’s university politics. Their goal was to offer a place for apolitical students averse to the left where they could present a global reform project based on the concept of the organic and corporative university. The Secretariat accused the Student Movement of being hostage to the extreme left factions whose only intention was to politicize the student masses in an anticolonial fight. The Secretariat criticized the regime’s right wing for their reactionary stance, incapable of being pro-active and attacked Caetano for his technocratic nature regarding his university policies and weak person skills with the students, between concessions and repression. The government’s censorship and the violent confrontations with the left between 1970 and 1971 encouraged students to radicalize as can be seen in one of the Secretariat’s flyers: Against a government that has wavered in adhering to the obligations of educating Portuguese men, who have refused to announce a clear national policy for youth, limiting itself to an opportunist action of reform on behalf of technocratic neo-capitalism; against a Student Movement completely out of touch with Portuguese reality, unaware of the true needs for men and forgetting the true vocation of the Portuguese people, preparing a foreign and de-humanizing dirigisme of the masses. (Marchi 2009: 227) The political maturation of this nationalist group allowed one of the extreme right’s most important initiatives to surge in the first half of the 1970s: the Cooperativa Livreira Cidadela. Founded in 1970 in Coimbra and with delegations in Porto and Lisbon, the Cidadela arose out of impulse from the Faculty of Law group under José Miguel Júdice. The idea was to provide services for students (such as selling academic books and school material) to finance the political and cultural activity of the radical nationalists. The collective’s identity can be made clear by the books and journals available in their headquarters: authors such as Brasillach, Bardeche, Huguenin, Ousset, Pound, Saint-Loup, Von Salomon, Nimier, and the journals Fuerza Nueva, il Borghese, il Secolo d’Italia (official press of the neofascist party MSI), Rivarol, among others. In Coimbra, the Cidadela worked with two other university groups controlled by the right: the Orfeón Académico and the Oficina de Teatro da Universidade de Coimbra (OTUC). Founded in 1890, Orfeón was the oldest independent student organization, and from the 1960s it began to be considered a beacon for the extreme right for its constant refusal to be part of the opposition against academic authorities, spurred on by the other independent student organizations, including the Catholics from the CADC. At the start of the 1970s, Orfeón’s events were political targets for the left: in 1970, a rally of 200 students protested an Orfeón concert with anti-facist sayings in Coimbra, and in 1971 another concert in Lisbon was protested, sponsored by the Fundação Oliveira Salazar, attended by the President of the Republic. In the same year, a concert in the Netherlands was interrupted by anti-colonialist activists, and finally, in 1973, the left accused the music

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 59 festival organized by Orfeón as fascist and reactionary with the presence of South African and Rhodesian delegates. The OTUC, in turn, arose in 1966 as a student collective, with the goal to create an alternative theatre company to the two already existing and owned by the extreme left. As decided by professor Miranda Barbosa, the group’s management was attributed to the fascist intellectuals Florentino Goulart Nogueira, and, later, António Manuel Couto Viana. The theatre company’s performances represented this identity, with plays of nationalist content, among which were “Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc” and “La Reine de Césarée” by Robert Brasillach. Their output ended up provoking the Student Movement, which, in 1970, expelled them from the Academic Association of Coimbra (AAC). In the same year, the AAC presented a formal protest against the OTUC’s excursion in Angola, during which professor Barbosa presented the theatrical group as the last bastion of fascist resistance in the university. On 9 May 1970, the OTUC performed a play by Paul Claudel, Le livre de Christophe Colomb in the Teatro Gil Vicente in Coimbra, becoming the stage as well for violent confrontations between the Student Movement and the police. Claudel’s play was objected against as it celebrated the Portuguese discoveries and the imperial mission of Portugal as a civilizing force overseas. The nationalists welcomed the confrontations in order to attack the university’s dean, José de Gouveia Monteiro, who was close to Caetano and accused of being complicit with the Student Movement. The Cidadela, which was given a boost by Orfeón and OTUC, also became a point of reference not just for the extreme right in Coimbra, but also for the right wing in general at the start of the 1970s, which sought out an alternative to Caetano’s reformations. From a cultural point of view, the most interesting result was the combination of classic extreme right-wing thinkers like Ugo Spirito, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle, Jean Larteguy and Roger Nimier, José Ortega y Gasset, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos and José António Primo de Rivera, and the heterodox Marxists like Edgar Faure (defector from the radical party to Gaullism), Ota Sick (ministry of economy during the Prague Spring, considered an example of an anti-capitalist and anti-communist third way), and critics of neo-colonialism Franz Fanon and René Dumond. The goal was to trace a new identity, inspired as much by Peronist justicialism as national paths to socialism: from the socialist Arab nationalism and the Romanian and Maoist totalitarian nationalism, to left-wing nationalism in Latin America in Bolivia, Peru, and especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. With these readings as their starting point, the group in Coimbra conceived a geo-political perspective that did not consist of the classic Catholic civilizing mission, but rather a revolutionary project with a Euro-Afro-Asian identity of Portugal. The revolutionary role of Portugal was to break the East-West axis, as imposed by the American and Soviet imperialism, and claim the importance of the North-South axis. Seen from this perspective, the pluri-continental Portugal would come across as the poorest country in the first world, but the richest in the third world. Therefore, the country could act as a bridge between civilizations in the fight against US and USSR imperialism. In practical terms, the Cidadela group

60  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime wished to redesign the Empire’s structure: the designation of “Portugal” had to be reserved entirely for the Empire, with the European land mass being renamed as “Lusitânia”. The capital would be transferred from Lisbon to Luanda, since Angola was the largest land mass in the Empire, and only then could it be possible, once and for all, to carry out a pluri-continental and not Eurocentric concept of the “great Portuguese space”. Promoting this ideological programme rather heterodox within the Portuguese nationalism, Cidadela worked with factions that could have been considered the most radical in the right-wing opposition network, such as the traditionalist Catholics of the CESV, the students of the Movimento Nacionalista do Ensino Secundário, and the group from the journal Política. The collaboration with the CESV was quite significant, since Portuguese Catholics also were increasingly influenced by the progressive currents and started to criticize the Portuguese presence in Africa. Be that as it may, however, although the revolutionary nationalism of the Cidadela differed from the reactionary nationalism of the CESV, the common goal to defend the Empire facilitated their collaborative efforts and allowed the radicals to have their project go beyond the university campus. In particular, the leaders of the Cidadela presented their criticism on Caetano’s university policies to the II and III Congress in Fatima, organized by the Vector in 1970 and 1971 which congregated right-wing Catholics. The university reform was also the main subject at the conference in March 1971, by the Cidadela, Vector, journal Política, newspaper Debate, whose records would become the collective’s first official publication of the publishing cooperative. The Cidadela was also the point of reference for the youngest comrades who started their political activism in the first years of Caetano’s presidency. In December 1970, the collective organized the Young Portugal Congress (Congresso Portugal Jovem) to define the ideological bases of nationalism for the 1970s, facing the regime’s deteriorating values. Students of the Integrationist National Front (Frente Nacional Integracionista) from the University of Lourenço Marques (Mozambique) also participated, led by Gonçalo Mesquitela, a far-right deputy in the National Assembly for Mozambique. High school students from the Nationalist Movement (Movimento Nacionalista MN) also took part in the Congress. The MN appeared in 1972 as a network of contacts among high school students in Lisbon, Coimbra, and Porto, united by their double identity of being anti-Caetano and anti-Marxist. They shared with their older comrades ideas, such as the evaluation of the student movement as longa manus of international subversion against Portugal, but also the distrust of the regime’s elite. The critique that the Minister of the National Education, José Veiga Simão, faced was just one small part of the wide-scale nationalist protests against the regime, namely regarding the African War, which was no longer seen as a simple police operation, as promoted by the official propaganda, but rather as a patriotic war, revolutionary in nature against foreign imperialism. All of these initiatives and stands taken by the extreme right had their mouthpiece in the journal Política, which was founded in November 1969. The editorial initiative was begun by radicals in Lisbon and Coimbra, with the initial project

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 61 being an academic magazine along the lines of Combate. This was, however, quickly replaced by a more ambitious project, intended to fill in the editorial hole within the regime’s right wing. Their idea was to overcome the limitations of the propaganda of the radical ideas that, outside the official channels of the regime and the tight control of censorship, was still limited to semi-clandestine documents increasingly critical of the Government. Jaime Nogueira Pinto became the head of the journal, and at just 23 years of age, had already become a veteran of the extreme right. Born in Porto on 4 February 1946, he started his political activism at 14 years old, in 1961, at the Liceu D. Manuel II, where he started his area’s local section of the Jovem Portugal movement. Having been a contributor to extreme right-wing Portuguese newspapers in the 1960s, he headed over Política until its interruption on 25 April  1974. Meanwhile, in April  1973, he joined the Army, where he took a course in Psychological Operations (Acção Psicológica APSIC). Nogueira Pinto also opened the newspaper for all kinds of right-wing criticism on the New State. The newspaper’s affiliation in European radicalism was evident in the contacts it had maintained with its European counterparts: the French Rivarol, the Italian Il Borghese, the Spanish Toledo (journal of the neoNazi organization CEDADE), and with nationalist organizations with the French Groupe Union Droit (formerly Occident) and Ordre Nouveau, as well as the Italian MSI, Ordine Nuovo, and Fronte Nazionale from the commander Junio Valerio Borghese. Política published translations of articles from Les Cahiers Universitaires by François d’Orcival, from Défense de l’Occident by Maurice Bardeche, and from Critique Nacionaliste and Le Lettre Politique by Jacques Ploncard d’Assac. Others contributed towards the international section of the journal, namely extreme-right activists who had taken refuge in Portugal: French writers from Aginter Press and the monthly Découvertes as overseen by Jean Haupt (in particular Pierre Hofstetter), and the Italian Umberto Mazzotti (pseudonym of the neo-fascist Stefano Poltronieri). On the cultural front, Política published and wrote about authors of reference for the European extreme right, but also literature, film, and art not of just a political nature, which had an impact on the Portuguese nationalists from the 1960s and 1970s. In terms of political analysis, the newspaper also distinguished itself when compared with previous ones on matters of the extreme right. Its priority target was the Ala Liberal and its influence on Caetano’s government  – in particular, Política underwent a campaign against Portugal joining the EEC, which considered it to be a step towards abandoning Africa. The newspaper had the viewpoint that Europe had been defeated in 1945 and dominated ever since by a technocratic superstructure, fuelled by the principle of neo-colonialism: a bourgeois, democratic, reformist, and moderate Europe, having bent over backwards by the money from the Marshall Plan and dominated by American capital. In comparison to the great space of the Empire, Europe represented a small space for Portugal, with some economic significance, but harmful in the geopolitical sense for removing Lisbon from its natural support in Africa and Brazil. The preference for the imperial dimension over the European dimension had its scientific basis on the theorization of the North American school of thought

62  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime of the geopolitical realism endorsed by the redactors of the newspaper Politica. António Marques Bessa played a particular role in this, as for him, Europe was geographically nothing more than a peninsular extension of Asia, and politically, the breeding ground of internal, civil war. The true essence of Europe was his project, whose apex coincided with the decision of white elites to control the world at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. From that moment on, Eurocentrism suffered three breaks: the first being American, the second Soviet, and the third pro-independence. The creation of the USA ruptured as such the geopolitical axis of the old world, being moved to the new one, with the implementation of its new values (democracy, individualism, and massification). That said, the creation of the USSR produced an equal but opposite messianism to that of the USA, also fatal for Europe, which fascism and National Socialism were unable to defeat. Lastly, the emergence of the Afro-Asian front resulted in the last blow to what remained of white domination. Faced with this reality, Europe and its empires, including Portugal, became an alternative model and thus incompatible with technocratic Europe (EEC). Geopolitical realism led those in Política to support the Greek regime of colonels, the Franco dictatorship in Europe, South Africa and Rhodesia in Africa, military regimes in South America, nationalist regimes in the Muslim world as the Nasserism and the Ba’athism, but also Republican administrations in the USA, in particular candidates closer to the right like George Wallace and Richard Nixon in 1968. Politica’s Occidentalism did not impede it from looking sympathetically at more traditionalist views of the far right, which, in the wake of Rene Guenon, considered the East and West as two peaks of human civilization, bearers of complementary traditions in terms of technical and spiritual domains. These ideas emphasized race, culture, and civilization, with hierarchical superiority as a prerequisite, particularly regarding Africa, as without Europeans, the continent would have eternally suffered the fate of its inherent ethno-tribalism. When seen from a political action point of view, the right-wing opposition found its most promising window of opportunity in 1970 and 1971 at the time of the debate regarding the governmental proposal to review the constitution. The debate on the future of Portuguese Africa accentuated even further the points where the integrationist right wing and pro-European liberals diverged (Pimenta 2016: 25). The debate on constitutional reform allowed the extreme right to stress their positions against Caetano’s policies as regarding the Portuguese presence in Africa, as well as to outline the borders of integrationist forces inside the regime’s institutions. By specifying their borders, the most independent constituent of the right-wing opposition was able to gain a prominent position when criticizing Caetano’s policies. From a doctrinal point of view, they were able to convey their vision of the Empire through the work of Fernando Pacheco de Amorim, as he had had an important role in clearly defining the political lines of the youngest groups of radical nationalists in the first half of the 1970s, and would continue to lead the most promising right-wing party in the first months following 25 April 1974. Pacheco de Amorim was a monarchist, a critic of the New State since the 1940s, even

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 63 having taken part in an anti-Salazar revolt on 10 October 1946, in Mealhada, as a result spending two years in prison. From the 1960s, Pacheco de Amorim dedicated his efforts on the question of the overseas provinces, speaking out against the errors of the New State when he saw fit. Therefore, when Caetano opened the debate on the future of the overseas provinces in December 1970, the most fervent supporters of the extreme right found material in Pacheco de Amorim’s work, in particular his book from 1971, Na hora da Verdade. Colonialismo e neocolonialismo na proposta de lei de revisão constitucional, as ammunition against the regime. In particular, the integrationist extreme right blamed the lack of revolutionary spirit regarding the regime’s policies in Africa. In that sense, Salazar had limited himself and his policies by keeping on with the colonialist tradition prior to the New State, inspired by the French school, whose mission was Christian, civilization-­building, and univeralist. At first, this model of colonialism was different from other European powers, but they were only interested in exploiting Africa’s resources and not in socio-cultural integration as they thought it was unavoidable, as could be seen by theories written by thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon, Hippolyte Taine, Émile Durkheim, and Lucien Lévy-Brhul, who wrote on ethnic, cultural, and civilizational differences. The missionary-universalist French tradition ended up accepting the hallmark of racist colonialism, integrating nonEuropean territories and the Metropole in a perspective of economic profitability. As a result, Portugal also abandoned its mission to integrate even during the constitutional Monarchy (1820–1910) and the First Republic (1910–1926). Therefore, the two regimes created specific ministries for the overseas provinces: the Ministry of the Navy and Overseas (Ministério da Marinha and do Ultramar) in 1890, later the Ministry of Colonies (Ministério das Colónias) in 1911. After the fall of the First Republic, overseas policies were kept much the same: both with the Colonial Act (Acto Colonial) of the military dictatorship (1926–1933) and legislation under the New State (from 1933 on), which simply put in practice the scientific colonialism inherited from the previous period. In particular, New State maintained its colonial nature by implementing the Colonial Act in the Constitution of the Republic (Constituição da República) under Título VII (1951), with the replacement of the Carta Orgânica do Império Colonial Português for the Lei Orgânica do Ultramar Português (1953), being later revised in 1963. To respond to the critics from the international community, the colonies came to be known as provinces, but the discrimination between “citizens” and “indigenous people” remained. The colonialist approach of the New State was reflected in the policy of white settlement. This generated a white elite within the euro-descendent community itself and completely excluded the locals from economic or social integration. Far from any kind of integration, these policies produced a caste of public workers for colonial management, hated by the rest of the population. Tensions got worse with the government’s plans to modernize, that moved the black populations from their territories to the outskirts of the urban centres, destroying their traditional social fabric, without any social compensation, like education or health assistance. In the

64  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime countryside, the State left it up to the large private companies to provide social assistance, resulting in them dominating the lives of the small local farmers. With that in mind, the armed rebellion in 1961 was an inevitable reaction, but even with war, New State continued to only listen to the public opinion from the privileged class and administrators in a colonial system to the pure detriment to all others who lived in the provinces. In this way, the State betrayed the revolutionary nature that the overseas project could have won since the Age of Discovery, passing by the Ultimatum of 1890. From this perspective, the integrationist extreme right accused the African policy by the economic and political elites of the Western colonial Powers, including Portugal since the 19th century, of being racist and colonialist. They called for a project to piece together the cultural differences in a harmonious way in the administrative-political unity of the Empire, with this humanist principle inspired from Christian equality and fraternity, and opposed to racially discriminatory principles. For the extreme right, Caetano’s overseas policies were totally shaped by the colonialist logic. The new President approved New State’s ambiguous overseas legislation to continue on not just with a juridical reform for the provinces but also federalist for the Empire, with his eyes set on future independent States. The final objective was to guarantee the interests of the white elite. For the radicals, Caetano’s political path had provided several clues to lead up to this. In 1962, he sent a report with federalist content to the Minister of Overseas (Ministro do Ultramar) Adriano Moreira; in 1964, he interpreted the Constitution as permitting political-administrative autonomy for the overseas provinces; in 1968 he spoke of the non-European provinces as future “new Brazils”. The extreme right accused the federal model of being racist because it was based on the conviction of the impracticality of a single empire-nation, constituted by different populations and because its main concern was to take advantage of Africa for its resources. For the radicals, the internal enemies were those in favour of federalism as decreed by Caetano and the right wing who put up no resistance to the President’s reforms. The federalists were deemed enemies as they considered it to be treason against Portugal for the idea of transferring of power to black people and for agreeing to the construction of new independent States controlled by the white minority. The weak right wing was also under fire due to its perception of the reforms as a mere cover for the international community and consequently refused to support the oppositionist right wing. The extreme right developed its political offensive on the basis of two principles: on the Portuguese legislation (article 134° of the constitutional revision from 1959) which still persisted with the concept of the Empire as one unity regardless of local specifics; and the legislative elections of 1969, won by the National Union (União Nacional), which confirmed this former principle, and had to be read as a plebiscite in favour of Portugal as a unitary nation-State, multi-racial and pluri-continental, and not in favour of Salazarist colonialism or Marcelist federalism. Their imperative was, however, to fight against reducing Portugal to a mere European parcel and strengthen the Eurafrican Empire against more

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 65 economically powerful imperialist nations. For the integrationists, the victory of Caetano’s reforms would bring evident consequences: We will be just a small rectangle on the extreme south of Europe, partially mixed-race, a point of interests for tourists, some moderate appeal as a market, but an important source of cheap, hard-working labour, a good perspective to recruit workers. (Marchi 2010: 540–541) In order to determine to what extent they could challenge Caetano’s reforms, the extreme right analyzed all possible allies they could try to find in the New State’s institutions. In this sense, four different ways of perceiving African policy could be detected in the National Assembly (Assembleia Nacional). On one side, there were the reformists, many of whom had been elected overseas, who also were of the opinion that the provinces and regionalization of the non-European territories needed strengthened and de-centralized administration. On another, a smaller group considered the future independence of the overseas provinces as the most effective answer to African guerrillas. These two pro-independence opinions were supported, although not explicitly, by the third one, which also criticized Caetano: the Ala Liberal. The fourth opinion was represented by the so-called “ultras”, against the independence reform. Quite reduced in number of parliamentary seats, this group was led by deputies Francisco Casal-Ribeiro and Rui de Moura Ramos, the former of whom spoke against the dangerous lack of a singular voice in the National Assembly on the unitarian character of the Portuguese State. The latter insisted on the Christian civilizing mission of Portugal, conceding just that administrative de-centralization would not fragment political power. That said, both deputies rejected removing from the Constitution the principle of social-politicaleconomic integration among the different parts of the Empire as well as i­ ntroducing the concepts of “autonomous regions” and the “honoris causa States” (“Estados honoris causa”). This way of thinking was supported by more moderate deputies like Henrique Veiga de Macedo. Away from the National Assembly, the integrationist option was backed by some attorneys of the Corporative Chamber (Câmara Corporativa), some former ministers of Foreign Affairs, Franco Nogueira, and Overseas as well Adriano Moreira. Franco Nogueira had been from the start an integrationist, who considered the sovereignty and independence of Portugal to be strictly dependent on its pluri-continental position, which would guarantee a geopolitical influence otherwise impossible with its rectangular, European borders. Otherwise, Moreira criticized regionalization which had already caused problems in nation states like France and Italy, which, conversely from the Portuguese empire, did not even have ethnic, religious, cultural, or geographic pluralism, let alone war. Integrationists had tried to make their voices heard among all political actors, including the President of the Council. In a letter from 22 October 1969, Pacheco de Amorim explained to Caetano that there were currently three active forces in Portugal on the overseas political front: the radical integrationist; those who

66  The far right at the end of the authoritarian regime advocated to abandon the overseas over time; and those who wanted to leave Africa immediately. Over the years, integrationists lost much of their influence in the debate over the future of the Empire. The debate today is dominated by supporters of immediate abandonment and by supporter of the abandonment over time. The former presented their option as the best answer to war, but instead, they supported truly a strategy of national communism to hand over Portuguese Africa to the Soviets. The latter, who had “won the debate”, so to speak, were able to convince in their discourse by saying that progressive independence was a way to spur progress in the overseas provinces, but looked out for the interests of racist neo-colonialists worried about their material riches in Africa. The autonomist front who wanted to gradually leave was strong among Marcelists and was comprised of two distinct factions – one favourably viewed white people leaving Africa and handing power over to the natives, more easily dealt with by international capitalism, and the other preferred transferring power to white communities to maintain their privileges there. The propaganda of the two neo-colonial factions had their support among the Portuguese public opinion, which was not very political and was easily moulded to geographic and ethnic justifications of the pro-independence supporters. Some integrationists as well fell prey to this propaganda and confused the concept of “independence” with “administrative de-centralisation” which had always been package and parcel of radical nationalism. From this perspective, all of the most powerful actors in the debate favoured the end of the empire as a single State. On the contrary, integrationists were in a clearly unfavourable position, who met in small centres of radical students, veterans of the African War, of monarchical intellectuals and Republicans who believed in the myth of the empire. This reduced number of supporters was determined in large part due to them not accepting the conformist way of the right wing of the regime. On the same day of the constitutional revision’s presentation in the National Assembly, as brought on by Caetano on 2 December 1970, integrationists organized a propagandistic offensive with the aid of some institutional actors involved in the deciding process. Regarding the institutional actors, the extreme right pressured the most sensible of them to the arguments as delivered by the integrationists in the National Assembly and in the Corporative Chamber for them to later present counterproposals that would unravel the Marcelist reform. This intervention, however, did not lead to any significant results. In the National Assembly, the radicals could not use the far right-wing, but rather just deputies or former deputies who were wary of Caetano’s reforms. This was the case of the former deputy Paulo Rodrigues and some, at that time, currently working deputies, Francisco CasalRibeiro, Franco Nogueira, Rui de Moura Ramos, and Henrique Veiga de Macedo. At the Corporative Chamber, the pressure the radicals tried to impose did not translate into any serious proposal from the institutional members, which is how Jaime Nogueira Pinto recalled professor Afonso Queiró’s attitude. As director of the Faculty of Law at the University of Coimbra, and having close ties with the extreme right, professor Queiró had interceded with Marcelo Caetano and the

Right-wing opposition to Marcello Caetano 67 Minister of National Education José Veiga Simão at the time of the Cooperativa Livreira Cidadela’s foundation by the radicals of Coimbra (Marchi 2009: 255). As official relator of the Corporative Chamber’s reports, however, Queiró completely supported the government: both the Corporative Chamber as well as the Commission for the Constitutional Reform (Commisão Eventual para a Revisão Constitucional) supported the maximum level of autonomy within the State to not harm the system as it was. As such, the final vote from the Corporative Chamber counted just two votes against the reform: the former Minister of the Colonies and governor of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, Francisco Vieira Machado, and the former Minister of Justice, João Antunes Varela. Both attorneys, however, were not speakers of the integrationist extreme right, as they only saw eye-to-eye on generic concerns regarding the consequences of the reforms in a time of war. Despite the ideological and activist efforts made to create an alternative from the right during the Marcelist Spring, on the eve of 25 April 1974, the extreme right found itself backed in a corner without a chance to leave. They were blocked between the opposition to a dying government, and their fidelity to an integrationist project going nowhere under a stagnant regime. Even in October 1973, several members of the extreme right met in Porto, gathered by the Cidadela, to outline an anti-Marcelist strategy for the years to go. Just some five months later, however, their plans went into flames by the military coup that would oust the authoritarian regime.

Bibliography Accornero, Guya (2016). The Revolution Before the Revolution: Late Authoritarianism and Student Protest in Portugal (New York, Oxford: Berghahn). Cunha, Carlos A. (1992). The Portuguese Communist Party’s Strategy for Power (New York, London: Garland). Fernandes, Tiago (2007). “Authoritarian regimes and pro-democracy semi-oppositions: The end of the Portuguese dictatorship (1968–1974), in Comparative Perspective”, in Democratization, 14(4): 686–705. Júdice, José Miguel (2000). “Oposição de direita a Marcelo Caetano”, in António Barreto and Maria Filomena Mónica eds., Dicionário de História de Portugal (Porto: Figueirinhas), Vol. 8, suplemento F/O, 643–644. Lopes, Rui (2016). “Accommodating and confronting the Portuguese dictatorship within NATO, 1970–4”, in The International History Review, 38(3): 505–526. Marchi, Riccardo (2009). Império Nação Revolução: As direitas radicais portuguesas no fim do Estado Novo 1959–1974 (Alfragide: Texto). Marchi, Riccardo (2010). “A oposição de direita à política ultramarina de Marcello Caetano”, in Lusíada História, 7: 519–542. Pimenta, Fernando Tavares (2016). “Decolonisation postponed: The failure of the colonial politics of Marcelo Caetano (1968–1974)”, in Social Dynamics, 42(1): 12–30. Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (1995). Portugal, os anos do fim: O fim do Estado Novo e as origens do 25 de Abril (Miraflores: Difel). Raby, D. L. (1988). Fascism & Resistance in Portugal: Communists, Liberals and Military Dissidents in the Opposition to Salazar, 1941–74 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Part II

The far right during the transition to democracy (1974–1982)

4 The far right resistance during the revolution (1974–1975)

The extreme right’s presence during the Portuguese transition to democracy can be outlined in three specific phases, with each characterized by strategies shaped by specific political-historical contingencies. From a chronological point of view, the first phase began with the revolution on 25 April 1974 up to 11 March 1975, with the important date of 28 September 1974 in the middle. Afterwards, the second phase lasted most of 1975, from the end of the first to 25 November, and the third was the longest, from the end of 1975 up to the legislative elections on 5 October 1980. In the wake of the 25 April revolution, the strategies the extreme right wished to implement varied among the three phases. In the first, the few figures of the extreme right who had not been sent to jail or fled the country made an attempt to create parties with two main goals: influence the process of decolonization in such a way to maintain Portuguese presence in Africa in different ways from the integrationism of the New State and oppose the radicalization from the left of the revolutionary process. During the second phase, brought on by the events of 28 September 1974, and worsened with the military coup d’état attempts by the right on 11 March and by the left on 25 November 1975, respectively, the extreme right took on a more underground approach. In the third and final phase, opened by the normalization of the democratization process, from 25 November 1975, the far right carried on with their electoral strategy, with the aim of winning parliamentary representation, ultimately leading to their definitive failure in the 1980 elections. Truth be told, however, the Portuguese extreme right had found themselves in a political ditch already before the events of 25 April 1974. In the five years leading up to the fall of the regime, they had been able to block Caetano’s reformist project, particularly in regards to his overseas plans, but they were unable to create a viable alternative to the decline of the New State. From the beginning of Caetano’s rule, the leaders of the Salazarist right displayed their inability to stir up support for a more authoritarian version of the regime. In much the same way, the military right wing failed to put up any fight against the reformists, as can best be detailed through the failure of the alleged coup d’état in December 1973, by general Kaúlza de Arriaga. As such, the most fervent component in the right-wing opposition against Marcelism remained the overwhelming minority who sought

72  The far right during the transition to democracy to mobilize the right wing through their revolutionary ideas of Empire (Marchi 2010: 541–542; Pimenta 2016: 12, 26). This impasse among the different extreme-right factions came to an end as a result of the coup d’état carried out by the Armed Forces Movement (­Movimento das Forças Armadas MFA), in addition to the rapid evolution into a revolutionary process thanks to the left wing’s mobilization and the mass support of the p­ eople. The unique role of the Portuguese armed forces in overthrowing the regime and the rapid collapse of the latter were, on the one hand, a clear sign of how weak the anti-Salazarist civil opposition was (other than the PCP). On the other hand, it represented Caetano’s failure to turn the tides of the New State’s decline (Schmitter 1999: 2011–2012; Cruz and Ramos 2012: 7–13). The violent downfall of the New State marked the first major blow against the extreme right wing. As someone from the time period noted, 25 April represented a change in the vocabulary of Portuguese politics: the term “right wing” became a demonizing label of everything defined with the former regime (Pinto 1996: 235). Stripped of their political citizenship, the elite who had been closest to the regime underwent a wave of repression, being purged or sent to jail (Pinto 2008a: 317; Pinto 2008b: 271). The paramilitary and repressive structures of the New State were quickly done away with and its leaders sent to jail or exile (Pinto 1998: 1679–1717; Cerezales 2007: 157). The lack of any kind of resistance was proof enough of the regime’s degradation: paramilitary organizations did not react (Portuguese Legion and Portuguese Youth) along with the secret police PIDE/DGS, which, besieged in its headquarters in Rua António Maria Cardoso, caused the only four deaths on the day of the coup d’état. In the first hours of the coup, the chain of command collapsed immediately. Anyone who may have had the authority to lead an immediate reaction, to distribute weapons or call up the ranks, simply did not do so. The grass-root militants were completely abandoned, which led those in the extreme right to accuse the leaders of the regime of treason and collusion with those who organized the coup. This impression was accentuated by the inaction of the right-wing officers of the Army, the elite in Caetano’s government fleeing the country, and the quick surrender of the President of the Council and the President of the Republic, transferred to Madeira and then later exiled in Brazil. Even in January 1975, there was an underground extreme right-wing pamphlet that denounced: In the last twenty years of the overrun regime, the revolution that arose as it did on 25 April was patiently and by obstinacy performed, and with such a degree of success that it was not even necessary for those at the heart of it to add anything to the detailed work that had already been planted in all areas of national life. . . . The regime had not been overthrown, it had already been dead and rotting for quite some time. (Marchi 2012: 76) Whereas the elites at the head of the authoritarian regime were looked down upon in the eyes of their own respective support base, those who opposed the Carnation

The far right resistance during the revolution 73 Revolution came from the second line of power in the former regime and from different sectors of the New State. They were comprised of the radical nationalist students, Catholic nationalists (mainly monarchical), the military right connected to Salazar and to the Empire more than to the New State itself, and the administrative economic staff of the overrun regime, who were immune to the transitional justice. These rank and file members available to the extreme right of the transition were obliged to organize themselves in a power vacuum and acceleration of revolutionary events. In the months following 25 April, they were able to take advantage of the precarious balance of power among the forces at the front of the transition. In particular, their manoeuvre margin was ensured by three revolutionary institutions: the anti-communist faction inside the National Salvation Junta (Junta de Salvação Nacional JSN),1 represented by generals António de Spínola and Jaime Silvério Marques, by colonel Carlos Galvão de Melo and by captain José Pinheiro de Azevedo; the President of the Republic António de Spínola appointed on 15 May 1974; the Prime Minister Professor Adelino da Palma Carlos (an anti-­ communist liberal and freemason) in charge of the First Provisional Government (16 May – 18 July 1974). Despite these three institutional guarantees for the right wing, the Portuguese political scene at the time was highly influenced by the left wing, with an increasing mobilization of the forces on the extreme left, primarily from the PCP, and the popular masses led by them. With this in mind, Spínola’s main concern was in maintaining control over the decolonization process (Rodrigues 2013: 98), encouraging the rise of antiMarxist parties, although not openly associated with the right wing. This attempt aimed at controlling decolonization took place during the first two months of the revolution, the same time at which the largest anti-communist parties that would shape Portuguese democracy in the following decades were formed: the Socialist Party (PS) of Mário Soares, the Social Democrat Party (founded with the name of People’s Democratic Party Partido Popular Democrático PPD/PSD) by Francisco Sá Carneiro and the Democratic and Social Centre (Centro Democrático Social CDS) by Diogo Freitas do Amaral. The extreme left, however, demonstrated an ability to organize and mobilize in a much more prolific way than the anti-communists were able to do. In this regard, a study conducted in August 1974 by SEDES2 analyzed half a hundred organizations which were active in the first months of Portuguese transition. Among them, merely 19 could be defined as being somewhere between the centre, right, and extreme right. In particular, three of them were considered centrist, four of the centre-right, six of the right, and five of the extreme right (Prata 1974). This ground-breaking study on the Portuguese right wing during the transition to democracy would be enriched in the following months with further analysis, including reports produced by the Intelligence, journalistic reports, political dossiers, with all meeting on two fundamental points. The first was that the extreme right had remained a constant over the course of the entire transition process, and as such this presence had been expressed in both broad daylight (with political

74  The far right during the transition to democracy parties) and in the underground (with armed groups) through a variety of organizations that had in some way collaborated on different levels with political and social agents in the moderate anti-communist field. In the microcosm of the extreme right, the first to get started were the radicals that had been at the forefront of the right-wing opposition of Caetano. They convened in the afternoon of 25 April at the Coimbra headquarters of the Cooperativa Editora Cidadela, fully aware of the way the military coup would proceed. This impression was quickly confirmed by the facts: on 27 April, the headquarters of the Cidadela was attacked and devastated by groups of the extreme left. The first reactions to the situation emerged in this first active conglomeration of the extreme right in two different ways. They followed along with the entire transition process, but later came into contact with other subjects not necessarily from the extreme right but labelled with this political category due to their fervent anti-communism. With respect to the two different ways chosen by the radicals, the first brought together many of the student organizations of the 1960s and 1970s, which had taken political action due to the War in Africa in 1961, the student protests against Salazar in 1962, 1965, and 1969, and the opposition against Caetano up to the fall of the regime. This faction considered the coup d’état to be an irreversible fact, which excluded Utopian-like attempts to restore the former regime. This political line could be traced back to former veteran nationalist leaders in the African war, who worked in particular with general Spínola. José Valle de Figueiredo was a notable figure among them, who, along with some former comrades from the Combate group in Coimbra, had collaborated with Spínola in the department of Psychological warfare in the Portuguese Guinea, in particular in the edition of the book Portugal e o Futuro (February 1974). Despite leading the integrationist front during Caetano’s rule, several right-wing leaders at the time, including José Miguel Júdice, had begun considering the federalist alternative as presented by Spínola (Júdice 2012: 439) and took the debate inside the extreme right milieu, such as for instance in the Cidadela and the Associação Programa led by Valle de Figuereido himself. As such, on the eve of the military coup, this group began to consider federalism as conceived by Spínola to be the only solution to avoid the definitive collapse of the Empire. Immediately after the coup d’état, on 26 April 1974, this component of the old integrationist front founded the Portuguese Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Português MFP), officially presented on 4 May  1974, headed by Fernando Pacheco de Amorim. The MFP was able to piece itself together in various places in the centre north of Portugal thanks to the Associação Programa network, working since 1973. With the overseas territories as the main issue on their agenda, the movement tightened contacts with Lusophone African organizations who were in favour of keeping ties with the Metropole, in particular the Associação Cívica Pró-Angola, the Frente Nacionalista Angolana, the Movimento Federalista de Moçambique, the Liga Popular dos Guinéus, and the União Democrática de Cabo Verde. The MFP came to be, as such, the first extreme right group in the political spectrum of democratic transition, which demonstrated the faction’s ability to mobilize in spite of their minor influence in the New State.

The far right resistance during the revolution 75 The second faction brought together the extreme-right activists who did not wish to make a pact with the new revolutionary powers, and were subsequently against any openings to general Spínola and his federalist ideas, which were gaining steam among the right wing. In this group, the initiative was taken by Florentino Goulart Nogueira and Rodrigo Emílio de Alarcão Ribeiro de Melo, who, in June 1974, founded the Portuguese Action Movement (Movimento de Acção Portuguesa MAP), both of whom belonged to the fascist intellectual milieu within the New State. Goulart Nogueira, as a result of his publications in Mensagem and Tempo Presente, as well as heading over the weekly Agora (1967–1969) and the Oficina de Teatro da Universidade de Coimbra (1966–1969) was able to make a name for himself. Rodrigo Emílio belonged to the generation of student-led nationalism in the 1960s, and at the time of the regime’s fall, he was a young poet on the rise, awarded with the Prémio General Casimiro Dantas da Academia de Ciências de Lisboa in April 1974, but did not receive the prize due to the Carnation Revolution. The name of MAP was suggested by another renowned intellectual from the extreme right, by the name of António José de Brito, as an homage to the Acción Française. The headquarters had been put in an apartment, a property belonging to the National Secretariat for Information (Secretariado Nacional de Informação SNI), near the Parliament in São Bento, Lisbon. The Central Commission (Comissão Central) was organized by Rodrigo Emílio, Luís de Sena Esteves, and Alberto Correia de Barros, with the intent to make MAP the point of reference for radicals from the New State, with its founders offering the honorary presidency of the movement to the former dean of the University of Coimbra, Guilherme Braga da Cruz. He would end up declining the invite: it was a sign that leaders during Salazar’s time should not step into prominent roles as a way to resist the new political situation. With that said, MAP managed to get veterans of radical nationalism to congregate, such as those who had been in Portuguese Legion and young political activists from the start of the 1970s, which, in the aftermath of the coup d’état, encouraged small clusters of underground activity such as Nationalist Committee for Revolutionary Action (Comités Nacionalistas de Acção Revolucionária CNAR). MAP, with its political programme which expressly refused the revolution’s values, while affirming principles of authority, order, and subordination of the individual rights to the greater good of the community, was the most clearly extreme right-wing organization in weeks following the revolution. It condemned the system of parties as a source of dividing the nation, also rejecting democratic political and economic models, whether they be Western (liberal-democracy) or Eastern (people’s democracy), as they were incompatible with the homeland’s independence. As such, the principle of class conflict was repudiated, but the need to fight against Marxism hegemony in the culture was called for. Regarding the overseas provinces, they still believed in the integrationist concept of the multiracial and pluri-continental Portugal as a firm stand against any federalist rightwing models and views in alignment with Spínola.

76  The far right during the transition to democracy Other political parties who were clearly associated with the extreme right had been created by marginal fringes of the paramilitary structures of the regime. They were, however, promoted by tiny circles of persons linked by friendship, with their vision not being able to leap from the page and be turned into a reality. The Portuguese Democratic Workers Party (Partido Trabalhista Democrático Português PTDP) arose in Lisbon, founded on 3 May 1974, and in Porto it was instead the Portuguese Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionlista Português PNP), founded on 24 July 1974. PNP came about from the legionary revolt in Porto against the leaders who abandoned the organization and let the chain of command collapse on the eve of the revolution. The party went to the public with a message signed by the Central Junta (Junta Central), with signatures from general secretary Artur Alberto da Silva, Luis Marques Coelho, and Ilídio Marques Acácio. Its declarations were rather generic, calling for liberty for citizens shaped by a sense of responsibility, on behalf of individual and public religious belief, peace, order, moral values, and the essence of being Portuguese in accordance with the very real will felt by the Portuguese people. The party claimed to be behind the National Salvation Junta (JSN) and defended political, cultural, social, and economic independence for Portugal against communism. With the remaining parties all on the extreme right in the political spectrum, PNP’s main concern was maintaining the integrity of the Portuguese empire. In a message sent in July 1974, the party criticized the principle of colonial independence which was expressed by Spínola on 27 July, calling as such for the original meaning of the MFA’s programme, according to which the future relationship between the Metropole and the overseas provinces was to be decided by the self-determination of the people there. These stands taken were enough for the MFA to call for the party’s headquarters to be occupied on 18 September 1974, to take its supporters and get rid of the organization, all of this coming even before the repressive wave to take place on 28 September 1974. When looking further into the documents that were confiscated at the headquarters, the investigators believed there to be a network that joined all the right-wing parties, including the PNP, MFP, PL, PTDP, and even the CDS. This suspicion was reinforced by the appeal on July 1974, released by the conservative magazine Jornal Português de Economia e Finança, which called for a large party of the centre right. All those suspected to be involved avowed to not having any connection with the PNP. The MFP, the MAP, and the smaller groups did not make up the entire panorama of those from the right-wing of the revolution in their attempt to create a blockade against the left wing. After 25 April, other parties emerged that were part of the extreme right due to their anti-Marxist discourse and defence of “African Portugal”. Their origin came from initiatives enacted by Catholics, royalists, and liberal masonic Republicans. Regarding the Catholic milieu, the most successful party was the Social Democrat Centre (Centro Democrático Social CDS), whose formalization came about just in July 1974. Far from being a party of the extreme right, CDS arose as an

The far right resistance during the revolution 77 initiative of the most cautious right-wing members who had come from the New State, preferring to play it safe under a centrist identity. They were the juridical and technocratic elements of the ousted regime, less compromised with dictatorship and more functional to balance the bias to the left of the political axis. The party presented itself as an anti-Marxist force, moderate and open to currents of social Catholicism and liberal-conservatism. As a result, it positioned itself to the right of the PPD/PSD, but in truth both parties were welcomed by many supporters of the New State. It was founded before the CDS, as Sá Carneiro’s PPD/PSD ensured its territorial roots through its co-optation of the old structure of the National Union (União Nacional the single-party of the New State), whereas Freitas do Amaral’s party, instead, found its basis with Catholics, conservatives, and liberals of the former regime. However, PSD was able to capitalize on the reputation it gained that arose from the opposition against Caetano’s government, presenting itself as a centre-left party, committed towards building socialism in Portugal. CDS, on the other hand, always rejected its placement in the right, positioning themselves rather in the centre, anchored in Catholic personalism and in the social doctrine of the Church (Jalali 2007: 141; Pinto 2008a: 310). CDS’ preference in choosing its name for “social democracy” at the expense of the more conservative “Christian democracy” derived as well from the posturing on behalf of the Portuguese episcopate. The Catholic Church, therefore, approved of Christian engagement in political parties, but was unwilling to support in the creation of confessional parties. As such, during the entire transitional period, CDS sought to maintain its cautious position in rejecting its label as “the rightwing party”, but also expressed concern in keeping its conservative electorate, and even of the extreme right, boycotting anything that could pose a threat to its hold on right-wing voters. The strategy would prove to work: CDS managed to not just avoid repression from revolutionary forces even in the most heated moments of the transition, but also consolidated its role of the right wing in the Portuguese parliamentary system, without ever having been marginalized on the extreme right of the political spectrum. The central role that CDS had during the transition did not impede that, before its formation in July 1974, other Catholic groups formed, with these instead ending up in the extreme right. In particular, two parties attempted to become references for the activists and Catholic voters on the right during the transition, namely the Christian Democratic Party (Partido da Democracia Cristã – PDC) and the Portuguese People’s Movement (Movimento Popular Português – MPP). The Partido da Democracia Cristâ (PDC) was founded on 10 May 1974, following the merging and misunderstandings among two other parties led by activists for the Acção Católica: the Partido Cristão Social Democrático (PCSD) by António da Cunha Coutinho and the Partido Democrático Popular Cristão (PDPC) by Nuno Calvet de Magalhães. The PDC wished to bring together Christian Democrat liberals and conservatives, inspired by the anti-Salazar tradition within the Catholic world, according to statements by its leader Calvet de Magalhães in the weekly magazine Expresso (11/05/1974). This statement was, without a doubt,

78  The far right during the transition to democracy excessive, seeing as between the party’s founders there were several Salazarists and Marcelists, some of whom had been connected to the extreme right since the 1930s. The Movimento Popular Portugues (MPP), however, was founded on 8 May 1974, by Catholic traditionalists from the Círculo de Estudos Sociais Véctor (CESV) and the journal Resistência, followers of the Cité Catholique leader Jean Ousset, and by young nationalists from the 1960s. The MPP was presided over by António da Cruz Rodrigues (also leader of the CESV). Despite his roots in the extreme right within the New State, in June 1974, the party went to the public with anti-fascist propaganda, namely the manifest “Don’t be fooled: communism is worse than fascism” (“Não se iluda: Comunismo é pior que Fascismo”) and the pamphlet “PCP – a fascist party” (“PCP – Um partido fascista”) as written by the former leader of the FEN, José Luís Pechirra, under the pseudonym J. V. Claro. In a public statement dating to July 1974, the MPP defined itself as a “movement of the centre right”, dedicated towards democracy and supporting the Armed Forces Movement, the National Salvation Junta, and the Provisionary Government. It claimed to be inspired by European parties, such as the British liberal and conservative parties, in addition to leaders, such as the Frenchman Giscard D’Estaing. From the beginning, the MPP joined forces with the remaining parties on the extreme right as a strategic move to save the pluri-continental Portugal, supporting a referendum in the African provinces regarding the future relationship with the Metropole. Its programme brushed aside the idea of class struggle, instead affirming the right to private property, but also the necessity of State intervention in the economy. In international politics, it supported Portugal’s integration in international organizations, such as the European Economic Community and NATO. The movement was the target of repression even in August 1974, with 14 of its activists arrested for having put up posters of propaganda deemed counter-revolutionary. Ultimately, MPP came to be dissolved following 28 September 1974, for having integrated the organization of the mass mobilization in support of President António de Spínola. After the dissolution, its cadres would move to the PDC, supporting the party even after 11 March 1975 and collaborating with anti-communist underground networks which had been founded at the time in Spain. With regard to the monarchists, in the aftermath of 25 April 1974, their official organization, the Royalist Convergence (Convergência Monárquica – CM), bet on the anti-Salazarist political line drawn by several intellectuals of this area during the last years of the regime. These intellectuals joined the theories of Integralismo Lusitano with the anti-authoritarian thought of Jacques Maritain, to the detriment of traditionalist and counter-revolutionary monarchism. Seen in this way, on 23 May 1974, prominent figures from the CM founded the Royalist People’s Party (Partido Popular Monárquico – PPM), led by architect Gonçalo Ribeiro Teles, whose leanings were more progressive, and focused on environmental issues. In spite of his support for the principle of self-­determination for those in the Empire, the leftist language used by the PPM incited a strong reaction from the right-wing monarchists, who, under the initiative of Gastão da

The far right resistance during the revolution 79 Cunha Ferreira, sought to cut ties from the party, and founded the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal – PL) on 28 May. On 30 May, PL officially formed in a press conference, but it was just in the summer of 1974 that it established its leadership, declaring the president of the party would be architect José Harry de Almeida Araújo. The architect was a member of the Portuguese upper class with no political activity in the fallen regime. He raised a red flag in the right wing when he published an anti-communist article in Expresso on 27 July 1974, stating “we are not all comrades . . . we are all Portuguese” (“comrade” is the term used by the communists to identify themselves). As president of the PL, Almeida Araújo brought to the party’s General Secretariat the Air Force Lieutenant colonel António Figueiredo, supporter of colonel Galvão de Melo from the right wing from the MFA and National Salvation Junta (JSN). Regarding how the party defined itself, in its political program, PL portrayed itself as centrist, following the economic and political liberal model, without adhering to any socialist tendencies. As the majority of the other parties were on the extreme right, they supported not just the Armed Forces Movement and the National Salvation Junta but also the referendum for the overseas provinces to decide the future relationship with the Metropole. The party was one of the main promoters of the mobilization of the “silent majority” in support of President Spínola at 28 September 1974. For that reason, its headquarters in Porto was attacked on 27 September, and the one in Lisbon was occupied by the military special force COPCON.3 Later, the party dissolved following the events on 28 September 1974 and several members took refuge in Spain where they would become part of underground networks. In addition to these Catholic and monarchist parties clearly located on the right of the political spectrum, other social-democratic groups emerged that defended the liberal capitalist model for Portugal. They were not a part of the Portuguese extreme right, but over the course of the transition to democracy, they repeatedly crossed with the subjects more on the right than the CDS and collaborated with them in various political projects and coalitions, looking for parliamentary representation. On that front, in particular, shone the social democrats, with their Portuguese Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata Português – PSDP) and the Independent Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata Independente – PSDI). The PSDI was publicly presented on 25 May 1974, through a manifest signed by the Comissão Organizadora by Luís Arouca. The party supported the programs of the MFA and JSN and asked for, as did the remaining right-wing parties, to have a referendum on the overseas provinces for them to decide how future relations with the Metropole would be. The party ceased its activities after the events of 28 September 1974. After 11 March 1975, an arrest warrant for Luís Arouca was issued for his newspaper Liberdade’s involvement in the counter-­ revolutionary coup of General Spínola. This small social-democratic group would return to politics only after 25 November 1975, once again alongside the parties and personalities associated with the extreme right, namely PDC and the major Sanches Osório.

80  The far right during the transition to democracy The PSDP was founded on 15 July 1974 at the initiative of businessmen connected to the Portuguese masonry, namely to the Grande Oriente Lusitano (GOL). The party’s aim was to support prime minister Adelino da Palma Carlos and the provisionary government’s attempt to stave off the PCP’s seizure of power. The party found its inspirations in rationalist humanism of the intellectual anti-Salazar tradition (like António Sérgio, Màrio Azevedo Gomes, and Jaime Cortesão). PSDP had among its leaders some figures that would have an important role in the armed underground resistance against communism, as was the case with Waldemar Paradela de Abreu, who carried out the plan Maria da Fonte in summer 1975. Regarding its beliefs, the party supported the Western social-­ democratic model, for Portugal, and the creation of new independent states in ­Portuguese Africa that would remain in the Western world. During the first meetings of the party, disputes emerged regarding the registration of Marxist inspiration in the party statutes. Be that as it may, the final blow was settled with Palma Carlos and other party founders leaving it on 7 August 1974, after the fall of the first provisional government. With the party’s end, some of its members, in particular Paradela de Abreu, got close with PSDI under Luís Arouca, and, therefore, dealt with the consequences on 28 September 1974 and 11 March 1975. This first phase of party formations was accompanied by newspaper publications close to the extreme right. The press that spread its anti-communist message the farthest was a regional one, connected to the Catholic Church and the local chiefs that came from the former regime. Since 25 April and for all of 1975, the revolutionary institutions charged with the control of the media and strongly controlled by the PCP (the Conselho de Imprensa and the Comissão Ad Hoc para a Imprensa, Rádio, Televisão e Cinema) frequently intervened with complaints and suspensions of newspapers on the basis of counter-revolutionary propaganda. On a national level, the newspapers that were most associated with the extreme right were Bandarra, Tempo Novo, and Tribuna Popular (organ of the MFP), not to mention the periodicals that were already in publication during the New State, such as Jornal Português de Economia e Finanças, and the magazine Resistência founded in 1969 by future supporters of the MPP. Bandarra came about as the product of two veterans of the Portuguese radical right: Miguel Freitas da Costa, a young activist from the revolutionary nationalist groups of the 1960s (particularly FEN), and Manuel Maria Múrias, former director in the New State’s television channel RTP and son of the prominent member of the Lusitanian Integralism Manuel Múrias. The project arose in June  1974, but the newspaper’s first edition only came out in September of the same year under the leadership of Miguel Freitas da Costa, with its redaction in an apartment that had been provided by the Causa Monárquica in the Travessa de S. Pedro in Bairro Alto in Lisbon. The edition issued by Editorial Restauração by António da Cruz Rodrigues had been made possible due to advertisements, primarily from the bank Pinto e Sotto Mayor by António Champalimaud. The editorial line of the newspaper was abrasively critical of the new revolutionary political class, accusing it of committing treason to the fatherland. Due to this, the only two editions issued of the newspaper were

The far right resistance during the revolution 81 enough to put it on the radar of the MFA: on the eve of 28 September 1974, its offices were attacked, and Manuel Maria Múrias was jailed at the Forte de Caxias, and Miguel Freitas da Costa fled to Madrid. Tempo Novo came about at the same time as Bandarra, founded and led by José Hipólito Vaz Roposo, son of the Lusitan integralist José Hipólito Raposo. Its redaction was comprised of old writers for the newspaper Observador, in cohorts with the right-wing opposition against Caetano. The magazine had a mere seven issues from July to September 1974: on 13 September, the Comissão Ad Hoc suspended it due to alleged defamation against the commander of the COPCON major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. Ultimately, attempts to retake the publications failed definitely on 28 September 1974, when Tempo Novo also came under siege from revolutionary forces as it was (incorrectly) deemed the organ of the PL and a mouthpiece of the silent majority (Marchi 2017: 42–43). At the beginning of the transition to democracy, both political parties and the printing press on the right were concerned with two main subjects: PCP’s domain over strategic positions in the State’s institutions (for example the control over the administrative commissions imposed on the local councils) and the ever-looming African question. In particular, the latter was a central issue: it set the tone for who was in the right or in the extreme right of the new political spectrum and explained the reason for which they supported General Spínola in the first months of the transition. General Spínola had accepted the task in handing over the power from the fallen regime’s chief Marcelo Caetano to the revolutionary forces, but only after having ensured a substantial alteration in the MFA program, ultimately guaranteeing the preservation of the Portuguese overseas provinces. At the time of the military coup, among all the political parties, only the PCP and the extreme left were willing to immediately transfer political power to Marxist guerrilla groups of the African colonies. Against this hypothesis, the Spinolist factions established the principle of holding a referendum whereby the people in the African provinces of the Empire could decide their future, either opting for total independence or being integrated in a federation. This strategy was embraced by a large part of the extreme right who saw in it the last chance to maintain the ties between the Metropole and the colonies thanks to Spínola’s ascension to President of the Republic in May 1974. To ensure the greatest possible result for the referendum, it became key as such to gain time to organize politically in the colonies, both for white people and the indigenous people opposed to the transferral of power to Marxist groups. The same issue unfolded in the Metropole as right-wing forces aimed to achieve democratic legitimacy. For the extreme right, their priority was to assemble from an organizational point of view, gaining supporters among the disgruntled right wing and staying low key as to avoid repression, by which point they would be guaranteed parliamentary representation in the new regime. For this reason, all of the declarations uttered by the right wing, except for MAP, insisted on being faithful to the principles and projects tied to the moderate wing of MFA.

82  The far right during the transition to democracy The constant fear of being relegated to the so-called “ghetto” of the counterrevolutionary right wing resulted in the parties on the right of the CDS utilizing language at odds with their political ideology. Terms such as anti-Salazarism and anti-fascism became catch phrases uttered by politicians which were not part of their political culture; they were used merely as ways to legitimize themselves. For example, the first billboard for the MPP equated communism and fascism with both as potential dangers for Portugal. In August 1974, the PTDP presented itself as belonging to the left for a future centre coalition. This left-wing bias with anti-fascist tones from the right wing would be present during the entire transition to democracy. Even at the start of 1976, the former nationalist leader, Francisco Lucas Pires, by that time high cadre of the CDS, denounced the “risks of the fascistization for the political process” (Lucas Pires 1976: 101). Some 20 years later, the former secretary general of the MFP, Fernando Pacheco de Amorim (1996: 182), insisted in affirming: All leaders of the Progress Party (name of the Movimento Federalista Português since July 1974 author’s note), wished, for many years, for democracy to take root in Portugal, for only then would the country be able to fight for its ideal of independence and national unity, as it has been defined by history and consecrated in the Constitution. (Marchi 2012: 80) Jaime Nogueira Pinto attributed this “left wing syndrome” to all the parties on the right of the PS, starting with PSD and CDS, who were part of the Provisional Governments and Constitutional Assembly after the elections on 25 April 1975. During the transition, all of them developed political programs more to the left than their leaders, who in turn, positioned themselves more to the left than their electorate (Pinto 1996: 237). In the summer of 1974, the political panorama of the right and extreme right had been set and defined. From that moment on, the radical right set about creating political parties, with their sights set on the constitutional elections for April 1975 to achieve definitive institutionalization. With this goal in mind, on 11 July 1974, the four political parties more to the right (MFP, PL, PTDP, and MPP) formed a delegation that met with the President Spínola, demanding equal opportunities in reaching out to the public and representation in the Provisional Government, as well as administrative commissions, seen over at the time by members of the Movimento Democrático Português Comissão Democrática Eleitoral (MDP/ CDE). The MDP/CDE was a remnant of the years of the former regime: an organ in which converged anti-Salazarist oppositional forces, now controlled by the PCP, whose preponderance in local municipalities represented a clear advantage for communists in future elections. These more right-wing parties’ initiative was backed by General Spínola. The President of the Republic was interested in consolidating the anti-communist front who supported his leadership and political project for both Portugal and the overseas provinces, which was constantly under threat by the advances made from the PCP and the extreme left.

The far right resistance during the revolution 83 Of the four aforementioned parties, the MFP was the most promising: on 19 July 1974, the movement was transformed into the Progress Party (Partido do Progresso MFP/PP) and on 24 July it began publishing through its official organ Tribuna Popular. As a party, the PP officially sought out a coalition, called the Democratic United Front (Frente Democrática Unida – FDU), along with PL and PTDP, on 27 August 1974. The FDU was formed with the date of 25 April 1975 for the elections in mind and was supported by economic groups who had been affected by the revolution. However, the relationships sustained between the FDU’s parties and between them and the President Spínola denoted their fragility. The first major misunderstanding with Spínola occurred during a speech on 27 July 1974. On this occasion, the President officially recognized the right of the African colonies to be independent, going against the extreme right programme and the faith many had in the President to preserve pluri-continental Portugal. Further difficulties for the parties would ensue as a result of the mass mobilization organized for 28 September. This event was promoted by the air-tight circle of Spínola and the Partido Liberal – the goal was to ensure mass mobilization in support of the President as a force against the PCP and the extreme left. For this reason, the initiative was for the “silent majority”, which is to say the majority of the Portuguese people against the rise of communism in Portugal, but unable to freely express themselves due to the revolutionary forces’ extremism. On the international front, the North American administration supported the protest, as it considered Spínola at this time a guarantee for the Atlantic Alliance (Moreira de Sá 2011: 88–92). However, the project de-stabilized the right-wing party coalition. All anticommunist forces, including the largest parties within the Provisional Government, took part in the first meetings on carrying out the political rally, but it ended up causing more misunderstandings than any mutual agreements. The main parties (PS, PSD, and CDS) did not consider the event worthwhile and abandoned the organization. On the extreme right, the MFP/PP thought the protest inopportune not just due to the organization’s lack of professionalism, but also due to the strong risk of being repressed. Seen this way, the PNP’s liquidation on 14 September had already served as a warning, with prison sentences for its members accused of counter-revolutionary activity and the party’s ultimate dissolution. However, the leaders of the MFP/PP were unable to take a unanimous stand. José Valle de Figueiredo’s faction, close to Spínola, was aware of the dangers involved, but also of the chance to usher forth mass mobilization and influence the party’s president, Fernando Pacheco de Amorim. The bases of MFP/PP ended up getting involved, as such, in preparatory phases for the 28 September rally, namely the bullfight in the Campo Pequeno bull ring, in Lisbon, which had been arranged for 25 September, with President Spínola’s presence alongside Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves. The bullfight of 25 September quickly rang some alarms for the left: the event was a right-wing protest, with the President being acclaimed by the crowd at hand, yet with the prime minister (as he was close to the PCP) being hotly contested against. Near the bull ring square, violent confrontations

84  The far right during the transition to democracy were registered between left and right militants, proof of how the anti-communist forces were already in the process of being consolidated around Spínola. The violent outcome at the bullfight convinced the MFP/PP to prepare for 28 September with the utmost care, so much so that their organ Tribuna Popular openly alerted against the danger that could possibly harm their main objective to institutionalize the party in the near future elections: The Partido do Progresso is willing to ensure the March 1975 elections, therefore it champions political work that ultimately leads to this objective, at the same time renouncing any other kind of act that may be adventurous opportunism or completely unrealistic. . . . Revolts are made on the basis of emotions. Revolutions, however, are made with rational thought. (Tribuna Popular 26/09/1974: 1) Still in 1976, president Fernando Pacheco de Amorim insisted on the party’s opposition to the way in which the rally was organized in 28 September (Amorim 1976: 32). On the contrary, José Almeida Araújo, leader of the PL, would always confirm both the manipulation by the extreme right and especially by the MFP/PP (Almeida Araújo 2012: 175). As MFP/PP expected, the left wing reaction was immediate, with calls for antifascist mobilization for three days in a row after the events at the bull ring. The rally of the silent majority ended up representing the noteworthy weakness of the extreme right and the President of the Republic himself. On the morning of 28 September, PCP and extreme left activists erected barricades on the streets of Lisbon to intercept right-wing demonstrators coming from other Portuguese cities, thus impeding forces that hoped to gather strength in the capital. President Spínola on the other hand was unable to provide security for the right-wing civilians who were part of the political rally, and suffered the opposition to the event by the anti-­Communist main parties PS, PSD, and CDS. The debacle was even more serious in the ranks of the army: Spínola did not mobilize loyal troops to protect the demonstrators, and was criticized by the high military hierarchies, in particular by the Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief (Chefe do Estado Maior das Forças Armadas) general ­Francisco da Costa Gomes who feared what would arise from both the extreme left and extreme right. Therefore, Spínola was politically defeated by the MFA left wing, which held him hostage in the Presidency Palace at the peak of the crisis. Spínola’s lack of leadership and the right wing’s complete inability to band together allowed left-wing civilians and military to reprimand the most visible actors in the anti-communist front: the headquarters for MAP and MPP were invaded and the parties, along with the PL and PTDP, were declared to have disbanded. Hundreds of leaders, militants, and sympathizers of the right wing were arrested. The MFP/PP headquarters in Lisbon was also occupied by COPCON on 2 October. Supporters of the PCP and groups of the extreme left also attempted to vandalize the headquarters in Porto, but this attempt was prevented by military police forces. The party came undone and its members were jailed or were forced to flee to Spain.

The far right resistance during the revolution 85 The outcome of the events on 28 September was a hard blow for the extreme right, whose ability to manoeuvre and resist, even under an institutional figure like Spínola, were shown to be rather precarious. In the political space on the right of the CDS, only the PDC survived, which became a haven for those whose parties had been dissolved and who had not been arrested or were on the run. In the following months, a tactical move by the PDC to keep their party afloat was through offering the role of the party’s secretary to one of the leading military men of 25 April and a member of the provisional government: major José Sanches Osório. Under his direction, Osório put PDC on a rapid fire political projection: on 12 February 1975, the new secretary met with leaders of the European Union of Christian Democrats (UEDC) in Brussels, gaining access for the PDC to be an observer of the European Christian Democrat group, with obvious repercussions in terms of international and national legitimization. On the same day, the party presented 8,500 signatures to the High Court of Justice (Supremo Tribunal de Justiça) for its legalization, with their sights set on the elections for the Constituent Assembly (Assembleia Constituinte) to be held on 25 April 1975. Sanches Osório provided to be of even greater value by adding a dynamic touch to the party. Through him, there was the sense of a breakthrough for the right wing, and with it a renewed vigour to band together the anti-communist electorate. For this reason, various middle-high ranks of Salazarism and of the scattered radical right joined the party, in particular António da Cruz Rodrigues’ group, an orphan of the dismantled MPP. The CDS also reacted to the PDC’s new dynamic. Fearing competition in the upcoming elections, the centrist party asked the UEDC to pressure Sanches Osório into accepting an electoral coalition in exchange for the PDC’s official entry in the European Christian Democrats (Amaral 1995: 333). As such, in February 1975, Sanches Osório imposed the PDC’s direction to accept the electoral alliance with CDS, under the name of Union of the Center and the Christian Democracy (União do Centro e Democracia Cristã UCDC) and signed an agreement with Freitas do Amaral, the leader of CDS, for PDC’s accession to the “Pacto MFA/Partidos”.4 Sanches Osório was met with some resistance, either from some of party’s cadres who were aware of the dangers involved in being absorbed by the CDS, or from within the ranks of the party who had always been adverse to any agreement with the MFA as dominated by Marxist officers. Sanches Osório’s political success did not prevent, however, a second wave of suppression against the right wing when General Spínola developed a plan yet again to defeat the left wing through military action. This event took place on 11 March 1975. The genesis of 11 March was set on the rumours of the so-called “Easter massacre” (Matança de Páscoa): This was an alleged operation from the extreme left to kill hundreds of Portuguese right-wing civilians and soldiers under Spínola. The operation would have had the support of members of LUAR5 and Uruguayan Tupamaros, stationed in RAL 1 (a military base controlled by the extreme left). The objectives to murder or arrest would have encompassed 500 Spinolist officers and 1,000 right-wing civilians, whose names had been

86  The far right during the transition to democracy assembled in a list delivered by the Spanish or French secret services to Portuguese refugees in Madrid to alert them. In particular, the operation’s existence would have been communicated by the leader of the Spanish government, Arias Navarro, to the sub-director of the PIDE, Agostinho Barbieri Cardoso. Barbieri Cardoso had fled to Madrid and was closed to an underground network called Portuguese Liberation Army (Exército de Libertação de Portugal – ELP), created by people on the run from MAP. On 8 March 1975, Barbieri Cardoso alerted some members of the anti-communist network in Madrid to inform general Spínola of this operation through general Rui Tavares Monteiro, a key figure of the military extreme right in cohorts with the ELP. With the “Easter massacre” looming, Spínola took refuge in Tancos airbase, where he coordinated the 11 March 1975 operations to neutralize the supposed executors of the “massacre”. The origin of the “Easter massacre” rumour remains to this day uncertain. Some attribute it to the extreme left as they had taken advantage of the ELP’s network being infiltrated since January 1975, and as they wished to provoke the Spínolist military right wing, this pushed them to action. The officials involved who belonged to RAL 1, the Fifth Division (Quinta Divisão), the Armada, and Comissão de Extinção da PIDE/DGS, took it upon themselves to prepare an appropriate response in a meeting on 9 March 1975. The extreme left’s objective, in agreement with the PCP, would have been to eliminate the Spinolist right wing within the MFA and to strengthen the link between the moderate and leftwing radicals within the MFA against the Spinolist coup-plotters, as such driving the revolutionary process even faster, particularly regarding nationalization and de-colonization. Others, however, attribute the rumour of the “massacre” to an operation made by the ELP itself, in collaboration with Spanish secret services, to oblige the Spinolist right wing to armed action, which would have engaged them further, whether in victory or defeat, with underground right-wing networks. Both versions point towards secret service involvement, either from the West (Spain, France, Germany) or from the East (Soviet Union) in the provocation’s elaboration. What is certain is that both the extreme left and right were informed on the “Easter massacre” and it was of great importance to both factions to be prepared for it. The communists sought to definitively eliminate civil and military support for Spínola, and the ultra-right wing (in particular the ELP) wanted to take advantage of the confrontation for the greater good of the military extreme right, which centred around general Tavares Monteiro. The yearnings of the radicals were successful: general Spínola and the military right-wing reacted with a preventative operation to neutralize those who were supposed to be in charge of the imminent massacre. However, the coordination of the Spinolist forces at Tancos airbase and the air strikes against the military base of the extreme left did not reach the expected result, which should have been the insurgency of the anti-communist military units. On the contrary, the leading figures of the Armed Forces condemned Spínola’s actions and ordained for all those involved to be arrested. As a result, all involved, including Spínola himself, were

The far right resistance during the revolution 87 forced to flee to Spain, where the ranks of political refugees in the aftermath of 25 April and 28 September kept increasing. Major Sanches Osório, the PDC’s leader, was also among those on the run, although he had not been directly involved, but was still fearful of facing the consequences. His vanishing involved the only right-wing party still existing in the attempted coup, with the PDC’s headquarters being attacked by the extreme left, its organization made illegal immediately, and thus erasing the last actor on the right of the CDS with the chance to participate in the April 1975 elections. The outcome of 11 March 1975 proved to be disastrous for the extreme right, with its leaders pointing the finger of responsibility directly on general Spínola. For captain Guilherme Alpoim Calvão, who was directly involved in the coup, and would have an important role in a future underground Spinolist network, 11 March was a counterintelligence operation that achieved its goal. It definitively removed the civilian and military anti-communist faction led by Spínola (Calvão 1976: 145). For the civilian extreme right, 11 March was the second stage of the strategy framed by the communists after 28 September to gain headway in Portuguese politics through the progressive elimination of all right-wing forces, starting with the most extreme ones (Amorim 1996: 162). For the anti-Spinolist extreme right, however, the Spinolist faction was once again responsible for the breakdown. On 25 April 1974 it had contributed to the regime’s fall without knowing how to deal with the communist rise as a result. On 28 September it abandoned hundreds of right-wing militants at the hands of revolutionaries, and finally on 11 March its military failures allowed the communists to do away with all of the most powerful adversaries remaining (Costa 1979: 173–214). This debacle on 11 March marked the end of the first phase of the extreme right trying to find their way into institutionalized parties during the transition to democracy. After this, the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso – PREC) would come in on the scene for the following eight months, up to 25 November 1975. During this time period, the PCP dominated the Portuguese political scene and the extreme left could be seen locking horns over the consolidation of their respective projects in bringing communism to Portugal. It is difficult to quantify what kind of impact the right wing could have had on the 25 April 1975 elections had they been able to take part. The scant data on the subject, taken from surveys on the eve of the elections, point to about 1% of the vote going to the fascists, 2% to conservatives, but with about 8% breathing room for the Christian-Democrat right (Bacalhau 1994: 55). Without official representation and the PREC’s radicalization, voters had the choice between the CDS, PSD, and PS, all considered to be the safest best against the PCP’s political stranglehold (Jalali 2007: 73). In any case, 11 March 1975 signified the last wave of right and extreme right political refugees. On the whole, after the military coup of 25 April 1974, there were three distinct waves of political emigration from Portugal. The first wave was in the coup’s immediate aftermath by leaders of the fallen regime and members of the paramilitary and repressive forces of the New State, namely PIDE/ DGS and the Portuguese Legion. The second consisted of leaders or sympathizers

88  The far right during the transition to democracy of right-wing parties involved in the organization of the “silent majority” on 28 September 1974. The third wave was made up of military men and civilians who were part of the failed coup on 11 March 1975. What all these fluxes of movement have in common, however, is that the people involved went almost exclusively to Spain or Brazil. The officials from the old regime (mainly from PIDE/DGS) who were based in Angola and Mozambique took refuge in South Africa. Different factions from the right wing could be found in neighbouring Spain, which was still under Franco’s rule. Among them were the orthodox Salazarists, the rightwing opponents to Caetano’s government, the former members of PIDE/DGS and Portuguese Legion, soldiers and civilians supporters of general Spínola, as well as representatives of the big economic groups who suffered as a result of their companies being nationalized. Some thousands of people crossed the boundaries to reach Spain – at the peak of the crisis, numbers pointed towards around 20,000 dislocated Portuguese people. The Portuguese refugees went to different places, but Madrid was a frequent destination point. Logistic support was guaranteed by comrades who had arrived beforehand, by civil and military sectors of Franco’s regime or the Catholic Church. Of these 20,000 or so, those who participated in the underground network in Spain were a minority, not exceeding 2,000. The majority went about their lives without any political intervention or abandoned the ideas of the first months, simply waiting to be able to go back to Portugal. Many of the refugees that never had political activity after 25 April were part of the Portuguese upper class, who lived in luxurious neighbourhoods in Madrid, particularly on Torre Renta on Calle Capitan Haya with the aid of the Fundação Nossa Senhora de Fátima, founded by important Spanish personalities with traditional connections to Portugal. Those who engaged in underground operations belonged to two different milieus that crossed paths over the course of PREC’s eight months of existence in a network with recognizable links, but also hard to distinguish, whether between people or between the groups themselves. The underground network was structured in both Portugal and abroad, in two different structures: the Democratic Movement for the Liberation of Portugal (Movimento Democrático para a Libertação de Portugal – MDLP) and the Portuguese Liberation Army (Exército de Libertação de Portugal – ELP). According to one figure who was a part of these underground networks, both groups “arose from Gonçalvismo just like blood did from the wound” – in other words, they were formed due to the necessary reaction to the rise of communism under the provisional governments led by colonel Vasco Gonçalves. Along with the underground groups in Spain, underground networks also were begun in Portugal by civilians and soldiers who had not been so central to the coup attempts in September 1974 and March 1975, and had not suffered the repercussions. Some of these groups did not have a defined structure or denomination as they were, at their basis, made up on a local level among friends who banded together in violent resistance against the radicalization of the revolutionary process. Other groups arose out of social and professional milieu radicalized in defending corporatist interests. Such was the case of the agricultural organizations

The far right resistance during the revolution 89 whose members frequently carried out violent anti-communist operations, or in the military ranks where anti-communist officers organized under the Viriato, or the more important Comités de Defesa da Liberdade (CDL), led by General António Soares Carneiro. Finally, civil structures also emerged as an initiative from right-wing supporters. They had been active in intelligence services of the New State or in parties created after 25 April not linked with the extreme right, as was the case of Plano Maria da Fonte. Taken as a whole, the offensive capacity of the far-reaching and varied anticommunist front achieved remarkable relevance (Cerezales 2017: 798). From May 1975 to March 1976, 405 terrorist operations were carried out, among which were setting off bombs, assaulting political headquarters, fires, shootings, and physical aggressions. Thirty-four per cent of these activities were specifically against the PCP (AAVV 1977: 28–31), with more than a hundred headquarters assaulted just from July to November 1975 (Cerezales 2003: 1143–1146). From a geographic point of view, more than 70% of these operations were carried out in the north. The north of Portugal, particularly starting from the Rio Maior city, which is where the armed revolt began, proved to be a fertile region for anti-communist forces. They were able to take advantage of the blurry insurrectionary atmosphere as spurred on by the former chieftains (caciques), firmly rooted in the social tissue, comprised of small farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, who were worried about the collectivization programs of the extreme left. The “hot summer” (Verão quente) of 1975 was led by a complex and heterogeneous operative network made up by Catholic hierarchy, local networks of chieftains (caciques), the main anti-communist parties (PS, PSD, and CDS), and, finally, underground groups like MDLP, ELP, and Plano Maria da Fonte. Western allies (namely the USA and Great Britain) supported this network. During the armed resistance, Washington and London, however, ended up progressively leaving the underground networks, instead investing in Mário Soares and his party, PS, as the heart of the anti-communist opposition. As for the underground networks in Franco-led Spain, MDLP was without a doubt more structured than ELP. MDLP was founded at the start of May 1975, led by Spínola. Spínola himself suggested, while in Brazil, to include the word “democratic” in the movement’s name to cast a more favourable light in the international community as opposed to the name National Salvation Front (Frente de Salvação Nacional) proposed by Alpoim Calvão. The movement was financed by businesses connected to the former regime on behalf of the Portuguese community residing in North and South America and the logistic support of foreign governments fearful of Portugal entering the Soviet sphere of influence (Rodrigues 2010: 573–575). Regarding the Portuguese political system, the MDLP was constantly in touch with both the largest anti-communist parties (PS, PSD, CDS) and Portuguese institutions, in particular with admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo, the president of the sixth provisional government (19 September 1975–23 June 1976), who had succeeded the governments of Vasco Gonçalves and with the members from the Revolutionary Council, José Canto de Castro, Anibal Pinho Freire, and Vítor Alves. Alves would directly work with Calvão on de-mobilizing MDLP after 25 November 1975.

90  The far right during the transition to democracy In Spain, the MDLP counted on the support of Franco’s regime through members of the Direcção-Geral de Segurança (DGS) and the Guardia Civil. Getting international support and economic help was a main activity developed by Spínola in the first months of MDLP’s existence through multiple meetings that the movement’s president had in his frequent visits to Brazil, the USA, France, Switzerland, and Spain. Despite some success, MDLP was unable to consolidate its image even with the intervention of important international supporters, as many became increasingly fonder of Mário Soares and the moderate MFA as bulwarks against the PCP and the extreme left. As such, in September 1975, Spínola was unable to convince the French secret service to support the MDLP. In much the same way, in November the same year, the US administration officially cut off contact with Spínola at the time of a visit to the USA. This came about as a result of continual rumours swirling in the international press on an upcoming armed intervention carried out by MDLP in Portugal, sponsored by Spínola among Western governments. The organizational structure of the movement was characterized by different sections. The operational one was led in Madrid by Commander Guilherme Alpoim Calvão. In Paris, major Sanches Osório led the office of exterior relations. In Portugal, Morais Jorge oversaw the Network of Internal Action (Rede de Acção Interna) and Jorge Braga was in charge of informational services. The political commission was comprised of former cadres of the MFP/PP, namely Fernando Pacheco de Amorim, José Valle de Figuereido, José Miguel Júdice, and Luís Sá Cunha, among others. Consolidating the MDLP proved to be difficult within the movement itself, let alone among other underground Portuguese organizations. The polycentric structure of the MDLP was weakened by significant internal divergences: Calvão did not trust the extreme right civilians in the political office; Sanches Osório thought Calvão’s strategy to be problematic and harmful in obtaining international support. Morais Jorge also disagreed with Calvão’s line of thought, so much so that after 25 November 1975 he went from the MDLP to the ELP. MDLP’s strategy was both insurrectionary and political. On the former part, the two-armed wings led by both Calvão and Morais Jorge developed an extensive campaign for bombings in Portugal, targeting left-wing political headquarters and prominent communist militants. In Spain, they focused mainly on preparing for armed conflict, rear-guard logistical organization, and working with other underground groups active in Portugal. Those who worked for MDLP were soldiers faithful to Spínola and had been trained for guerrilla warfare in Africa, but, as was more often the case, members of the criminal underworld were hired for armed operations. This hazy world of criminality was also made possible by former members of PIDE who were available to carry out any kind of armed anti-communist operation. For this reason, it is difficult to establish the clear-cut membership to one group or another for each grass-roots’ militant. From an operational point of view, MDLP’s objective was to carry out an ambitious subversive project that wished to spark an armed uprising among the people to oust the Portuguese government. This project was to be done in three phases.

The far right resistance during the revolution 91 The first was to create a common platform between all the anti-communist underground movements, followed by defining more clearly the organization’s structure above ground and its armed action. Then, it would spark a people’s war of liberation, leading to a provisional government on a freed stretch of land, from which operations could more easily be coordinated against the communists. Finally, a democratic system would be implemented following the Western model. The insurrectionary objectives of the MDLP were concisely summed up by Spínola at a meeting on 15 May 1975, with representatives of the Brazilian Centro de Informação da Marinha (CENIMAR), in which: The General made clear that he is determined in carrying out a project, to say the least revolutionary, whose purpose would be to oust the current Portuguese government. With that being said, in the short term, he wishes to trigger throughout the interior of Portugal subversive action, following the same strategy promoted by the Soviet Union. It could evolve also in guerrilla warfare, considering that the circumstances are becoming more favourable to a large public support to his Political Project. (Marchi 2012: 83) The figures at the operational helm of MDLP were divided, however, between two tactical choices: one faction preferred subversive action on Portuguese soil, integrating a wide spanning anti-communist front, with the goal to have a people’s uprising. The other faction preferred to train a liberation army that would invade Portugal from Spain, downing the Vasco Gonçalves government. Regarding the MDLP political dimension, the Political Commission sketched different programs with varying objectives to implement after eventually taking power.6 At the forefront would be the destitution of all national political authorities, to be replaced with a Comando Nacional from the MDLP presided over by Spínola. Complete amnesty and liberation of political prisoners would come next, as well as immediate measures to protect the economy. From the Armed Forces would be purged those who implanted and maintained a totalitarian system in Portugal and there would be an immediate electoral census. In the short term, the measures they foresaw would include the president’s election through universal suffrage in the first two months after the MDLP would seize power. Then, a constitution would be drafted, subject to a referendum, indicating the rights, duties, and methods of participation for the people, as well the social-economic organization and structure of the State. A civil government would be nominated with independent persons chosen according to criteria on personal expertise. A State Council (Conselho de Estado) would be nominated and integrated by the leaders of MDLP, and, over the course of one year, there would be an administrative reform on the principles of de-centralization, aiming later for local elections. Government intervention on economy and its nationalization programme would also be reformed, with the goal being to reaffirm the principle of private initiative and regain the confidence of economic players. Special Courts would be erased, and legislative elections would occur from two months up to one year after the

92  The far right during the transition to democracy president of the Republic would have been elected. The Chamber of Deputies would be in office for a period equal to the term of the president in office. As for foreign affairs, the Political Commission defended the principle of neutrality with respect to large geo-political blocs, such as the USA and USSR, based rather on authentic political independence and national economy. After the most heated moment of armed conflict, and although it considered 25 November 1975 as an important victory of the military and civil anti-­communist offensive, the MDLP did not immediately end its activities. The organization dedicated itself in the following months on important operations of getting more weapons. On 2 December 1975, the MDLP received 26 tonnes of weapons and ammunition, provided by the National Liberation Front of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola – FNLA) from Holden Roberto7 and transported from Tunes, to Cadiz, then to Galiza, in an operation headed by Calvão. On 25 March 1976, president Spínola fell in journalist Günter Wallraf’s trap, accepting economic support and weapons from extreme right German circles to go about a coup d’état in Portugal. These events occurred at the same time of the cooling down period for MDLP after 25 November 1975. The group suffered from internal de-mobilization and definitively lost its external support. In December 1975, Spínola was kicked out of Spain where he had just arrived to meet with the MDLP’s high ranks. On 7 February 1976, the general was also kicked out of France as the unwelcome leader of the underground organization. Having taken refuge in Switzerland, he was also expelled from there following the Wallraf scandal. All of these events spurred the leaders of the MDLP to speed up the process of dissolving the movement. From January to April 1976 the necessary measures to do as such were taken: the representatives of the MDLP and Portuguese institutions, in agreement with the Prime Minister Pinheiro de Azevedo, began negotiations. The last jailed persons from the failed coup attempt on 11 March 1975 were freed and people began coming back to Portugal. Finally, on 29 April 1976, general Spínola made it official, from his exile in Brazil, that MDLP’s activities had been suspended. Over the course of its existence, MDLP’s activities often crossed with those of the ELP. This underground organization was based on the structure of the MAP, comprised of radical militants, former legionnaires, members of PIDE/DGS, and veterans from the African War (namely the Comandos) that never accepted 25 April and rejected the new political system. The extreme right within the ELP made a difference between themselves and those who supported Spínola – it did not support his strategy on 28 September 1974, it sought to take advantage of the chaos brought about by 11 March 1975, and in its underground operations, it remained independent from the MDLP network. In sharp contrast with the MDLP, the ELP suffered from a lack of logistics and financial support. Its counter-­revolutionary propaganda was very limited, with improbable plans on how to carry out a coup d’état and based on subversive bulletins. More meaningful were their bombings on emblematic targets of the revolutionary forces. The dozens of bombs the ELP set off were also at the same time of those of other

The far right resistance during the revolution 93 underground groups from the summer of 1975 up to 1976, strengthening the idea of an anti-communist front with a remarkable operative capacity. From a chronological point of view, ELP was the first underground organization to be formed, officially having been inaugurated on 6 January 1975, although its first underground component had been present in Spain already in August 1974. Its creation also showed to what extent it was also fragile: despite the support of professionals in counter-subversion, it was under surveillance by the MFA from its inception due to information provided by imprisoned Portuguese Legion members who were close to the extreme right milieu. On 23 March 1975, the network was publicly denounced by the military governor of Porto, after which 12 of its members were sent to jail (Cervelló 1995: 135). Photographs revealed by the printing press also showed a meeting in Salamanca which several notable people attended, including the Portuguese José Rebordão Esteves Pinto (among the founders of MAP), the Frenchman Yves Guerin-Serac (director of the Aginter Press in Lisbon during the 1960s), and the North American Jay Sablonsky (his alias Castor) who, as a part of the CIA, infiltrated ultra-right-wing organizations. In operational terms, ELP’s network was able to rely on the collaboration of European extreme right refugees in Spain, particularly from Italians of the Avanguardia Nazionale and from Frenchmen of the OAS, with whom they were in contact since their clandestine activity in Lisbon under the Aginter Press umbrella (Albanese and del Hierro 2016: 150). Also important is the support received from the Spanish secret service that guaranteed protection, but they also controlled and limited the underground activity carried out by the Portuguese. The official face of the network was secured by the commercial firms Sociedade Mariano SA and Tecnomotor SA. In political terms, the ELP published just two numbers of its official organ Libertação between August and September 1975 and spread a series of documents to characterize its political agenda within the wider context of other underground organizations. In this aspect, the ELP followed a somewhat contradictory strategy when compared with other similar anti-communist organizations. On the one hand, it called for a common front against communism; on the other hand, it refused to work with moderates, who, according to them, had all been part of the 25 April despite their current activity in the underground groups. The contradiction did not make any great difference once the ELP was isolated in some way from other anti-communist milieus. As such, the ELP declared that it did not wish to restore the New State, which was already irreparably compromised by the action of the Caetano government even before the coup d’état. Instead, they wished to start anew with the pluri-continental Nation-State against the liberaldemocratic model, against US and USSR imperialist interventions, and Marxist cultural colonization. Its propaganda reflected at its heart the Programmatic Manifesto (Manifesto Programático) of the MAP, due to its founders, but had more focus on insurrectionary action against the extreme left: We will never have the chance to win without employing equally revolutionary methods and techniques. Recent facts and others further in the past have

94  The far right during the transition to democracy shown the truth, yet again, the failure of the classic political fight, under the guise of so-called democracy, up against an organised enemy in accordance with a revolutionary process. (Marchi 2012: 86) Subversive strategy followed the theories of revolutionary war, which were in vogue in the 1960s. As explained in the first edition of Libertação, for the ELP, each Portuguese person should become a combatant and band together in small, secret numbers, while working in the public sector, in factories, in businesses, in villages, in cities. Their aim was the increasing number of small groups of rebellion that attacked the PCP-MFA symbols of power, the soldiers of COPCON and its civilian collaborators, while promoting a permanent campaign of propaganda, sabotaging the Marxist economy. In this aspect, one of the most important actions they carried out that had an impact against the revolutionary forces was the liberation of first lieutenant Nuno Barbieri Cardoso, son of the number two of the PIDE, Agostinho Barbieri Cardoso, who was implicated in the Spinola’s attempt in 11 March 1975. Although the MDLP and ELP integrated a vaster network of personalities and organizations that promoted the armed anti-communist campaign during the “hot summer” of 1975, the reciprocal contacts did not avoid a high degree of internal dissidence, mutual distrust, and competition (Cervelló 1995: 136–137). For example, major Sanches Osório, operational for the MDLP, defined the ELP as “an anti-democratic fascist movement . . . led by pseudo-enlightened people, with a crypto-Nazi tendency” (Osório 1976: 63). Waldemar Paradela de Abreu, the leader of the Plano Maria da Fonte, denounced the ELP as half a dozen of irrelevant radicals (Abreu 1983: 121), and confessed how difficult it was to promote the MDLP’s president, Spínola, as a consensual leader of the large anti-­communist front of the north. The ELP also accused general Spínola of being an “agent provocateur with respect to the right wing” (Marchi 2012: 88). Indeed, during the armed uprising, the extreme right itself ended up playing a significant operational role, but not in leading the large anti-communist front. ELP recognized how key the Catholic Church was in defending the traditional liberties of Portugal against communist totalitarianism and dedicated itself to integrating the resistance with its organization, methods, and instruments. This resulted in the idea not being very clear, which was all the same. For that reason, the theory expressed in Dossier Terrorismo, published in 1977 by the Avante! Editions of the PCP, according to which the Portuguese extreme right was structured, since October 1974, in a “counter-revolutionary national organisation” coordinated by a “centralised command of the counter-revolution” (Marchi 2017: 36) can be seen to be wrong. Regarding the underground organizations that remained in Portugal, the most relevant was by far the Maria da Fonte Plan (Plano Maria da Fonte). It consisted of a large campaign of violent anti-communist actions carried out in the north of Portugal during the “hot summer” of 1975. The plan came about in Madrid by Waldemar Paradela de Abreu, José Sanches Osório, and Jorge Jardim following

The far right resistance during the revolution 95 the events of 11 March 1975 (Abreu 1983: 116). The idea was to mobilize, in an anti-communist sense, the base in the north controlled by the Catholic Church and the local chieftains (caciques). For this, Jorge Jardim sparked a diplomatic incident that resulted in Catholic hierarchies mobilizing: anonymously, they denounced to MFA the archbishop of Braga D. Francisco Maria da Silva, for allegedly being ready to flee the country with a large amount of hidden money. This denunciation had an effect: at the Lisbon airport, the archbishop was forced to stop and undress, getting patted down by revolutionary soldiers. The indignation felt through this episode was used by the founders of the Plano Maria da Fonte: in July 1974, Jardim sent Paradela de Abreu to the archbishop in Braga to present him the plan of the anti-communist offensive. The archbishop put Paradela de Abreu in contact with the cleric Cónego Eduardo Melo, who was in charge of executing the plan’s implementation without the official intervention of the church as an institution and its highest hierarchies. Cónego Eduardo Melo became a symbol of the Portuguese church’s involvement with the extreme right for the anti-communist uprising in the north.8 Indeed, his presence was constant in meetings whose aims were to mobilize the masses and coordinate among the various right-wing underground movements. In particular, in the summer of 1975, he met up with Paradela de Abreu in Spain, Joaquim Ferreira Torres, major Valentim Loureiro, and the commander Alpoim Calvão to tighten the links between the Plano Maria da Fonte and the MDLP. Through this collaboration, the MDLP provided Maria da Fonte some veterans from the African War to carry out bomb strikes on extreme left and trade unions’ headquarters during the summer of 1975. Between July and September 1975, the plan was carried out according to techniques of subversive war: work up the local people through priests (both in homilies and regional ecclesiastical printing media) and the local chieftains (caciques), radicalization of the political climate through propaganda of clandestine groups (the Commandos Democráticos do Norte, the Brigadas Anti-Totalitárias, and the Viriatos), and assaulting the headquarters of the PCP and the extreme left. The scheme was successfully replicated in various places: getting the masses together when leaving mass or at rallies, incitement to anti-communist resistance from priests or other local eminent persons, and violent attacks against the local headquarters of the extreme left from hidden figures among the crowd. The plan was supported, from an international point of view, by the Western secret services (namely the British and North Americans) and, from a national one, by the collaboration of other underground organizations (MDLP, ELP) and by the cover of anti-communist parties (PS, PPD, CDS, PPM). In October 1975, the organizers of Plano Maria da Fonte integrated their network in the larger mobilizations of the anti-communist faction of the MFA, which was increasingly more active around the Group of the Nine (Grupo dos Nove: nine, the number of officers that headed this military faction). For this purpose, Conego Melo organized a meeting, in the Santiago Seminary, in Braga, between leaders of the Plano Maria da Fonte and the MDLP, led by Paradela de Abreu and Alpoim Calvão respectively. The aim was to decide the future of how to mobilize the people of the north, after the successes during the summer and their integration

96  The far right during the transition to democracy within the operations against the expected military coup from the extreme left, predicted for 25 November 1975. The meeting at Santiago Seminary was interrupted by the arrival of the Braga Infantry Regiment, on command of COPCON. Among those present, just two were detained. The others, including Paradela de Abreu, Alpoim Calvão, and Conego Melo, were able to escape. On the eve of 25 November, Conego Melo took refuge in a monastery of monks in Tuy (Spain), where he awaited the outcome of the military operations. He would end up coming back into contact with Paradela de Abreu only on 27 November, during an operation of transferring weapons to Portugal. The preliminary negotiations with the Grupo dos Nove anticipated that, in case the left-wing promoters of the coup were successful, the network of Plano Maria da Fonte would isolate the north of the country through blasting bridges throughout the Douro River, keeping just some in the city of Porto for strategies of resistance. Parallel to this, the MDLP’s structure was to look after the logistic assistance of the defeated anti-communists, fleeing to Spain. The favourable outcome on 25 November and the new political perspectives were key factors for de-activating Plano Maria da Fonte’s network. The pre-coup phase at the end of 1975 was brought about by the inability of Vasco Gonçalves’ governments to control the extreme right armed offensive and by making tensions worse among the revolutionary forces. The protagonist this time was the civil and military extreme left that, on 25 November 1975, occupied some military bases as a first step for a general armed uprising. These forces were, however, quickly wiped out by the anti-communist military factions with the approval of the Western allies (Moreira de Sá 2004: 142–145). The success of the counter-coup was attributed to the moderate faction of the MFA and the leadership of lieutenant colonel António Ramalho Eanes, future president of the Republic. In it, however, a significant role was also given to commander Jaime Neves, assisted by several close figures to the extreme right. As was the case of the Spinolist offensives, the nature of the 25 November also spurred controversy regarding its effects on the right. For the leader of the defeated PCP, Álvaro Cunhal, it was about a military coup in the context of a counter-­ revolutionary process. For the winners it was, however, the date that affirmed pluralist democracy, despite notable figures of the Grupo dos Nove that recognized a certain level of ingenuity and imprudence in their conduct for not having been able to avoid the advance of the right. For the radical right, ultimately, it was a lost opportunity, whose main figures were concerned with preventing at all costs the return of right, once the PCP had been scaled and the extreme left galaxy had been eliminated (Marchi 2012: 90). The alleged betrayal on 25 November underlined by the extreme right was due in particular to the lack of repressive measures against the PCP. In this aspect, the intervention from the member of the Revolutionary Council Melo Antunes became symptomatic, which, in the aftermath of the coup, assured the PCP’s permanence and relevance for the democratic system under construction. The idea of 25 November as a missed opportunity was generalized in the right wing: the figures from the former regime remained in exile abroad, and, in many cases,

The far right resistance during the revolution 97 gave up any notion of returning to politics. Militants in the underground networks were sceptical of being able to come back to Portugal safely and avoid repression from the revolutionaries. Anti-communist military men from the MFA, mainly the ones closest to the extreme right, bemoaned the fact that left-wing radicals were not purged from the Army. The leaders of right-wing formations highlighted the injustice that they were forced to endure repression on 28 September and 11 March in comparison to the clearing of the communists on 25 November (Marchi 2017: 32–36). In spite of many counter-revolutionaries being unsatisfied, there was no doubt that the end of PREC and the beginning of the normalization phase after 25 November represented, for the extreme right, a gain in freedom of action in the cultural and political terrain.

Notes 1 The JSN was composed by military men nominated by the MFA to manage the political situation up to the appointment of the First Provisional Government. It was presided over by General Spínola, tasked by the MFA to receive the powers of the deposed Marcelo Caetano. 2 SEDES was a think tank of the Liberal Wing (Ala Liberal) during Caetano’s rule, now a part of the People’s Democratic Party (PPD). 3 COPCON (Comando Operacional do Continente) was created by MFA in July 1974 with the scope to fight counter-revolutionary attempts. It was led by the prominent figure of the Carnation Revolution, major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. 4 With the official name as Constitutional Agreement Platform (Plataforma de Acordo Constitucional), the “MFA-Parties Pact” was signed 11 April 1975, by the MFA officers and the parties who run the 25 April 1975 elections. As agreed, the parties committed to carrying on the socialism revolution, in collaboration with MFA, which had meanwhile been institutionalized through the creation of the Revolutionary Council (Conselho da Revolução). 5 The Liga de Unidade e Acção Revolucionária (LUAR) was an extreme left organization created in 1967 for armed fight against the New State. 6 Manuscripts from Diogo Pacheco de Amorim’s personal arquive. 7 The FNLA would closely work with the military Portuguese extreme right, namely with the Comandos of the lieutenant colonel Gilberto Santos and Castro who, at the start of November 1975, would battle to no avail near Luanda against the MPLA and the Cuban troops to stop a communist government from taking root in Angola. 8 At the end of the 1980s, Cónego Melo was involved in the homicide case of Father Maximiliano Barbosa from April  1976. In two processes finalized during the 1990s, the court was unable to find sufficient proof to incriminate the accused, leading to their acquittal.

Bibliography AAVV. (1977). Dossier Terrorismo (Lisbon: Avante!). Abreu, Waldemar Paradela de (1983). Do 25 de abril ao 25 de novembro: Memória do tempo perdido (Lisboa: Intervenção). Albanese, Matteo and del Hierro Pablo (2016). Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century. Apain, Italy and the Global Neo-Fascist Network (London, New York: Bloomsbury).

98  The far right during the transition to democracy Almeida Araújo, José (2012). A Vida aos Pedaços (Lisboa: Almedina). Amaral, Diogo Freitas do (1995). O Antigo Regime e a Revolução: Memórias políticas 1941–1975 (Lisboa: Bertrand). Amorim, Fernando Pacheco de (1976). Manifesto contra a Traição (Coimbra: author’s own edition). Amorim, Fernando Pacheco de (1996). 25 de Abril Episódio do Projeto Global (Porto: ed do autor). Bacalhau, Mário (1994). Atitudes, opiniões e comportamentos políticos dos portugueses: 1973–1993 (Lisboa: Mtd). Calvão, Guilherme Alpoim (1976). De Conakry ao MDLP (Lisboa: Intervenção). Cerezales, Diego Palacios (2003). “Um caso de violência política: o verão quente de 1975”, in Análise social, vol. XXXVII: 1143–1146. Cerezales, Diego Palácios (2007). “ ‘Fascist lackeys’? Dealing with the police’s past during Portugal’s transition to democracy (1974–1980)”, in Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 6(3): 155–169. Cerezales, Diego Palácios (2017). “Civil resistance and democracy in the Portuguese revolution”, in Journal of Contemporary History, 52(3): 688–709. Cervelló, Josep Sanchez (1995). “A contrarrevolução no PREC (1974–1975)”, in João Medina dir., História de Portugal, vol. XIV (Alfragide: Clube Internacional do Livro). Costa, Eduardo Freitas da (1979). Spínola. O anti-general (Lisboa: Edições FP). Cruz, Manuel Braga da and Ramos, Rui, eds. (2012). Marcelo Caetano – Tempos de Transição (Porto: Porto Editora). Jalali, Carlos (2007). Partidos e Democracia em Portugal, 1974–2005: da Revolução ao Bipartidarismo (Lisboa: ICS). Júdice, José Miguel (2012). “O Nacionalismo Revolucionário”, in Manuel Braga da Cruz and Rui Ramos, eds., Marcelo Caetano – Tempos de Transição (Porto: Porto Editora), 433–443. Lucas Pires, Francisco (1976). A bordo da revolução (Lisboa: Selecta). Marchi, Riccardo (2010). “A oposição de direita à política ultramarina de Marcello Caetano”, in Lusíada História, 7: 519–542. Marchi, Riccardo (2012). “As Direitas Radicais na Transição Democrática Portuguesa (1974–1976)”, in Ler História, 63: 75–91. Marchi, Riccardo (2017). A Direita Nunca Existiu. As direitas extraparlamentares na Institucionalização da Democracia Portuguesa 1976–1980 (Lisboa: ICS). Moreira de Sá, Tiago (2004). Os Americanos na Revolução Portuguesa 1974–1976 (Lisboa: Edições Colibrí). Moreira de Sá, Tiago (2011). Os Estados Unidos e a Descolonização de Angola (Lisbon: Dom Quixote). Osório, José Sanches (1976). O MFA no banco dos réus (Lisboa: Infinito). Pimenta, Fernando Tavares (2016). “Decolonisation postponed: The failure of the colonial politics of Marcelo Caetano (1968–1974)”, in Social Dynamics, 42(1): 12–30. Pinto, António Costa (1998), “Dealing with the legacy of authoritarianism: Political purges in Portugal’s transition to democracy”, in Stein U. Larsen, ed., Modern Europe After Fascism, 1945–1980s (New York: SSM-Columbia University Press), 1679–1717. Pinto, António Costa (2008a). “Political purges and state crisis in Portugal’s transition to democracy, 1975–76”, in Journal of Contemporary History, 43(2): 305–332. Pinto, António Costa (2008b). “The legacy of the authoritarian past in Portugal’s democratisation, 1974–6”, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9(2–3): 265–291. Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (1996). A Direita e as Direitas (Carnaxide: Difel).

The far right resistance during the revolution 99 Prata, Rafael (1974). Portugal novo: movimentos e partidos políticos (Lisboa: O Emigrante, Voz de Portugal). Rodrigues, Luís Nuno (2010). Spínola (Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros). Rodrigues, Luís Nuno (2013). “Antonio de Spínola and the international context of Portuguese decolonization”, in Luso-Brazilian Review, 50(2): 93–117. Schmitter, Philip C. (1999). Portugal: Do autoritarismo à democracia (Lisbon: ICS).

5 The far right resurgence in the “democratic normalization” (1976–1982)

Historiography marks the date of 25 November 1975 as the end of the PREC. Rather, the dynamic of building up socialism did not abruptly stop, seeing as throughout 1976 the most emblematic processes of the revolution were still being carried out, like the agrarian reform, nationalizing companies, with factories under workers’ control. However, from this date on, the anti-communist forces began to create solid bases for the phase of institutionalization of Portuguese democracy in line with the Western model. This process would culminate with the constitutional revision of 1982 that would eliminate the Revolutionary Council that was the instrument of military control over civil political power. This second phase of the transition was mainly led by groups on the extreme right who sought to become institutionally integrated in Portuguese democracy. The last traces of armed action, however, were still there, albeit removed from the over-arching insurrectional strategy of the underground networks in 1975. Commander Alpoim Calvão, for example, affirmed as the chief operating officer from the MDLP, that the bombing operations from 1976 on could no longer be attributed to the organization’s original network. The last wave of bombings was actually on the initiative of former militants who were active in the grey zone between MDLP and ELP, many of whom had come from the anti-communist guerrilla warfare in Angola – particularly those that integrated the FNLA and Chipenda Battalion. They worked either on their own or under the command of the last unwavering members of the ELP who were already far removed from the large underground movement in 1974–1975. The attempt was to reproduce the “strategy of tension” in Portugal to provoke chaos and a reaction against the PCP and extreme left. This terrorist activity was supported by former financers of the MDLP, like the businessman Joaquim Ferreira Torres, whose assassination in 1979 remains to this day shrouded in mystery. The cause seems to be a reckoning within the terrorist extreme right wing who were revolted with the end of armed struggle. Examples of these last underground groups were the bombing network of the north and the Comandos Operacionais de Defesa da Civilização Ocidental (CODECO). The former, active in Porto and only taken down in the summer of 1976, was made up of right-wing extremists, some figures from police forces, and small-level businessmen who financed the operations. CODECO was mainly active in Lisbon and its ranks were reinforced

102  The far right during the transition to democracy with the last Portuguese combatants coming back from Africa after Angola’s independence on 11 November 1975. Emblematic terrorist acts like the homicide of father Maximiliano Barbosa de Sousa (2 April 1976) as well as bombings against the Cuban embassy (22 April 1976) and against the Casa de Angola (20 July 1976) were part of the last phase of this strategy of tension. Journalistic investigations at the start of the 1980s uncovered connections between these diehard operatives and the networks of the MDLP, ELP, and the parliamentary forces PS, PSD, and CDS. In particular some of these terrorists were middle ranks of the mainstream parties and bodyguards of the parties’ leaders in the most heated periods. These enquiries raised the suspicion that the CODECO was the armed wing of the CDS during the PREC. The accusation was always rejected by Diogo Freitas do Amaral who pushed forward a judicial action against his detractors. Indeed, these continual relations between parliamentary anti-communist parties and the underground networks during the transition have remained to this day a proven fact, but still have not been delved into with much depth by historiography due to the silence of the people who were part of it (Carvalho 2017). Despite the bombings in 1976, in comparison to the preceding two periods, this third phase, kicked off on 25 November 1975, represented a window of opportunity for the extreme right and their new electoral strategy, at least until the legislative elections on 5 October 1980. The increased freedom of action that the extreme right could use to their benefit highlighted all the intrinsic limitations typical of this milieu in terms of political strategy. Their analysis proved to be particularly useful to explain the failure of the extreme right in finding their way as a political actor – if they could not be relevant, they could at least be solid and lasting in Portuguese democracy. The most evident sign of this window of opportunity was through the increased financial and other resources they had at their disposal due to a rise of right and extreme right-wing print media, even before the party projects had achieved any kind of stability. In the first months of the transition, the openly right-wing newspapers were few, primarily on a regional level or connected to political parties, but they were all heavily influenced by the conditions imposed on them by the revolutionary period and were frequently subject to repression from the revolutionary institutions. After 25 November, on the contrary, the change in the political climate made it easier for various newspapers on the right to be published. Between the end of 1975 and the start of 1976, several directors, editorial boards, and periodicals sped up the turn to the right, modifying editorial lines which had been up to then much more prudent in having openly hostile political stances on the PCP and the revolutionary forces. Titles like O Dia, Tempo, Jornal Novo, O País, became, as such, reference points for the readers among the Portuguese extreme right. Seen from this widened editorial perspective, at the start of 1976 two weeklies emerged that would represent a milestone for the most radical right wing at the end of the democratic transition: O Diabo and A Rua. The extreme right printing media also had some flops by journals with a successful past in the aftermath of 25 April and during PREC, such as Tempo Novo

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  103 and O Templário. In the case of Tempo Novo, José Hipólito Vaz Raposo, who had taken refuge in Spain on 11 March 1975, attempted to relaunch the weekly after 25 November, financed by right-wing businessmen. According to him, the atmosphere was favourable for editorial initiatives dedicated in revising Portugal, now reduced to the European dimension, in an anti-communist and anti-socialist perspective. This atmosphere was characterized by the significant decrease in the danger of being silenced and being boycotted to print and distribute the newspaper. Upon announcing its return – thought to be in March 1976, but ended up not happening – the printing press described the weekly as one of the first editorial attempts from the extreme right after 25 April. As such, it highlighted the fact that its director was the brother of Francisco Hipólito Raposo (Quito), the man who designed the billboard of the silent majority (Marchi 2017: 42–43). O Templário, however, had become the spearhead of the anti-communist printing press during the PREC, going from 2,000 to 60,000 units sold, with those who subscribed to it having multiplied as well. The success of the weekly was due to the director Fernanda Leitão who bought it in May 1975, renewing the editorial staff with young people coming from Angola and Mozambique. After 25 November, however, the weekly started to lose publicity and financial support, causing it to decline, and leading to it shut down in January 1978. Regarding the most significant printing press for the extreme right, the weekly O Diabo was founded at the start of 1976 by Vera Lagoa, a journalist who had already been active during the New State, but close to the Republican opposition. Her turn to the right became more acute in the years of the PREC and her controversial anti-communist zeal helped her become a reference point for business people, mainly from the north, looking for a voice to speak out against communist influence in the economic life of the country. The importance of O Diabo for the extreme right was not limited to just the newspaper’s editorial line, but primarily through Lagoa’s availability in co-opting some of the most promising young radical militants in joining the editorial staff coming back from their stints underground. As such, in the pages of O Diabo, various radical militants achieved notoriety as political opinion makers: José Miguel Júdice, Jaime Nogueira Pinto, António Marques Bessa, and Diogo Pacheco de Amorim, among others. The nationalist weekly, A Rua, was founded in April 1976 by journalist Manuel Maria Múrias, the former promoter of the Bandarra newspaper at the start of the transition. A Rua would represent, in its four years of publication, the most defining voice of the Portuguese extreme right. In the second half of the 1970s, Manuel Maria Múrias became the spearhead for the extreme right’s offensive through his direction of the newspaper. Múrias’ influence was also due to the persecution suffered after 25 April: on 2 May 1974, Múrias was purged by the Portuguese public television RTP for his connections to the former regime. After 28 September, he was put in jail for 15 months in the prisons of Caxias, Peniche, and in the Penitentiary of Lisbon, without trial. As the director of A Rua, Múrias would be the object of some dozens of processes on the basis of abusing the freedom of the press. In particular, in June 1979 he was condemned to 14 months of detention for

104  The far right during the transition to democracy defaming Mário Soares, having served seven months in jail in Linhó, from February to September 1980. From a political point of view, the group of A Rua attempted to consolidate their place in the institutionalization of Portuguese democracy within the rightwing electorate. From 1976 to 1979, the journal supported the CDS as the party had guaranteed them financial support for their publications in an attempt to reach the most radical voters. The connection to CDS led A Rua to support the centrist party in the legislative elections of 25 April 1976 and the anti-communist candidate, lieutenant colonel António Ramalho Eanes in the presidential elections of 27 June 1976. The support, however, was not generalized, but was invested at first in the figure of Diogo Freitas do Amaral as an alternative to the other CDS leader, Adelino Amaro da Costa. In another moment, A Rua placed their bets on Francisco Lucas Pires. Coming from the national-revolutionary organizations in Coimbra during the 1960s, Lucas Pires entered active politics to change the CDS stubborn placement on the centre and turn the party more to the right of the political spectrum. Lucas Pires’ path to the CDS was emblematic of the extreme right’s difficulty in consolidating their position in the Portuguese political system. The former nationalist militant had already moderated his position in the last years of Caetano’s government to not damage a promising academic career in the Coimbra Faculty of Law. After 25 April, he kept his distance from any political entanglement, primarily with respect of his former comrades of the MFP/PP. After having gone back to political activity in 1976, Lucas Pires presented himself, against the tendencies of the time, as a man openly right wing and kept in touch with the radical area. However, he was also careful to not become the official reference point of the extreme right, which he actually attempted to dilute in the moderate electorate of the CDS, erasing from it any radical political identity. The failure of A Rua’s strategy to push the CDS to the right through Lucas Pires obliged the extreme right faction to change political tactics and get closer to the PDC as a result of the elections of 2 December 1979. Until then, the newspaper had ostracized the PDC, considering it a divisionist party of the right-wing electorate and an obstacle in consolidating the CDS. The CDS was unwilling to form a coalition with the PDC and as such there was open hostility from the centrist party in including the competing Christian Democrats in the negotiations among parliamentary parties for the elections which led Múrias to integrate the lists of the PDC in the general elections with another five independent right-wing candidates. The relative success of the right-wing independents in the PDC finally convinced Múrias of the viability of an autonomous group of the extreme right: a project that would come to fruition on the legislative elections on 5 October 1980 with the creation of the National Front (Frente Nacional – FN). The right-wing printing media being consolidated also made it easier to restructure the extreme right in the phase of normalization in the Portuguese transition on a propagandistic level. Between 1976 and 1980 this political area was able to reorganize in various fronts of Portuguese social and political life. Regarding political parties, three were actors that led the extreme right in the period at hand:

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  105 the Christina Democrat Party (Partido da Democracia Cristã – PDC), the Independent Movement for National Rebuilding (Movimento Independente para a Reconstrucão Nacional – MIRN), and the National Front (Frente Nacional – FN). The PDC was the oldest of the three parties. Founded in May 1974, the PDC had been pushed further and further to the right through the birth and institutionalization of the more moderate CDS. The slide to the right in the PDC became all the more acute when it was banned from April 1975 election due to secretary general Sanches Osório’s involvement with 11 March 1975. From then to after 25 November, the PDC drifted between many defecting militants, who were scared of the repression and the physical opposition from the extreme left against any organized public initiative by its members who were still active. In this semiunderground phase, the party was able to resist due to integralist Catholics joining their ranks from the dissolved MPP in the aim to push the PDC further to the right. This attempt to colonize the PDC from António da Cruz Rodrigues’ circle was met with resistance from the party’s founders. The controversy between radicals and moderates arose at exactly the time that the party returned to political activity in December 1975, with these quibbles becoming a constant, although the actors involved would be different throughout the entire second half of the 1970s. In the following five years, the PDC became one of the reference points of the extreme right electorate. Its existence, however, would be characterized more by its lack of ideological definition and contradictions on the political line than any clarity of content and strategies. As such, in a short space of time, the party would change four general secretaries but just one nomination for presidency, none of which would be able to consolidate the party’s structure, increase its militant base, or build party loyalty. All of the party’s leaders, one after another, would have the same issue of internal shock among the allegedly moderate faction, headed by the secretary general, and the extreme right faction represented by internal opponents. In the same way, controversy arose in all congresses in an attempt to renew the party’s identity: there were those who wanted a party based on the Church’s social doctrine and adherent to the values of 25 April, and others sought out party consolidation as the official mouthpiece of the right wing and rooted in the nationalist values of the New State. The apex of the crisis was reached in 1979 when the party was divided once again between the secretary general Sanches Osório, who had returned to lead the party in October 1978, and president admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo, who joined the party in December 1977. The presence of two military men at the head of the PDC from the anti-communist faction of the MFA, but not of the military extreme right, was symptomatic of the party’s structural fragility even at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, both were co-opted by the founders of the PDC to make the party more prestigious and insert it in the Portuguese political system. The result was, however, exactly the opposite. The former prime minister of the provisional VI government, Pinheiro de Avezedo, was interested in the PDC merely as a vector of personal political promotion, with his sights on the 1980 presidential elections. The former secretary general Sanches Osório worked in the PDC by mandate of the CDS, which guaranteed him a parliamentary seat in the 1980 elections in

106  The far right during the transition to democracy exchange for fusing the PDC into the centrist party. CDS’ goal was to definitively eliminate an opponent that was, electorally speaking, irrelevant but troublesome in getting all the votes from the right-wing electorate. Both of these military men entering the PDC was meteoric, but had no long-lasting effects on the party, but it did clearly show how the extreme right was porous to external influences, while at the same time being unable to carry out its autonomous project. The start of 1976 was also the year that general Kaúlza de Arriaga returned to public life, an emblematic figure of the military extreme right who would have a significant political role in the second half of the 1970s.1 Since the end of the 1950s, Kaúlza de Arriaga had gained prestige among the radical factions of the regime for his role in the founding of the Portuguese Parachute Troops (Tropas Pára-Quedistas Portuguesas – 1956), in the overthrow of the attempted coup d’état by general Botelho Moniz (April 1961), for his wide military operation “Gordian Knot” (Nó Gordio) against the independent African guerrillas in Mozambique (summer of 1970), and for the alleged organization of a right-wing military coup against Marcelo Caetano (December 1973). In the wake of 25 April, on 14 May, Kaúlza de Arriaga was discharged from the armed forces. Although he was contacted by President Spínola to organize a right-wing political party, the general dedicated himself in coming up with counter-revolutionary plans with the military circles that were in close cohorts with him, along with the support of businessmen connected to the old regime like António Champalimaud in the first weeks of the transition. These plans were not directly correlated with the political rally of the silent majority organized by the Spinolist circles, and, however, on 28 September 1974, it was an occasion for the revolutionary militants to arrest Kaúlza de Arriaga and keep him in prison for 16 months, without trial. With the normalization process following 25 November 1975, Kaúlza de Arriaga also began negotiations for freedom, which the general refused, not accepting exile in Paris until the presidential elections which at that point still had no fixed date. This is why he was kept in detention until 21 January 1976.2 His freedom was warmly greeted by the extreme right who saw in Kaúlza de Arriaga a potential leader of a political party and the ideal candidate for presidency for the entire anti-communist front. However, the general did not take on any clear stance in his first year of freedom, but openly supported the candidate Ramalho Eanes in the elections of July 1976, dedicating himself to long stays abroad, allegedly looking for international contacts to support his entrance in political life. Káulza de Arriaga’s trips abroad were a constant throughout the second half of the 1970s and sparked rumours on the general’s integration in European circles of the extreme right. Kaúlza de Arriaga did indeed keep in touch with the extreme right, namely those involved in the Euroright project, in particular with the Italians of the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano – MSI), the French from the National Front (Front National), and the Spanish from New Force (Fuerza Nueva). However, he was aware of the dangers in terms of his image in getting close to extremist forces, the reason for which he preferred to

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  107 strengthen his relations with conservative European circles, particularly with the British Tories, Republican Americans, and the French Giscardians. As such, in 1980, Kaúlza was involved in a controversy with the German newspaper Der Spiegel for the financial support he received from the Bavarian CSU from Franz Joseph Strauss. The care he took in avoiding being identified with extreme right forces was the same in the national political scene. In Portugal, Kaúlza de Arriaga did not portray himself as a leader of the ultra-right, but as a link between all of the moderate anti-communist forces. In this perspective, on 28 June 1977, the general officially presented the Movimento Independente para a Reconstrução Nacional (MIRN). MIRN was not a party, but a non-partisan movement open to all anti-communists, from non-Marxist socialists to the moderate right. As the president of the MIRN, Kaúlza wished to gain further prestige from the parliamentary parties PS, PSD, and CDS with the aim to be supported in the 1980 presidential elections as an alternative candidate to the PCP. The parliamentary parties did not welcome the non-partisan approach at all. The extreme left denounced the dangers of fascism coming back. Socialists, social democrats, and centrists condemned the general’s claims as anti-democratic in his move to become a political leader without running elections. However, what the PSD and CDS most feared was actually their own respective militant bases being eroded, which were in large part former supporters of the New State and fervent anti-communists, and therefore influenced by Kaúlza de Arriaga’s messages. This resulted in a paradoxical situation in which Kaúlza de Arriaga rejected any official understanding with the extreme right forces, including the PDC, considering them harmful to his image as an “anti-Marxist and anti-extremist” leader, while the parliamentary parties were opposed to any support the general got they considered to be fascist. As the major parties refused to recognize Kaúlza de Arriaga as an independent reference point, this rendered his non-partisan strategy of the MIRN to be unviable, obliging the general to transform the movement into a political party. At the end of 1978, however, the Right-Wing Portuguese Party (Partido da Direita Portuguesa – MIRN/PDP) came about with the goal to renew negotiations with the PSD and CDS, this time from an inter-party perspective. The attitude of the parliamentary parties, however, did not change. Despite continual attacks against the general, Kaúlza de Arriaga preferred to not run independently in the interim elections of December 1979. He did, though, invite his possible electorate to vote for the Democratic Alliance (Aliança Democrática – AD) coalition, formed by the PSD, CDS, and PPM. The idea was to gain time to consolidate the MIRN/PDP and for the legislative elections on 5 October 1980. The persistent submission to the mainstream parties by the general, who was seen as a leading figure for the Portuguese extreme right, resulted in him losing his credibility among the main actors in the extreme right itself, namely the PDC and the A Rua group, who held Kaúlza de Arriaga responsible for the serious crisis within the Portuguese right. Kaúlza de Arriaga’s wavering on the face was one of the reasons to lead Múrias’ group to advance in the lists of the PDC in 1979 and in promoting the project of

108  The far right during the transition to democracy the Frente Nacional for the elections of 1980. The FN’s founding was possible due to the financial contributions of businessman Bernardo Guedes da Silva, who had interests in Lusophone Africa. In April 1979, he also supported the failed project of the party Reunir Para Reconstruir (RPR) on the right of the CDS. The ephemeral experience of the FN ended up showing how fragile the extreme right was: its financer, interested in joining the political arena mainly to promote his Lusophone Commonwealth project as opposed to the integration of Portugal in the European Economic Community (CEE), left the party immediately in its first congress, in stark contrast to Múrias’ strategy in getting the FN closer to the PDC with the 1980 elections coming up. At the same time these parties were being formed, the extreme right was also organizing political movements. They largely dealt with groups of hardly any relevance at all, at least in comparison with the mobilizing capacity of the extreme left, but they had a certain level of importance in radicalization and organization, particularly with students and the youth. As such, groups made up of young people and students from secondary school were appearing, like the NationalRevolutionary Youth (Juventude Nacional Revolucionária – JNR) in 1976, or small groups created from former leaders of the extreme right in the 1960s, like the National Syndicalist Liberation Front (Frente da Libertação Nacional Sindicalista – FLNS), founded in 1978 by the former leader of the Young Portugal Movement (Movimento Jovem Portugal), Zarco Moniz Ferreira. From a militant point of view, the Nationalist Movement (Movimento Nacionalista – MN) was most solid of all, whose activities began in 1976, but its founders had come from nationalist youth groups in the first years of the 1970s, with the same name MN, integrated in the right-wing network opposed to Marcelo Caetano. Finally, in 1980, the Nationalist Intervention (Intervenção Nacionalista – IN) came about, a group that brought together former militants from MAP who had come from ELP and were against the extreme-right attempts to be part of the democratic game through the formation of parties. The controversy, in particular, was sparked against the project of the National Front (Frente Nacional) and its sponsor, the businessman Bernardo Guedes da Silva, whose agenda of getting Portugal closer to its former colonies did not please the extreme right sectors who were deeply opposed to the agreements with Marxist governments of Lusophone Africa. In the area of cultural intervention, the extreme right particularly felt the weight of the Marxist hegemony that was already increasing within the universities in the last period of the New State, but after 25 April, spread in the high schools and the centres of cultural production. The attempts to react on the cultural front were largely trivial and were substantiated on a series of study centres that were not particularly active and solid from an organizational point of view, but whose proliferation represented an important indicator of the extreme right’s strategy of institutionalization over the course of the democratization process. The creation of think tanks was a continual objective that the Portuguese extreme right chased after, also due to the sociological characteristics of its supporters: often intellectual, active in liberal professions, coming from the urban bourgeoisie, and therefore close to the official cultural environment from the authoritarian regime.

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  109 These think tanks were informal political gathering or more structured centres. An example of the former case is the National Convention (Convenção Nacional), brought about by renowned personalities from the extreme right, such as the director of A Rua, Manuel Maria Múrias and the colonel Gilberto Santos e Castro. Their structures, however, were difficult to put into action. One case of this was the Instituto Padre António Vieira founded in 1976 and reactivated in 1980 by the A Rua collaborator, Fernando Jasmins Pereira. Another was the Instituto Histórico Tradicionalista D. Miguel I, founded in 1977 by Miguelist monarchists. Other projects proved to have a more solid foundation, namely the Portuguese Studies Institute (Instituto de Estudos Português – IEP) and the Renewal – National Association for Social and Political Studies (Associação Nacional de Estudos Políticos e Sociais Renovação). The first was founded in 1978 by general Silvino Silvério Marques, with German support from the Hanns-Seidel Foundation, connected to the conservatives of the Bavarian CSU party, interested in consolidating Portuguese right-wing presence in all of its components. The project, however, ended up being thwarted due to the intervention of the CDS leaders. Fearing the emergence of autonomous groups on the right of the CDS, the leaders of the party convinced the German sponsors of the IEP to stop financing. The IEP’s failure was representative of the limited ability the Portuguese extreme right had in being recognized within Portuguese politics. Although all the anti-communist parties were supported by cultural foundations created for exactly that purpose during the transition on the basis of foreign financial support, the same opportunity the extreme right had through Franz Joseph Strauss was seen as dangerous and therefore boycotted by the parliamentary parties at national and international level. Renovação was founded in 1977 and in 1980 it even became a reference point for the theoretical elaboration and organizational mobilization of the Portuguese extreme right. Its president was colonel Gilberto Santos e Castro, but the true person behind the institution was José Valle de Figueiredo, who was the editor for Edições do Templo since 1976. In particular, in June 1978, Renovação organized conferences in Portugal with the Romanian writer Vintilia Horia who had taken refuge in Spain and the leader of the Spanish extreme right Blas Piñar (January 1980). Despite its renown in the Portuguese extreme right, Renovação was unable to survive the end of the transition: in 1980, its promoters, namely Valle de Figueiredo and Zarco Moniz Ferreira, decided to go from cultural action to political action, restructuring the movement with the name of New Order (Ordem Nova). The new organization was able to congregate some dozens of young people, with some resemblances of the neo-fascist style from the 1960s. The initiative could not resist orders from judicial authorities, however, to modify some of their statutes that went against democratic values. After a brief period underground, the movement did not survive another transformation into the Lusitan Institute for Culture (Instituto Lusíada de Cultura) and disappeared at the start of the 1980s. Social movements proved to be more diversified. An early kind was made up by different organizations of Portuguese people who had been affected by the process of de-colonization, like the Movimento Nacional de Fraternidade Ultramarina (FRAUL in 1975), the Comissão dos Interesses dos Desalojados (1978), the

110  The far right during the transition to democracy Organização de Defesa dos Ultramarinos (1979), the Movimento dos Desalojados e Emigrantes Portugueses (1979), the Inter-Organização dos Refugiados and the Associação dos Portugueses Refugiados do Ultramar, these last two having promoted a failed attempt to create a political party made up of refugees, by the name of Frente de Ressurgimento Nacional (FRATERNA). On occasion of the 1976 presidential elections, the returnees from Africa would attempt to make their voice heard through Pompílio da Cruz’s candidacy, president of the Centro Social Independente (CSI), whose failure, however, would demonstrate not just the fragmentation and political unravelling of this social milieu, but also a certain initial disinterest from the extreme right, more interested in Ramalho Eanes’ candidacy as a spearhead of the anti-communist forces. The disinterest, however, was just temporary. Over the course of the transition period and the normalization of Portuguese democracy, the Portuguese who returned from Africa remained a privileged target of the extreme right, which tried repeatedly to radicalize and organize them in an anti-system force. Symptomatic of this instrumentalization attempt was the lawsuit made by 18 civil and military persons from the extreme right, in December 1979, against the military men and politicians responsible for de-colonization, on the basis of article 114 of the penal code on crimes of high treason against the Fatherland. However, the proliferating of movements headed by the returnees from Africa, far from being an indication of activism, was more the signal of internal conflict and the inability to join together around a singular leader, recognized by all, and a solid project of political content. This explained, in part, the extreme right’s inability to politicize the discontent of these individuals, whose claims ended up being capitalized upon by the mainstream parties of the centre-right (PSD and CDS), more efficient in the defence of corporate interests of the dispossessed of the former colonies. Another subcategory of social movements was made up of organizations that tried to politicize the discontent of workers and bosses, as was the case of Movimento Português do Trabalho (MPT) and the Movimento dos Empresários Usurpados (MNEU). The first was founded in 1979 by syndicalists of the Catholic right, active in the central syndicate União Geral dos Trabalhadores (UGT), an alternative to the Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses (CGTP) controlled by the communists. The second tried to take advantage of the phase of normalization to claim the interests of businessmen who had been negatively affected by the nationalization during the revolutionary period. Despite not exactly belonging to the extreme right, these associations often crossed paths with the far right milieu in the transition, so much so that some of their representatives were part of the PDC lists in the 1979 elections. This was just circumstantial, however, as the majority of these associations would leave the extreme right parties to be part of the more profitable, centrist project Aliança Democrática in 1980. This same character of reclaiming for rights denied by the revolution makes up a third subcategory of organizations made up of victims who suffered repression from the coup military men. The Associação Portuguesa de Prisioneiros Políticos Anti-marxistas, founded in 1978, aimed to bring together hundreds of arrested

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  111 Portuguese following 28 September 1974 and 11 March 1975. The initiative did not make many waves, and not just because in 1978 there were no more political prisoners, but also because the majority of those who were behind bars in April were members of the former regime, mainly figures of PIDE/DGS, or were people without counter-revolutionary backgrounds, and, as such, were not very interested in keeping this rather controversial historical moment open. The fourth subcategory of social movements was made up of groups of a religious nature, having arisen as a reaction towards the quick diffusion of secular and progressive values from the left-wing forces after 25 April. Some of the groups included Associação Portuguesa de Defesa da Família (1977), the Movimento Amor e Vida (1977), and Movimento Português contra o Aborto (1979). All of these social movements got particular attention from the extreme right media, which sought to lure this conservative sector, presenting themselves as the only entity defending traditional Portuguese values. As was the case with the people back from Africa, the proselytism of the extreme right was hardly successful at all, not going beyond physiological contact among the ultra-conservative milieu. The fragmentation of extreme right forces in a myriad of organizations with hardly any ability to influence the political process was accompanied by the continual attempt to find a cohesive figure or leading elite, capable of uniting all these dispersed forces around a common project. This activity followed two diverging vectors: on the one hand, a tendency of some figures of the extreme right in claiming themselves as leaders of the radical milieu, on the other there were some groups of the extreme right who tried to co-opt internal or external personalities to the radical milieu to lead them all. Both civil as well as military figures were considered in this search. In this sense, in the years of democratic normalization there were a series of high level people in military ranks, in favour or against 25 April, that tried to emerge in the right-wing milieu, luring more radical sectors as well. In the second half of 1976, colonel Carlos Galvão de Melo, former member of the National Salvation Junta (JSN), was highly esteemed by the extreme right due to his balanced role as the president of the Commission for the Extinction of the PIDE/DGS, his vigorous anti-communist action during the “hot summer” of 1975, and independent stance in the Parliament as deputy of the CDS. The colonel himself tried to use his rise to bring along with him the radicals, but mainly the returnees from Africa, to consolidate his own electorate independent from the CDS, with his sights also set on a future presidential candidacy. However, the colonel did not belong to the political family of the extreme right and the merely instrumental nature of his work in the extreme right milieu resulted in a lack of trust between the two. This led to an abrupt rupture with notable figures from the radical milieu, particularly those from A Rua. The personalism of Galvão de Melo also created friction with the CDS: in 1977, the centrist party expelled him from the parliamentary group for having made declarations, through the media, that were not compatible with the moderate and centrist strategy of the party. Galvão de Melo’s main competitor in leading the extreme right was Kaúlza de Arriaga. Both of them tried over the course of the transition to secure the extreme right electorate, but rejecting this political identity and using the extremist label

112  The far right during the transition to democracy to demonize the adversary. As such, in May 1974, Kaúlza made a statement to the weekly Expresso: “I am not and have never been part of the extreme right, and I am not a reactionary in any way” whereas Galvão de Melo still at the end of the 1970s accused him repeatedly of being a Salazarist military man interested in restoring the old regime. The most prominent activists of the radical area were clearly worried about the consequences on the continual diatribes between the two military men. As such, in May 1977, a meeting was arranged in London between Galvão de Melo, Kaúlza de Arriaga, and Silvino Silvério Marques, to put an end to the reciprocal attacks and find common strategies to consolidate the anti-communist milieu outside the PSD and CDS. The agreement did not result in any practical result, nor too much else, as both men continued to attack each other in the media. The third military figure that tried to promote his political career in the area at the right of the CDS was major Sanches Osório, former member of the MFA Coordinating Board (Commissão Coordenadora do MFA). Foreign to the political culture of the extreme right, Sanches Osório gained some prestige in this political milieu for his work as Social Communication Minister (Ministro da Communicação Social) in the second provisional government (18 July–30 September 1974). The turn to the right was due to nomination to lead the PDC, in January 1975, and, mainly, with the underground period after 11 March 1975, when as a refugee in France and Spain he integrated the ranks of the MDLP. In this sense, Sanches Osório was supported by the extreme right, namely by A Rua, in his new conquest of the PDC in 1978, with the goal to turn it into the party of the anti-system electorate. However, Sanches Osório could not draw together radical forces. On the contrary, he represented an element of severe instability within this political milieu when considering the party’s internal fighting, at a standstill with president Pinheiro de Azevedo and the role of the Trojan horse as mandated by the CDS. The failed operation to dilute the PDC in the CDS laid out by Sanches Osório as ordained by Freitas do Amaral’s party in 1979 ruined once and for all his image in the eye of the extreme right. If the self-promotion of the military men as leaders of the radical right did not work, the search for one among civilians did not have better results. At the start of the democratic normalization, the most influential reference point for the radical right was Francisco Lucas Pires, a young leader of the CDS, with a background of university nationalism in the 1960s. The extreme right saw in him an instrument to influence the CDS against the moderate leadership of Diogo Freitas do Amaral and Adelino Amaro da Costa. This expectation seemed to come true in December 1978 during the CDS congress in Porto, where Lucas Pires was given a notable position as a leader of a party that seemed to be oriented increasingly more for the right wing. In the following two years, however, Lucas Pires’ path, far from being characterized as clearly right wing, was lost in internal CDS fights in trying to obtain leadership positions of the party, with little care given to the political content in and of itself. Lucas Pires accepting the role of coordinator of the coalition Aliança Democrática in January 1980 distanced him definitively from radical projects, making him as such the reference point of the liberal within the centre-right milieus.

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  113 Even less fruitful were the extreme right’s attempts to co-op as leaders two renowned figures from the overthrown regime: the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Salazar, Franco Nogueira, and the former Minister of the Overseas, Adriano Moreira. Regarding the first, the extreme right had a support campaign for him to run for president of the Republic from April 1979 to January 1980. However, the former minister never intended to return to the political scene and simply did not take a stand even with the support from A Rua. From the beginning, the weekly was aware that Nogueira was not willing to run, but they still went on with it anyway to make waves in the right wing. Regarding Adriano Moreira, the extreme right’s attention was worsened in the spring of 1978 when the chance of the former minister being able to found and lead a party on the right of the CDS arose. This proved to be a flash in the pan: having come back from exile in Brazil, Adriano Moreira decided to join the ranks of the CDS, for which he was elected deputy in 1980, and even had rather favourable positions for Portugal to join the EEC in complete contrast with the line of the extreme right. Both Nogueira and Moreira’s attitudes fit perfectly in the general unavailability of notable figures from the New State in heading radical right-wing political projects in the new Portuguese democracy (Pinto 1996: 238). From an electoral strategy point of view, the period of 1976–1980 can be divided into two phases, characterized by different attitudes of the most active forces in the Portuguese extreme right. In the first phase, from 25 November 1975 to the summer of 1979, the extreme right tried many times to approach the centreright parliamentary parties, namely the CDS, and sought, in the name of anti-­ communism, an autonomous space in the Aliança Democrática coalition that would guarantee them the political legitimacy they did not have during the revolutionary period. This realist strategy was symbolized by the support of a consistent part of the extreme right for the candidacy of general Ramalho Eanes as president of the Republic in 1976. In this option, though, there was no ideological identification and no particular attachment to the candidate, other than his role in 25 November 1975. The reason would be merely to claim victory in a candidate of the anti-communist forces, which would ease getting political and constitutional recognition for the extreme right in a democratic Portugal. The faith in Ramalho Eanes, however, would not be very fruitful, as although he had been a key figure of 25 November, once he had been elected for his term, he did not go well with the parties that supported him and did not support at all the radical milieu. In the second phase, from the summer of 1979 to the legislative elections of 5 October 1980, the persistent rejection from the heights of the centrist parties, PSD and CDS, in accepting the extreme right forces as official partners obliged them to engage in an alternative strategy. The main goal was to take away from the centrist coalition, those of the radical electorate who had opted for the “useful vote” for the mainstream parties or who had preferred to abstain from voting. In the first phase, the extreme right missed out on voters as the hegemonic position of the CDS ensured that it received a considerable percentage of the electorate

114  The far right during the transition to democracy on the right and caused some unpleasant competition among the extremist forces. In this sense, at the start of 1976, the influential core connected to the new weekly A Rua supported the CDS with the goal to concentrate the extreme right’s vote in the centrist party, and as such influence its political agenda. On the contrary, the PDC, at that moment the only structured party on the right of the CDS, saw itself as obliged to compete alone in the legislative elections of 25 April 1976 due to the CDS refusing to accept an electorate coalition. These diverging positions from the two main representatives of the radical electorate ended up proving to be negative for both of them. A Rua was unable to influence the balance of powers within the CDS in spite of the favourable phase of the opposition to the socialist government. The PDC, however, barely got any votes with just 0,54% (29,874 votes), which abated some of the fears of many observers who, on the constitutional elections of April 1975, looked at the Christian democrat party as a fearful competitor of the CDS. The weak result for the PDC was enough, however, to lose four deputies to the CDS in favour of the PS. This fact became in the following years blackmail of the extreme right to the centrist party and its governmental coalition the Aliança Democrática. Otherwise, the extreme right electorate that voted for the CDS did not see themselves as being represented in any of the internal dynamics of the centrist party, as the leader Diogo Freitas do Amaral explained well, in comments for A Rua: The right wing . . . that votes or supports the CDS will know already beforehand that, in spite of this support and these votes, the CDS will not do any right-wing politics, but rather a centrist one as is understood from the declaration of its principles. I would like everyone from the right wing to understand this position that we have taken – so that later they do not say we have fooled the voters. (A Rua 15/09/1977: 8–9) The radical right converged for the first time in a common strategy at the time of the crisis of the first constitutional government led by Mário Soares from 23 September 1976, which by the end of 1977 was finishing due to a lack of parliamentary support. When a second constitutional government started in January 1978, led again by Mário Soares due to a parliamentary agreement between PS and CDS, it led the extreme right to join forces on a unitarian oppositional front against the “shameful coalition” between the socialists and the centrists, blaming the CDS as a shameless traitor of the right-wing electorate. For this purpose, the extreme right suggested a government of national unity promoted by the President of the Republic, led by a supra-partisan personality, with the support of PS-PSD-CDS, however free of parliamentary conditionality and capable of dealing with institutional turmoil. The formula was briefly embodied by the third and fourth constitutional governments, led by Alfredo Nobre da Costa (August–November 1978) and Carlos Mota Pinto (November 1978–August 1979), created in the debris of the coalition government between PS-CDS. The extra-parliamentary right would find useful alternative choices in both of these governments promoted by the

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  115 President of the Republic, either to diminish the parliamentary parties’ importance or by underscoring the importance of the president of the Republic in line with the presidential projects of the far right. How the extreme right forces behaved during these three years of democratic consolidation showed their inability in managing their own pro-active initiative, as well as needing to take advantage of the anti-communist parliamentary parties, without even being able to have any influence over them. For the extreme right, the political scenario changed radically after the summer of 1979 when the centrist coalition Aliança Democrática (AD) was made up by the PSD, CDS, and the PPM. In view of the agreement between the two centrist parties and the monarchists, the leaders of the extreme right were unable to engage in a coordinating strategy, but they all tried to start one individually. PDC and MIRN tried, each one individually, to negotiate their own hand in the coalition, but the members rejected them, mainly from the CDS which was against any agreement with political actors positioned on its right. A Rua supported the coalition after first being opposed to the centrist operation. Manuel Maria Múrias thought A Rua would be able to play a role in the future centre-right as a think tank responsible for the pro-AD mobilization of the radical electorate and the promotion of far right candidates within the coalition. This strategic choice, criticized by other extreme right actors, namely the fascists from the MAP experience during the transition, was justified by the weekly as an option of pure political realism: To organize and let a small extreme right wing party properly breathe and shine is a heroic and fascinating task; dividing anti-Marxist votes, to be less than the CDS – it’s a tactical and strategic error without the slightest justification. For the civilized right wing, the CDS is enough; if we want to be right wing out-and-out . . . we must deal with all of the consequences of what we wish to be. Violence – like Georges Sorel imagined it – is one of the foundations of creation. In our current system, either we declare ourselves violent in a revolutionary and palingenetic way, or we sacrifice ourselves in the camp of the margins – or is it better to be quiet – and let those pass who are able to pass. There is no personal charisma that can go against how things are how they are: we are much less than we think to be, than that which others say we are. (A Rua 02/08/1979: 4) In August 1979, however, A Rua distanced themselves from AD due to the coalition’s decision to include independent figures from socialist ranks, co-opted with the name of “Reformers”. The centrist coalition’s turn to the left also encouraged A Rua to get closer to PDC through six “right wing independents” being on the candidate list from the Christian Democrat party. Be that as it may, the entire radical milieu was unable to find a common meeting point: in November 1979, general Kaúlza de Arriaga, although marginalized by the centrists, called for the MIRN/PDP to vote for the AD.

116  The far right during the transition to democracy In spite of the MIRN/PDP’s defection and the ostracism faced from the centrists and the AD’s solid victory, the electoral engagement of the extreme right’s coalition “PDC – right wing independents” was a success in comparison to previous outcomes of his political area: with 1,2% of the electorate (72,514 votes), the PDC did not elect anyone for the Parliament, but it convinced the forces on the right of the CDS about the chance to have an alternative political project. The positive psychological effect, however, did not translate into putting new strategies together, as they would remain divergent in the months to come, in at least three different ways. One part of the extreme right continued to refuse an electoral push, considering it was doomed to get only a handful of votes that would be useless regarding the parties represented in parliament. This part of the extreme right opted for a push in the field of metapolitics, in other words, promoting cultural activities and doctrinal training that would allow political cadres to become stronger for an hegemonic project for the medium to long term. Another part of the extreme right considered the relative success in the interim elections of 1979 and the possible rise in the 1980 legislative elections to be more than enough to engage in new negotiations with the Aliança Democrática. Their goal was to get radical candidates in the centrist coalition. A third part of the extreme right, more enthusiastic about the results in 1979, put their efforts in building a project that was completely different from the AD and that tried to take the most right-wing electorate from the CDS. The final goal was to finally occupy the political space that belonged to the extreme right. These strategic divergences meant that the extreme right presented itself once again without coordination for the legislative elections on 5 October 1980. At first, the only two official extreme right parties, the PDC and MIRN/PDP, decided to approach in different ways, like 1979, their entrance to AD’s coalition. Once again rejected by the parliamentary parties, they saw it as unavoidable to join together in a common project, seeing as the 1980 legislatives were perceived by many analysts to be favourable for the right wing and as such an opportunity not to miss out on. The A Rua group also accepted to join to the PDC and MIRN/PDP, and for that purpose made up the Frente Nacional (FN). This electoral coalition of PDC-MIRN/PDP-FN did not convince the entire militant extreme right. The orthodox extreme right had always refused the democratic game since 25 April, having banded together in MAP and now in Intervenção Nacionalista, and they boycotted the coalition. The reasons tied in with the doctrinal opposition to electoralism and with the influence of businessman Bernardo Guedes da Silva in the FN foundation. Neither were the supporters of the metapolitical strategy in favour of the initiative. This group was committed to, at the time, a new editorial project promoted by Jaime Nogueira Pinto, the journal Futuro Presente, whose goal was to introduce the ideas of the French Nouvelle Droite in Portugal and, at the same time, the new Anglo-Saxon right of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who were on the rise in Europe and the USA. It is worth noting the lack of interest on this last radical coalition from former nationalist leaders like José Miguel Júdice, who since 1976, or rather since

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  117 having come back from the underground, gave up any revolutionary desires and went closer to the PSD and Aliança Democrática with the clear intent on battling the left-wing hegemony through the only alternative that seemed visible to gain power. In this sense, it is interesting to see the characterization Miguel Júdice made on the Portuguese extreme right’s political project at the end of the 1970s: A simply negative project, critical, that explores errors and weaknesses, but not only does it not offer “singing ’morrows” as it can’t even propose a concrete political solution that can substitute Aliança Democrática. (O Diabo 12/08/1980: 2) Indeed, the extreme right’s political agenda did not shine through its originality or pro-active spirit. From a programmatic point of view, this agenda may be analyzed in two different groups of proposals: one was very similar to the centrist parties’ proposals, like the PSD and the CDS, and therefore of little appeal to the electorate that would vote for AD or abstain, but would supposedly be open to a radical alternative proposal. The other was made up of proposals that were indeed characteristic of the extreme right in comparison with the moderate parties, but their extremism was becoming increasingly anachronistic with the development of the transition period and democratic consolidation in Portugal. Regarding the former group of measures, the parties on the right of the CDS fought for a profound constitutional revision that would remove Marxist influences in the 1976 Constitution and to promote a presidential system in Portugal. They sought to liberalize the economy, to put an end to nationalization that was imposed during the revolutionary process, and promoted the free initiative of private capitalism in the country. They called for a revision of the agricultural reform, an end to occupation and land collectivization, and returning funds to people who fled or had their money taken from them. They wished to get rid of the Revolutionary Council as a way to put an end once and for all the oversight of military men from MFA on the country’s political life. These were measures that were also supported by the Aliança Democrática and, from the start of the 1980s, would progressively be implemented by the centrist governments. The radical’s programmatic points were more characteristic: total opposition of Portugal joining EEC and wanting Portugal to go back to Africa through privileged economic relations with the former colonies in a common space moulded on the Commonwealth example. The PCP would be made illegal as a force acting for a foreign power (the USSR), interested in destabilizing the national political system to implement a pro-Soviet dictatorship. They would also oversee the trials against the ones in charge of de-colonization and the socalled “Gonçalvist terror” (the repressive measures against right-wing militants during the revolutionary period and during Vasco Gonçalves’ governments). This second group of proposals was distinguishable by its irrelevance for the current political climate at the start of the 1980s and would have a difficult

118  The far right during the transition to democracy time in convincing the potential electorate in the need to vote for extreme right political forces. As such, when considering their ambitious objective from the PDC-MIRN/ PDP-FN coalition to add to the 70,000 votes from 1979 and elect representatives in the Parliament, the result was frankly disastrous: with 23,819 votes, the coalition earned just 0,4% of the electorate. The loss of two-thirds of the electorate in comparison with the interim elections in 1979 was the final straw for the extreme right’s efforts in building itself up as an independent political force with an institutional project in Portuguese democracy. In this respect, a comment that Manuel Maria Múrias made regarding the electoral defeat in his own weekly, A Rua, proved to be telling: The right has ceased to exist, or perhaps it never existed . . . or those involved got a State job and joined the [AD] coalition. [The right wing has reduced itself to] tattered fringes with an ideology that the public rejected with unintelligible passion as is typical from the masses themselves. (A Rua 9/10/1980: 24) As a result of this electoral defeat, the new victory of the AD and its evident absorption of the most right-wing electorate in the centrist coalition caused the extreme right milieu at the end of the transition to implode. A Rua shut down just a few months after the elections. MIRN/PDP remained open, but only until the summer of 1984, when it became increasingly smaller. Only the PDC provided a right-wing presence in the 1980s, without any interest or relevance from an electoral point of view.3

Notes 1 General Kaúlza de Arriaga (1918–2004) entered the military academy in 1935 where he got his degree in civil and military engineering in 1939. In 1949, he finished the course on Army Staff and High Command of the Military Studies Institute (Estado-Maior e Altos Comandos do Instituto de Estudos Militares). From the 1950s, he had several functions in the New State: Chief of staff of the Minister of National Defence (Chefe de Gabinete do Ministro da Defesa Nacional 1953–55), Undersecretary of State and Secretary of State for Airforces (Subsecretário de Estado e de Secretário de Estado da Aeronáutica 1955–62), professor at the Institute of Higher Military Studies (Instituto de Altos Estudos Militares 1964–68), president of the Board of Nuclear Energy (Junta de Energia Nuclear 1967–69 and 1973–74), executive president of the petroleum company Angol SA (1967), member of the Overseas Council and the Council of the Military Order of Christ (Conselho Ultramarino and the Conselho da Ordem Militar de Cristo 1966–74), Commander-in-Chief of Ground Forces (Comandante-em-Chefe das Forças Terrestres 1969–70) and the Armed Forces (Comandante-em-Chefe das Forças Armadas 1970–73) in Mozambique. 2 On 15 March 1977, Kaúlza de Arriaga sued the Portuguese State for unlawful detention. He won the case on 5 November 1985 and on 4 June 1987, also the request for review presented by the Portuguese State in the Administrative Supreme Court. 3 MIRN/PDP and PDC would be removed from the parties’ registers and dissolved due to inactivity by the judgement of the Constitutional Court in 1997 and 2004, respectively.

The far right and the “democratic normalization”  119

Bibliography Carvalho, Miguel (2017). Quando Portugal Ardeu: Histórias e segredos da violência política no pós-25 de Abril (Lisboa: Oficina do Livro). Marchi, Riccardo (2017). A Direita Nunca Existiu: As direitas extraparlamentares na Institucionalização da Democracia Portuguesa 1976–1980 (Lisboa: ICS). Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (1996). A Direita e as Direitas (Carnaxide: Difel).

6 The metapolitics as the new strategy to modernize the far right (1982–1985)

The Portuguese transition represented a turbulent period for the extreme right, also from a cultural point of view (Fishman 2011: 246–247; Bermeo 1997: 308–309). In the first years, the intellectual effort from the extreme right was concerned with issues regarding revolutionary juncture, with little attention to the flourishing of ideas and new analysis that characterized right-wing radicalism in other European countries – namely France and Italy – in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the newspapers and publishing houses that were most connected to the right wing, O Diabo, and A Rua, on the one hand, with Edições do Templo and Editorial Resistência on the other, did not stand out through cultural avant-gardism. The most innovative operation that happened in these years, and as such deserving a mention in comparison to decades prior and to come, was the introduction of the Nouvelle Droite’s theorizations to Portugal, thanks to the intellectual effort from the 1960s generation (Marchi 2016). In this respect, José Valle de Figueiredo had an interesting statement on Alain de Benoist, the most important philosopher of the French current: My generation owes him [Alain de Benoist] an invaluable service, having done away with certain prejudices and avoiding that we fall in the pernicious and traditional allergy that the right wing has to science, proving, on the contrary, that we have nothing to do with the vast archaeological field that is still the leading and institutionalised political thought. (Futuro Presente n°5–6, 1981: 111) The first traces of this relation between the radical Portuguese milieu and the French group that led the Nouvelle Droite went back to the start of the 1960s, when José Valle de Figueiredo, at the time the leader of Combate, kept up a letter exchange with Alain de Benoist, and introduced in Portugal the intellectual’s texts and those of his French extreme right comrades who were interested in a dialogue between political doctrine and the sciences. However, the first radical right publication clearly influenced by the Nouvelle Droite was the journal Política (1969–1974) by Jaime Nogueira Pinto.1 This journal opened its pages for a cultural upgrade, coming from innovative scientific areas like anthropology, ethology, socio-biology, and realist geopolitics (Marchi

122  The far right during the transition to democracy 2013: 119–121; Santos 1998). In the 1970s, these branches of knowledge enjoyed some success in the eyes of the European extreme right, thanks to analyses made by French Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européene (GRECE), led by Alain de Benoist and his cohorts (Antón-Mellón 2013: 59–60; Griffin 2000: 225). In particular, in the Perspectivas section of Política, António Marques Bessa presented authors who were tied to these fields of scientific investigation. The objective was to demystify the Marxist vision of equality among human beings, and, therefore, dismantle the egalitarian base of a perfect society. Política had its base in anthropological studies carried out by Robert Ardrey, and as such showed the scientific reality of differences, of natural inequality, of feeling of belonging and hierarchy, from which the instinctive defence of territory became in fact genetic, as can be seen in animals. In the same way, thanks to work from Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Timbergen, and Helmut Buechner, the journal underlined how aggression is a natural given of living beings and not a product of society. Consequently, thanks to work from biologist Jacques Lucien Monod, Política contested the scientific rigour of Marxist theories. This criticism was expanded to capitalism, whose dynamic of massification was comparable to that of Marxism, and had the same egalitarian principles contested by the objective studies of the world of animals. The Portuguese extreme right’s attempt at innovation through ideology was interrupted by the military coup on 25 April and the revolutionary period that followed. Only at the end of the 1970s did the generation that produced Política succeeded in resuming their project, with the publication of the journal Futuro Presente in May 1980, led, once again, by Jaime Nogueira Pinto, with the goal to refresh the intellectual foundation of the radical milieu. This worry was clear in António Marques Bessa’s book, Ensaio sobre o fim da nossa Idade (1978), which traced the foundations to “erect a new culture” (Bessa 1978: 45). José Valle de Figuereido explained the identity of this new right aware of the new culture: The right wing, moving towards a discussion with science and incorporating new areas of interest, has arrived at the point of scientifically confirming notions that were already heritage of the tout-court right. In other words, the “new right” brought scientific confirmation of the main principles to the right wing. For all the attention given to these new fields of investigation, authors that integrate the new right end up saying to the right that science’s new discoveries confirm its fundamental principles and that there is nothing to fear – much to the contrary  – of what is being discovered in the scientific field. The notions of territory, hierarchy, pessimism on human nature, inequality, totality, organic unity, have gained new light through the developed works of science that are found in the avant-garde of investigation, from ethology to population genetics, theoretical physics, and the general theory of systems. (Futuro Presente n°5/6, 1981: 110) At the end of the 1970s, the return to public life for the young national-­revolutionary generation that had been underground since 25 April determined an increasing

The metapolitics as the new strategy 123 attention from the right-wing media for the innovative currents of radicalism. Between August 1979 and January 1980, for example, the weekly O Diabo systematically approached the subject of the new right through Diogo Pacheco de Amorim’s analyses, who, during his time underground in Madrid from 1976 to 1978, had combined militancy in MDLP with his studies on the French current along with António Marques Bessa. The series of published articles in O Diabo were connected with the imminent release of Futuro Presente, presented as a spokesman for the Portuguese new right. Pacheco de Amorim’s analysis stemmed from his observation of the time difference between the creation of Nouvelle Droite in 1969 and its arrival in Portugal a decade later. The author emphasized, in particular, the total of lack of any echo of heated controversy that inflamed the French intellectuals during the summer of 1978 on this radical current. Pacheco de Amorim’s articles in O Diabo also aimed to enlighten Portuguese people on the roots of an “idea movement” that in Portugal had already begun to influence prominent figures in the cultural and political milieu. The reference was to José Miguel Júdice, a renowned political analyst in right-wing media and was close to AD and Francisco Lucas Pires whose circle of former comrades in Coimbra was making significant waves in CDS. To enlighten right-wing readers, O Diabo reconstructed the historical dynamic of the Nouvelle Droite, described the network of like-minded organizations that began to pop up throughout Europe and explained the pillars that substantiated this “idea movement” through its most relevant publications: Alain de Benoist’s 1977 book Vu de Droite (awarded in 1979 with the Grand Prix de l’Essai de l’Académie française), the newspaper Nouvelle École, and the experiment of Figaro Magazine, led by Louise Pauwels. Through O Diabo’s pages, Portuguese followers of Nouvelle Droite also wanted to convince the radical milieu of the chance to replicate the organizational dynamic of their French comrades in Portugal, leaving to the side the sterile anticommunism in favour of a cultural battle in the middle to long term. Therefore, particular attention was given to how the Nouvelle Droite articulated its offensive against the cultural hegemony of the left wing with its publication of books by Pierre Val, Pour une renaissance culturelle (1979) and Alain de Benoist Les idées à l’endroit (1979). Benoist’s book was analyzed in great detail, but with a critical eye. The Portuguese, for example, had their own critiques on the chapters “Bolshevism in ancient times” and “Monotheism and totalitarianism”, attributing Louis Rougier’s harmful influence to the Nouvelle Droite’s insistence on the Jewish-Christian roots of totalitarianism. In the same way, the Portuguese praised the well-structured series of congresses, conferences, and debates led by the French to clarify their project of “New Culture” and to respond to the intellectual left-wing attacks that forged the label of “new right” in a depreciative sense. In particular, Portuguese intellectuals highlighted the successes of this cultural battle, emphasizing the influences in relevant contemporary currents like the new romantics, new philosophers, and new economists and in organized groups that worked around them, like the Club de l’Horloge (Bar-On 2016; McCulloch 2006: 158).

124  The far right during the transition to democracy Club de l’Horloge was particularly relevant for the Portuguese case, due to the fact that this group did not belong to the extreme right, but rather to the current of new republics close to the governmental French right wing. This specification would prove to be important as it directly interested Francisco Lucas Pires, who participated in Política, and since 25 April 1974 had become an important figure in the institutional Portuguese right wing. As the key figure of the party most on the right in the Parliament – the CDS – Lucas Pires openly identified himself as “one of the few Portuguese politicians connected to the Club de l’Horloge and that considers himself a man well integrated within the new right way of thinking” (O Diabo 4/12/1979: 23). In this sense, Lucas Pires became associated with the project of democratic renewal from the French new Republicans, seeing as he himself had become dedicated in restructuring the Portuguese Republic through a global revision of the constitution (Robinson 1996: 963–965). This rebirth had markedly political and moral characteristics closer to the French liberal reformists more than to the metapolitical and cultural interests with biological-scientific matters of de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite. In April 1978, Lucas Pires formalized this political-cultural identity by founding the Impulse Association for Studies and Political Intervention (Associação de Estudos e Intervenção Política Impulso). Several former members of the radical milieu in the 1960s and active in rightwing currents of the PSD and CDS crossed paths in Impulso. On an international level, Impulso integrated its network of like-minded organizations, working in particular with the French from Club de l’Horloge and the Spanish from Clube del Sable. These distinctions that Lucas Pires made between the new Republicans and the new right sparked different reactions among his old comrades. On the one hand, Jaime Nogueira Pinto emphasized how the distinction between the new right and the new republic was not just methodological but profoundly doctrinal. On the contrary, Diogo Pacheco de Amorim considered this distinction to be tricky, seeing as the new Republicans based their political practice on the scientifically based theorizations of de Benoist’s circle. In other words, the new Republicans were different from classic Republicans exactly by substantiating their political action in the theoretic contribution of the Nouvelle Droite. The new republicanism developed in Portugal by Lucas Pires, therefore, only made sense if it were to be integrated in the larger dynamic of introducing GRECE’s theorizations in Portugal, the Nouvelle Droite’s newspapers, the books by Benoist, whose work Vu de Droite was, at the end of 1979, translated into Portuguese (de Benoist 1981). The introduction of the Nouvelle Droite ideas in Portugal gained audience, but it also received disapproval both in the right and the left. Even if the progressive Jornal de Notícias positively referenced Nouvelle Droite, in general the printing press did not view them favourably, neither for the French current nor for its Portuguese followers. As for the French, the Comércio do Porto attributed Nouvelle Droite’s success to the French left-wing crisis and spoke of how its ideological support had been moved towards extreme right parties, namely the Front National (FN) by Jean Marie le Pen and the Parti de Forces Nouvelles (PFN) by Pascal Gauchon. Regarding the Portuguese, the main target was the newspaper Futuro Presente: the periodical Patuleia defined Nogueira Pinto’s publication as

The metapolitics as the new strategy 125 the cultural organ of the ultra-reactionary right wing. The influential newspaper of literary criticism, J.L. Jornal de Letras, Artes, e Ideias, accused it of being the newspaper of the nostalgics of the New State and the Empire, who were working for a mix among the Iberian extreme right and new French and Ango-Saxonic expressions. As for Futuro Presente’s leader, Jaime Nogueira Pinto responded to the cultural weekly, specifying his group’s political identity: What could bind us together in 1960s to the old regime, and I believe that this pertains to an overwhelming majority of Futuro Presente’s collaborators – persons who weren’t even 20 years old when Salazar stepped down from power – it was the overseas issue, that is the national issue. Beyond that, we considered and still do that the regime lost its essential traits of justicialism, aggressivity, ideological and social-economic modernity that we considered – and consider – essential for a national and solidaristic practice, which we have always defended and has been important to us. (O Diabo 7/10/1981: 9) Within the right wing, reactions were contradictory. O Diabo warmly welcomed the Portuguese translation of Vu de Droite, it recognized editor Fernando Ribeiro de Melo’s courage, and emphasized how important José Miguel Júdice’s introduction was. On the other hand, A Rua crushed Nouvelle Droite for its pagan and antiChristian tendencies which came dangerously close to the left wing. In the same vein was the Catholic extreme right’s reaction, whose newspaper Resistência in truth reserved space for ideas of the Portuguese new right, thanks to the collaboration of António Marques Bessa. Yet, at the same time, it did not hold back on criticizing the French anti-Christianism, accusing them of Nietschean doctrinarian abortion. The fascist extreme right also criticized Benoist’s works, mainly on how it exalted the concept of differences. For intellectual fascist António José de Brito, the blind faith of the new right in science was far from representing progress for the radical right; instead it marked a major setback and doctrinal yielding. In general, the extreme right accused the new right of being excessively intellectual, of not being connected to political realities, of being inefficient in the long term, of presenting heterodoxist and modernist deviations, and marginal, pseudo-left wing revolutionary infatuations. The Portuguese followers of the new right did not hide how mistrustful they were in relation to the traditional Portuguese right, who they considered to be incapable of understanding the range of cultural combat and Gramscian strategy in conquering the intellects and therefore the hegemony in society. For them, the Portuguese right was extremely conservative, nostalgic of their disappeared chief, of the police, the censorship, the reason for which, in Nogueira Pinto’s words, it isn’t very credible that the new culture of the right impresses the sociological right wing, that, very patriotically, does not understand nor does it wish to understand in what is happening across the world. Neither in Portugal, to tell the truth. (O Diabo 7/10/1981: 9)

126  The far right during the transition to democracy As such, the intellectuals who sought out cultural upgrade were unable to make an impact, even making their positions clearer on sensitive subjects for the Portuguese extreme right, like the religious question, on which José Valle de Figueiredo explained: Only imbeciles or malicious people make non-critical readings of any text, work, or movement, backing it completely, especially when it makes part of other coordinates and cultural horizons. The new right in Portugal did not need de Benoist to start reflecting on these problems, not even it will unconditionally jump in the waters of a steam, with whom the affinities are deep, but also, especially regarding the philosophical foundation and in the religious question the difference are sometimes abyssal. (Futuro Presente n°5–6, 1981: 114–115) Indeed, Futuro Presente’s promoters avoided any close reproduction of the French current. The journal was open to innovation, but this was also held back by national political tradition. In this sense, an article from the journal, published in 1985, presented an interesting radiography of the Portuguese new right: In Portugal, the new right has traits that distinguish it from the French new right (identified by its systematic neo-paganism and anti-Americanism) and politically tends to be nationalist, defending ethic primacy of politics over economy. If in these political aspects there may be affinities with the right wing – in a certain machiavellism with its acceptance of the laws of aggressive behaviour and the dichotomy friend/enemy – it completely differs in its style and literary, artistic patterns where it shows a clear preference for art and fiction, for less “orthodox” genres like science fiction, comic books, and war games. With the traditionalist right wing, it shares aspects in its organic vision of society that understands, however, like conservatives, in an historic perspective of change, of where violence and revolution do not have to be excluded. As for its customs, it tends to be more tolerant than its brethren. Politically it is nationalist and gibelin, having an elitist and realist vision of political phenomena, in symbiosis and contradiction with a certain romanticism and volunteerism in action. It recruits mainly in younger generations at universities in the middle and upper class and included some figures that were militant in the so-called “national opposition” to the past regime. (Futuro Presente n°23/24, 1985: 55) Futuro Presente made this identity of theirs clear since its first number in May/ June of 1980 (with the subtitle of “magazine of intervention and culture”) and in particular from its second series (n°7 from September/October 1981) with the subtitle “Magazine of New Culture”. The first numbers of the journal presented the works of members or followers of the new right (French Alain de Benoist, Guilleume Faye, Pierre Vial, Dominique Venner, Germans Armin Mohler, Henning Eichberg, Belgian Robert Steuckers, and Italian Marco Tarchi) and all references

The metapolitics as the new strategy 127 of the new culture (Carl Schmitt, Julien Freund, Robert Ardrey, Thomas Molnar, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ortega y Gasset, Oswald Spengler, and Yukio Mishima). It spread like-minded foreign publications in Portugal: the Frenche Nouvelle École, the Italian Diorama Letterario by Marco Tarchi, German Criticon by Caspar von Schrenk-Notzing, the Belgian Orientations by Robert Steuckers, Spanish Punto y Coma by Isidro Palácios, but also those from the classic extreme right: the Italian L’uomo libero, La Torre e Intervento, the French Est&Ouest and Défense de L’Occident, and the Belgian Renaissance Européene. At the same time, Futuro Presente published Anglo-Saxon new right authors as the liberals (Felix Sommary, Brian Crozier, Robert Moss), the French economic libertarians (Henri Lepage), North American neo-cons (Léo Strauss and Norman Podhoretz), and the new North American liberal economists (Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek) from the Reagan era. The attention Futuro Presente gave to liberal and conservative theorists distinguished the Portuguese new right from the French Nouvelle Droite and influenced the other editorial initiatives involved in the cultural combat: journals Terceiro Milénio by António Marques Bessa and Universidade and Cultura by Rui Manuel de Albuquerque. The journal Terceiro Milénio began publishing in October 1981 and finished, after five numbers, in March  1983. It was published by the Editorial Resistência by António da Cruz Rodrigues. As explained in the editorial of presentation, the newspaper’s goal was to provide for right-wing political action that scientific knowledge whose absence had contributed to the disorientation of the radical milieu following 25 April (Terceiro Milénio n°1, 1981: 4). The inspiration in French publications like Nouvelle École was clear in the subjects they approached: Konrad Lorenz’s ethology, the scientific confirmation of Darwinist evolutionism, demography, ecology, biology, elitist sociology, and investigations on the relation between man, territory, and natural resources. The journal Universidade e Cultura (two numbers in May/June 1983 and January 1984) was made up by students of the Students Association of the Universidade Livre do Porto. In March 1982, these students published the bulletin Impérium that, with the subtitle of “Magazine of New Culture”, presented itself as an introduction for younger people to the journal Futuro Presente, offering texts by Robert Ardrey, Alain de Benoist, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The Universidade e Cultura perfected the editorial line of Impérium with the more ambitious goal to enter into the economic and business milieus. Despite showing a clearly new right editorial line, with reviews from Futuro Presente and Punto y Coma and articles on defending elites, the right/duty to be indifferent, new economists, works by Guillaume Faye, Louis Pauwels, Julien Freund, the Universidade e Cultura presented itself as “integrating itself in the doctrinal current of economic liberalism and its expression a political level” (Futuro Presente, n°19–20, 1984: 56). All these editorial initiatives ascribed to the new right were unable to significantly influence the Portuguese extreme right milieu at the start of the 1980s. However, they represented the clearest sign of renewed strength of the Portuguese

128  The far right during the transition to democracy radical milieus after the gale of the revolution. This new cycle, however, was to be fleeting. Although it had traces of undeniable quality, it was unable to break through the decadence of the Portuguese extreme right from after the Second World War, which, in the last two decades of the 20th century would reach its critical climax.

Note 1 Jaime Nogueira Pinto enlisted as a volunteer for the African front in January 1974, but was sent to Angola only in July 1974 during the period of democratic transition. In Luanda, he worked alongside the civil governor, general Silvino Silvério Marques. When Silvério Marques was replaced by the extreme left MFA officer António Rosa Coutinho, Nogueira Pinto organized an underground structure of agitprop Frente Revolucionária de Angloa (FRA). Following 28 September 1974, he left the Portuguese Army and took refuge in South Africa, later in Brazil in 1975. In June 1976 he went to Spain where he worked in the final phase of anti-communist underground movements MDLP and ELP. He officially returned to Portugal at the end of 1978. In 1981, he was put on trial for desertion but was acquitted. From the end of the 1970s, he was member of international conservative right-wing think tanks, as an expert in Southern Lusophone Africa: from 1978, the Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP, Bendern, Liechtenstein), by invitation from Franco Nogueira, and, since 1980, Circle Pinay, by invitation from Brian Crozier. From the second half of the 1980s, he worked in Lusophone Africa as a consultant for anti-communist guerillas (UNITA and RENAMO), and, after the end of the civil wars, for the regular Armed Forces.

Bibliography Antón-Mellón, Joan (2013). “The idées-force of the European new right”, in Andrea Mammone, Emmanuel Godin and Brian Jenkins eds., Varieties of Right-Wing Extremism in Europe (New York: Routledge), 53–68. Bar-On, Tamir (2016). Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (New York: Routledge). Bermeo, Nancy (1997). “Myths of moderation: Confrontation and conflict during democratic transitions”, in Comparative Politics, 29(3): 305–322. Bessa, António Marques (1978). Ensaio sobre o Fim da Nossa Idade (Lisbon: Templo). de Benoist, Alain (1981). Nova direita, nova cultura: Antologia critica das ideias contemporaneas (Lisbon: Afrodite). Fishman, Robert M. (2011). “Democratic practice after the revolution: The case of Portugal and beyond”, in Politics & Society, 39(2): 233–267. Griffin, Roger (2000). “Plus ça change! The fascist pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite”, in Edward J. Arnold ed., The Development of the Radical Right in France: From Boulanger to Le Pen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), 217–252. Marchi, Riccardo (2013). “La presse d’extrême droite au Portugal: avancées et reculs pour une nouvelle culture du radicalism lusitanien”, in Olivier Dard (org.), Internationalisation des droites radicales: Europe Amériques. Supports et vecteurs (Bern: Peter Lang), 111–138. Marchi, Riccardo (2016). “The Nouvelle Droite in Portugal: A new strategy for the Portuguese radical right – between the authoritarian regime and the transition to democracy”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 50(3): 232–252.

The metapolitics as the new strategy 129 McCulloch, Tom (2006). “The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and entryism, the relationship with the front national”, in French Politics, 4: 158–178. Robinson, Richard A. H. (1996). “Do CDS ao CDS-PP: o Partido do Centro Democrático Social e o seu papel na política portuguesa”, in Análise Social, xxxi(138): 951–973. Santos, Luís Aguiar (1998). “Um teste aos conceitos de nomocracia e teleocracia: o jornal Política perante a primavera marcelista (1969–1970)”, in Análise Social, 33(149): 1093–1115.

Part III

The far right during the consolidated democracy (1982–2015)

7 A new cycle in democracy The groupuscular and subcultural far right (1985–1999)

At the start of the 1980s, the extreme right was still taking advantage of the last traces of the transitional period. The first government of the Aliança Democrática (AD), which arose from the electoral victory from December 1979 and confirmed in the general election of October 1980, was dealt a heavy blow by the death of Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro and the Minister of Defense Adelino Amaro da Costa in an aviation accident1 on 4 December 1980. After Diogo Freitas do Amaral’s interim government (December 1980–January 1981), Sá Carneiro’s disappearance as the charismatic leader of the anti-communist front led to Francisco Pinto Balsemão’s nomination of Prime Minister, owner of the weekly Expresso and founder of the Ala Liberal during the New State and the PSD (Zúquete 2011: 297–298). Although a successful businessman, Pinto Balsemão demonstrated weaknesses as a political leader. Both the centre-right coalition itself and the AD government came to a premature halt after two requests for resignation presented by Pinto Balsemão in September 1981 and June 1983. The governmental crisis of the AD and the return of the socialists to power under Mário Soares, whose cabinet was supported by the PSD (1983–1985), allowed the extreme right to continue attributing the debacle of the regime born on 25 April 1974 to all parliamentary parties. In this sense, the extreme right insisted on still-unresolved aspects inherit from the period of democratic transition, derived from the four governments of the PS, PSD, and CDS. These factors included the nationalization in the domestic economy, the constant rise of taxes, the devaluation of their money, the call for external financial help, the progress in negotiations for Portugal to join the EEC, and the fall of the former colonies in bloody civil wars under the shadow of the US/USSR imperialism. Protests against repression became less relevant, which had been key in the second half of the 1970s, but inexistent from the start of the 1980s (Pinto 2008: 287). Although this strategy’s limitations had already been exposed in the second half of the 1970s in terms of strengthening political cadres of the radical area and capturing the potential electorate for the parties, the extreme right did not exhibit any ability to renew its political discourse. As such, modernization efforts initiated by the magazine Futuro Presente did not leave a significant mark on the new subjects that emerge within this political area in the first half of the 1980s (Pinto 2000: 10–11).

134  The far right during the consolidated democracy The clearest example of the Portuguese extreme right’s inability in updating themselves can be seen in the weekly Novo Século. The newspaper was founded and led by Fernando Pereira from 15 November 1981, who was also the owner of the publisher of the same name. During the transition, the FP Editions achieved notability for having published books and authors condemning the 25 April from an extreme right perspective. Novo Século had an editorial line that was markedly nationalist, and it followed in the steps of the weekly that came before it, A Rua, in regard to the same subjects they approached. A Rua’s disappearance was due precisely to the political project’s failure that had given it life. Therefore, it is not surprising that Pereira’s weekly did not reach anywhere near the same level of success as Manuel Maria Múrias in 1976 when the political situation allowed more chances for the success of the right wing. The total absence of innovation on behalf of the Novo Século group was not just on the subjects they approached but also their political strategy. As such, still in 1984, the weekly insisted that the nationalists must get together and organize in a new National Front (Frente Nacional – FN), taking advantage of the Portuguese entrepreneurs plundered by 25 April like António Champalimaud. Fernando Pereira’s FN proposed the same doctrinal principles and the same contradictions that the extreme right faced under the PREC and from 1976 to 1980. Regarding the principles: they refused sociological explanations on poverty and criminality. They rejected the concept of revolution as a motor of change, while relying on selected elite to oppose democratic egalitarianism. They affirmed the trinity of God, Fatherland, and Family against communism and defended order, authority, discipline, private property, free economic competition, and believed in the domain of religion but also in the separation between Church and State. Regarding the contradictions: they opposed the party system introduced from 25 April, but called for a mandatory vote to avoid right-wing absenteeism. They rejected the revanchism for the New State, but recognized Salazar’s role in developing the country and his superior governance in comparison to Marcelo Caetano. In this respect, 10 years after the fall of the authoritarian regime, with the exception of the Futuro Presente group, within the extreme right there were no traces of a serious debate on the New State. Salazar remained a glorified/idealized statesman in contemporary Portuguese history, whereas Marcelo Caetano was considered a fool, responsible for the liberals’ infiltration, or, for the more radical ones, a traitor complicit with the figures behind the coup of 25 April. As a last organizational attempt from the extreme right, the Frente Nacional did not have any desire to become a full-fledged party, confining itself to be a centre for the dissemination of its nationalist ideology. The centre of studies was made official in September 1984 under the name Gestalusa. Beyond it having nothing innovative about it, Gestalusa did not identify with contemporary European radicalism, but was inspired in conservative intellectuals like Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Giovanni Prezzolini. Indeed, the first public conference of the centre claimed Catholic traditionalism as the basis of the civilizing mission of the discoveries. As such, the sources were the classical nationalism of the Integralismo Lusitano and the Action Française against the revolutionary nationalism inspired in the French

A new cycle in democracy 135 Revolution and in the anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism of the 1960s. Faithful to the counter-revolutionary identity, the Frente Nacional – Gestalusa also looked down on fascism and National Socialism by the expansionist excesses in the former case and the racists/anti-Semites in the latter. On the contrary, they found their virtuous models in Salazar and Franco, underlying the resistance of both dictators against the fascistization of their regimes. The Frente Nacional’s stagnation was merely symptomatic of a paralyzed political area at the start of the 1980s, for both political parties as well as social movements. Regarding the political parties, the situation was one of slow agony. The surviving groups from the transitional period – PDC and MIRN/PDP – were at the end of their road. In February 1983, faced with the crisis of the Aliança Democrática’s government and the possibility of anticipated elections, general Káulza de Arriaga attempted again to summon up the right-wing electorate to vote in swarms for the MIRN/PDP to transform Portugal into a presidentialist system in the North American or French style. This insistence was merely a formality: on 30 June 1984, the congress of MIRN/PDP decided to cease all party activities. Concerning the PDC, they did not offer anything foundationally different from others. Leadership stability and the lack of internal conflicts were not signs of the party getting stronger. The calm was simply due to many involved in different waves of the radical right wing having given up active political life, whereas in the second half of the 1970s this had breathed life into the PDC. As such, the party entered the 1980s without any significant dynamic that represented any medium-/ long-term project. Their only role was in heading the electoral committee of the extreme right, being part of the legislative elections in 1983, 1985, and 1987, as well as in the European elections of 1987 and 1989, with results that never went above 42,000 votes (0,72%). Regarding social movements, the 1980s confirmed the traditional groupuscular character of the extreme right, but representative of the general climate of de-mobilization in the nationalist area. The normalization of the democratization process, as well as the end of the Euro-african imperial ideas, led the majority of those involved in the 1960s and 1970s in political activism to stop. Some became part of mainstream parties of the new regime, particularly the PSD, others dedicated themselves to cultural combat. As Jaime Nogueira Pinto, the director of Futuro Presente, reminded, Aníbal Cavaco Silva’s decade of governance with three consecutive terms, represented a relevant challenge for the still active elite of the extreme right which was potentially interested in creating new political parties. Particularly in his first two terms (1985–1987 and 1987–1991), the main base of the extreme right found in Cavaco Silva something appealing for a variety of reasons. First, it was somewhat novel that he did not take on a particularly anti-fascist stance, to the contrary of what many centrist leaders had done, worried about their political legitimacy. The technical profile of an economics and financial professor having gone over to politics reminded many of Salazar. In addition to this, his speech was implicitly anti-hostile towards the right wing, while at the same time wishing to oppose the ideological hegemony of the left wing in politics and the economy. He also had a sense of euro-scepticism that was

136  The far right during the consolidated democracy closer in line with then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in comparison with other centrist Portuguese politicians. Finally, he used a populist tone in his speeches, centred on an organic vision of society in which the individual initiative supplanted the principle of class struggle. All those are just some of the reasons why the right wing supported Cavaco Silva (Pinto 1996: 255–257). As Cavaquismo took root in part of the sociological extreme right, coming from the transition and with the withdrawal of the veterans, a new nationalist generation arose in the mid-1980s, without any doctrinal or organizational points of reference. The results were a noticeable weakening of the ideological development capacity, a trivialization of the radical identity, a stagnation in terms of content, image, and communication, in traditional Portuguese nationalism or through the most caricatural expressions of right-wing extremism. The most revealing indicator of this bewilderment was the lack of any relevant newspaper or magazine in the editorial world of the radical right wing in the second half of the 1980s. Something else different from previous decades, with the exception of Futuro Presente, was the circulation of ideas being limited to newsletters, fanzines, loose sheets of paper, distinguished by their neo-Nazi tones, marginalized within the radical Portuguese right wing anyway. In the same way, the style of militancy came to be marked by pre-political and subcultural phenomena like the skinhead movement that, like in the rest of Western Europe, arrived in Portugal mainly through France and the United Kingdom. Seen from this perspective, organized groups began to multiply. Some of them were left-over pieces of the transition, such as the Movimento Nacionalista (MN) and the Ordem Nova (ON). Other more recent and fleeting ones like the Movimento de Unidade Lusa (MUL) were still tied to classic Portuguese nationalism or like the Portuguese section of the CEDADE and the group of the bulletin Último Reduto with clear roots in national socialism. None of them, however, showed any particular interest in renewing their doctrine, nor did they have the ability to recruit new militants. In this sense, a display of vanguardism arose only in groups made up of young intellectual nationalists, committed to cultural production, as was the case of the AXO group at the Faculdade de Letras in Lisbon, as well as the newspaper Ultras. These initiatives, which had hardly any audience, were part of a larger phenomenon in Portugal, belonging to the patriotic and nationalist ideology in the arts after the revolutionary windstorm. Notable as well was the musical phenomenon in Portuguese rock music, achieving huge hits in groups like the Heróis do Mar or the Sétima Legião. However, in the 1980s, the tone of the extreme right was between two distinct movements, whose doctrinal identity and political performance reaffirmed the dichotomy of Portuguese nationalism also in the end of the 20th century: the National Force New Monarchy (Força Nacional Nova Monarquia – FNNM) and the National Action Movement (Movimento de Acção Nacional – MAN). As in the New State, the monarchical Portuguese area within democracy was crossed by different sensibilities. From 25 April 1974, the only official monarchical party, the PPM, was unable to bring together all the realist supporters, many of whom adhered to the PSD, CDS, and even the PS. PPM, though, was

A new cycle in democracy 137 frequently the target of controversy by monarchists in other organisms, like the Causa Monárquica (the official organization of the House of Braganza), the Royalist People’s League (Liga Popular Monárquica), and the Royalist Union Cabinet (Gabinete de Unidade Monárquica). Within this fragmented area, and due to of the unsatisfactory result of the PPM in the legislative elections of 1983, it was on 5 October 1983 that the Nova Monarquia (NM) emerged. They were one of the few Portuguese political subjects identified by scientific literature as belonging to the European extreme right at the end of the 20th century (Pinto 1995: 121; Mudde 2000: 186; Davies and Lynch 2005; Merkl and Weinberg 2013: 55). In the beginning, the NM was composed by around 50 youths affiliated with the PPM, unsatisfied with the monarchical leaders’ inability to make a move, and anxious to renew their ideology and relaunch their activity. Among its founders were also some veterans of Portuguese nationalism, like the national syndicalist João Taborda, the neo-integralist Mário Saraiva, the Salazarist and critic of the historical fascism Jacinto Ferreira, the fascist poet from the New State, António Manuel Couto Viana, and the former official commander Francisco van Uden (cousin of the successor to the throne, the Duke of Braganza). The head, however, was made up by youth, mainly the brothers Nuno and Miguel Castelo Branco, the last of whom presided in the youth organization of PPM in the district of Lisbon. Although clearly in line with Portuguese nationalism, the Nova Monarquia was far from representing a radical faction of the Portuguese right wing. Its principles leaned more towards Christian values and the social doctrine of the Church. In this sense, the NM recognized the centrality of family as the base of society and its primacy with respect to the State, placing the organic character of the community over the divisive principle of class struggle. From a political point of view, NM did not define themselves as anti-democratic, but rather anti-partitocracy, or at least against the monopoly of parties in the representation of the Nation. As such, they proposed a radical reform of the State that foresaw a bicameral system, with one Chamber reserved for parties and the other for intermediary bodies of an economic, professional, and cultural nature. The two chambers were to be assisted in moments of national crisis by the summoning of the General Courts (Cortes Gerais), at a meeting of the High and Low Chambers. In this sense, the NM called upon the municipalism of the monarchical Portuguese tradition, valued by the Integralismo Lusitano at the start of the 20th century. At the end of it, municipalism was the monarchical response to the divisive dynamics represented by the regionalist impulses present in the bigger parties (as was the case in Madeira being governed by the charismatic social-democratic leader Alberto João Jardim). In foreign affairs, NM’s discourse was closer to the classic one of the Portuguese extreme right. The movement spoke in favour of a Europe made up of different Fatherlands as opposed to a Europe of markets, constructed by capitalism that won in 1945, convenient mainly for the centre-European industrialized States. As such, NM criticized the bipolar order of the Cold War, but it accepted Portugal’s integration in the Atlantic Alliance safeguarding national sovereignty. Regarding its historical references, the NM adhered to the pre-constitutional monarchical Portuguese tradition, against the Republic created on 5 October 1910.

138  The far right during the consolidated democracy Therefore, it took on the legacy of the New State in recognizing Salazar as the most important statesman of the 20th century, emphasizing how different he was from fascism and especially National Socialism, which they considered to be just another variant of socialism. As a result, they rejected any influence from foreign doctrines or any affiliation in totalitarian models, namely the fascist and Nazi ones, also refusing to wear the label of the extreme right. As for their nationalism, the NM stressed their anti-racist, multi-racial, and civilizing character of the New State form of nationalism. The claim for an Universalist nationalism contrary to chauvinism and imperialism, but also against stateless cosmopolitanism, allowed NM to defend the myth of the Empire, the legitimacy of the African War, and the responsibility of 25 April in destroying the last five centuries of the Fatherland’s history. Although they refused the label of the extreme right and rejected any influence from the fascist-like movements from the inter-war period, NM ended up being one of the most far right movements, also because of their stance against the parliamentary parties, in particular against the PPM, CDS, and PSD. As for the PPM, the NM criticized the left-wing bias of the party since its foundation in 1974. In particular, the movement challenged the PPM’s strategy to claim the constitutional monarchy (in charge from 1820 to 1910 and result of the liberal revolution of the 19th century) to integrate the 25 April system, more easily rejecting the oldest monarchical tradition. This had repercussions in the excessive attention on environmental and urban questions, putting aside institutional questions, namely the return to monarchy. The party’s leader, Gonçalo Ribeiro Teles, was shrouded in controversy, criticized for his excessive political heterodoxy: in the 1985 general election, for example, he was elected to the Parliament as an independent in the PS lists of Mário Soares. The continuous attacks from the NM obliged the president of the PPM to respond: during the sixth party congress in 1986, Ribeiro Teles openly accused the NM of wanting to infiltrate the PPM with totalitarianism and extremism, contrary to the socially advanced monarchical Portuguese tradition. Clearly positioned to the right of the PPM, the NM was the target of criticism from even more radical factions in the monarchical milieu, namely from the minority fascist component coming from the 1940s and 1950s. As such, in 1988, the monarchical and fascist intellectual António José de Brito accused the NM of moderatism for its heterodoxical positions regarding traditional monarchy, and accepting the party system. Indeed, the NM did not adhere exclusively to monarchical, counter-revolutionary, and anti-democratic traditionalism, which had driven the fascist group under Alfredo Pimenta at the end of the 1940s. The differences with this current of the extreme right, which at that time was not structured in the context of any organization, were evident: the NM was open to accept in its ranks traditional, liberal, and reformist monarchists. It chose its key thinkers also among the intellectual monarchists who were critical of the fascist tendencies of the 1950s, in particular Jacinto Ferreira and Henrique Barrilaro Ruas. For the restoration of the monarchy, they supported the successor Dom Duarte Pio de

A new cycle in democracy 139 Bragança who, however, was accused by the fascist extreme right of being connected to the partitocratic democracy of 25 April. The right-wing criticism of the PPM led the NM to get closer to the PSD, which, in 1985, took a clear turn to the right with its election of Aníbal Cavaco Silva to lead the party and his nomination to be prime minister following his victory in the legislative election of the same year. In line with large numbers of the Portuguese radical right, NM considered Cavaco Silva to be the best prime minister of the last decade, in particular for his formation of a technical government relatively free of party control. As such, the preference of this monarchical organization could be seen in line with the radical right’s favour for the populist discourse of Francisco Sá Carneiro at the end of the 1970s. This explained the NM’s request for the creation of a “national democratic bloc” in the debris of the “central bloc” constituted by PS-PSD. This project followed the AD model with a base in anti-socialist parliamentary parties. This request was urged further at the time of electing Mário Soares to be president of the Republic in March 1986. The search for the centre of attention by Nova Monarquia in the Portuguese right became even more intense in 1986 with the former Salazar’s Overseas Minister, Adriano Moreira, becoming the leader of the CDS. An important window of opportunities was opened for some radical right-wing factions with this new course taken by the CDS, although the former minister of the New State had never expressed any interest in radicalizing the party or opening it to the extreme right, even since his return to political activity at the end of the transition. As Adriano Moreira moved the CDS closer to the Christian Democrat and conservative political line, the NM distanced themselves from the technocrat liberalism of Cavaco Silva. The PSD was actually accused of wishing to take over the right-wing political spectrum but maintaining a moderate left-wing line. The shock with the PSD soured with the legislative elections of 19 July 1987. On this occasion, the NM was devoutly committed to Moreira’s electoral campaign, nominating some of their leaders as independents on the lists of the CDS. In particular, the NM made an attempt to make their campaign in Lisbon more dynamic by taking to the streets and working with key right-wing figures in public, like Jaime Nogueira Pinto and Bernardo Guedes da Silva. This first electoral experience for the NM, however, was a disaster, as the Christian Democrat party took home its worst ever result, going from 9,96% (22 deputies) in 1985 to 4,34% (four deputies) in 1987. The defeat clearly showed the radical monarchists that the figures of the former regime, no matter how valued in the right wing, would have little appeal for voters. As such, the most conservative and nationalist electorate remained hostage in the logic of the useful vote, as the 1987 elections guaranteed the absolute majority for Cavaco Silva’s PSD, again prime minister (Pinto 1996: 256). Despite its failure in the CDS, in the second half of the 1980s the NM consolidated its structure thanks to the adhesion of three dozen youths they won over from the CDS during the electoral campaign of 1987. As such, the movement opened up to a militant base primarily for young people, going beyond the 600 already affiliated. It won student votes in various high schools in Lisbon and Porto, and

140  The far right during the consolidated democracy elected candidates in university organisms, both in traditionally right-wing places (Lisbon Faculty of Law) and faculties that were staunchly left wing (Lisbon Faculty of Letters and the Students Association of the University of Coimbra). At the same time period, it created Associação Claustrum, active until 1991 on the academic front with the organization of public events like the conference with the ambassador of Israel, Colette Avital, in Portugal, at the Lisbon Faculty of Letters. The expansive dynamic and key role of the younger people in the organization resulted in the Nova Monarquia leaning ever more to the right at the end of the 1980s, led by the movement’s secretary general Miguel Castelo Branco. The movement changed its name to Força Nacional – Nova Monarquia (FNNM) with the goal to recruit more people outside the monarchical milieu, reaching out to indifferent nationalists to the subject of restoration. Radicalization was even more evident in the movement’s international relations. On 20 November 1988, Miguel Castelo Branco participated on behalf of the movement in a ceremony commemorating Francisco Franco and José António Primo de Rivera, organized in Madrid by the Spanish extreme right. There, he met with the leader of the Frente Nacional (formerly Fuerza Nueva) Blas Piñar and with delegates of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and the French Front National. Although the movement rejected any collaboration with racist and pagan movements, this change in international relations was clear in light of previous contacts with organizations like the Paneuropa Union, presided over by Otto von Habsburg. In 1989, the NM tightened its relations even further with the European radical parties: at the beginning of May, Miguel Castelo Branco participated in the second congress of the Spanish FN where he personally met the French leader Jean Marie Le Pen. Thanks to this contact, the French FN sent some of its members to Lisbon to sound out a chance to create a Frente Nacional also in Portugal. The idea was to create a party with its structural base being the FNMM, allowing in other figures coming from the inactive PDC, MIRN/PDP, and other groups of the extreme right in the 1980s. A decisive step forward in creating this party was at the Blas Piñar’s conference in Lisbon on 11 May 1989. The event “The homeland we have is the Europe that we want” was overseen by Miguel Castelo Branco and by Pedro Soares Martinez, professor of the Faculty of Law who was considered, even during the New State, as one of the spearheads of the ultra in the Academia. The Spanish leader of the FN spoke before 200 people who came from different organizations of the Portuguese extreme right and the meeting was presented by the media as the launching of a new formation of the extreme right in Portugal, with their sights set on European elections in 1994. From this electoral perspective, the FNNM worked as a reference point for the Euroright in Portugal, the group of the extreme right in the European parliament. The media highlighted the fact that this event coincided with the hundred-year anniversary of Salazar’s birth (Vimieiro, Santa Comba Dão, 28 April 1889) and characterized it as a meeting of fascists longing for the past. Although not met with success, Miguel Castelo Branco clarified that the party project did not have any fascist element: it went against the model of the totalitarian State and the mythic

A new cycle in democracy 141 Mussolini notion of living dangerously. Furthermore, the president of the FNNM emphasized the Portuguese nature of the movement, different from the French one, renouncing any kind of xenophobia, promoting even a proposal to have closer ties between Portugal and Cabo Verde for the creation of a new unitarian State with two nations. Indeed, the NM defended the concession of Portuguese nationality to all former black combatants in the Armed Forces, also proposing the creation of a confederacy of Lusophone States, starting from a community including Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Príncipe and Timor. This is not unusual as the NM had three conferences on the issue of East Timor from 1984 to 1989 and maintained relations with the leaders of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), like the then ambassador of Brazil in Portugal, José Aparecido de Oliveira. The FNNM’s attempt to transform into a party on the European Eurosceptic front was the deciding factor in its definitive rupture from the CDS on the European elections of 18 June 1989. The FNNM called out to abstain from voting, disapproving of the CDS’ pro-Europe stance and its deputy in Brussels, Francisco Lucas Pires. On the eve of the European elections, the entire Euroright group met in Lisbon on 11–12 June, with the presence of Jean Marie Le Pen and delegates of the MSI, the German Republikaner, the Belgian Vlaams Blok, and the Scottish Nationalist Party. On this occasion as well, the French leader met with leaders of the FNNM to carry on with the creation of the party in Portugal. However, this approach did not work out as planned, as Jean Marie Le Pen struck a bad chord with the Portuguese, as he wished to interfere in the agenda, issues, and content of the FNNM’s proposals. The FNNM’s transformation into a party was accelerated in the summer of 1989 when the PPM leader, Gonçalo Ribeiro Teles, quit his bid for the local elections of Lisbon, which were set for December, leaving open a space for candidacies on the right of the PSD-CDS coalition. For this, the president of the FNNM confirmed to already have lists ready for Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra. Miguel Castelo Branco even put forth the name of the former deputy of the authoritarian regime party União Nacional, Francisco Casal-Ribeiro, as a candidate for president of Lisbon’s city hall. The operation kept in line with the tradition of the Portuguese extreme right: Francisco Casal-Ribeiro spoke up about his unwillingness to run, which resulted in the hoped for endeavours in September/October to not lead to the birth of any party. The operation simply collapsed by itself. Despite all their efforts, the most visible supporters of the FNNM were at a standstill regarding the party project due to its international connections with the extreme right and the offensive from the media. The failure of the FNNM in becoming a consolidated party was also determined by the rising neo-Nazi wave in Portugal that directly affected the monarchical movement. As such, the FNNM trajectory ended up repeating yet again the history of the Portuguese extreme right. The movement was able to achieve a notable position within this political area, which in the 1980s had been otherwise rather empty. It experienced a radicalization process over the course of its short lifespan, but at the same time it was unable to become consolidated and institutionalized, simply disappearing off the map, without passing its message on to another militant generation.2

142  The far right during the consolidated democracy The damage brought on the FNNM by the neo-Nazi phenomenon was also due to the fact that the monarchical movement’s parable was accompanied and intersected by another radical movement, but very different in terms of its ideology: the National Action Movement (Movimento de Acção Nacional – MAN). During Blas Piñar’s important conference on 11 May 1989, a dozen young nationalists and skinheads stole the show and were able to grab the attention of the media present, with mottos on the death of democracy, uncovering flags with Celtic crosses, greeting people with fascist salutes. The leader of the FNNM called off the meeting, accusing the group of being Nazis and assuring that the party would not accept militants from MAN or skinheads. Miguel Castelo Branco’s statements would fall unto deaf ears: the FNNM underwent serious harm of reputation due to its identification with the extremists from MAN and the skinhead movement that, at the end of the 1980s, became the main subject of the media regarding the Portuguese extreme right. The Movimento de Acção Nacional (MAN) was founded in 1985 by José Paulo Henriques, a youth militant from the CDS, and his close group of friends from Amadora, a town within the Lisbon metropolitan area. The original identity of the MAN was not very different from classic Portuguese nationalism, but the movement quickly became the symbol of the new radical generation, strongly influenced by the recent developments of the European extreme right, namely the Anglo-Saxon one especially with respect to the battle for the ethnic defence of the Europe. In this sense, MAN fit well in the concept of the groupuscular extreme right that was heavily influenced by North American radicalism that scientific literature has shown to be one of the most prevalent forms of organization within the right wing following the Second World War (Kaplan 1998: 194; Bale 2006, 2002: 25; Griffin 2003: 38, 41; Marchi 2010). In terms of its organizational structure, since its foundation, MAN was modelled on two levels: a leadership one and a militant one. The leadership level was made up of the president, the political commission in charge of defining MAN’s line, the secretary for the movement’s administration, and the national council to coordinate activity between regional sections. This structure, however, was rather shaky. Paulo Henriques assumed the role of president over the course of the movement’s six years in existence. On the contrary, the political commission underwent continual restructuring; the secretary never officially began their duties, and the national council was only called upon three times (March 1986, May 1989, June 1990). This last fact also denotes the weakness of the movement on a national level. Over the course of its existence, MAN proved itself more consistent in spreading propaganda through the publication of two bulletins, Vanguarda and Acção, also having the support of the skinzine Combate Branco e Vento do Norte. It is difficult to state how many supporters there were around the affiliate bases in the schools and neighbourhoods. At the beginning, there were some three dozen individuals, but the regular militants could reach up to 200 as an increasing number of people signed up from 1988 to 1990, although the new entrants made up for the frequent number of people who defected. In the first years of the movement’s

A new cycle in democracy 143 life (1985–1987), the few militants were organized in “action groups”, active in basic propaganda actions: putting up posters on walls and distributing pamphlets. From 1988, as the movement grew, the militants were organized in a more pyramid-like structure, on four levels: the movement’s friends, supporters of the journal, high rank candidates, and political cadres. This last level gave access to the leaders’ realm. The structure’s fragility, however, became clear at the time of police repression and the constitutional court’s prosecution. The decision of leader Paulo Henriques to freeze MAN’s activities in 1991 meant people stopped joining and many of its affiliates fled, worried about the consequences of the legal proceedings. MAN never went beyond the phase of youth movement. The presence of members over 30 years old in its ranks was always insignificant. More than 80% were between 15 and 25 years old and only 10% were older than 25. The oldest militants never represented any homogenous group of nationalist veterans, but individuals in contact with the group’s leader more than the movement itself, out of ideological affinities but without effective weight from a militant point of view. The lack of mature elite behind the movement was also clear on a leadership level. Among the 25 political cadres identified, only three were older than 30, the others anywhere from 16 to 21. The president/founder of MAN himself was 22 to 28 during his time heading the movement. With no veteran elites leading MAN, this was the root cause of the movement’s doctrinal rupture in relation to the Portuguese nationalism tradition. This young base of the militants was also reflected in their professional profile, with the majority of the activists in secondary school, only 15% of which were university students. This indicates a significant counter-tendency in comparison with the Portuguese radical right, in particular in the 1960s and 1970s. In those decades, the movements were composed by university students, which allowed the younger activists to get closer with political figures who were much older from a cultural and doctrinaire point of view. The core of MAN was not just students, but also young people with low qualifications (unspecialized workers, shopkeepers, office employees, state employees). Few were autonomous workers (computer programmers, journalists, merchants) or from the military. The average profile of a MAN affiliate, both for its leaders and militants, was low education level and low qualified employments. This social characteristic of MAN also fit in the groupuscular typology of the extreme right at the end of the 20th century (Kriesi 1999: 403, 408; Ignazi 2003: 155). In terms of territorial roots, MAN had another characteristic common to all the Portuguese extreme right: the movement was present in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, where 46% and 32% of its militants resided respectively. The militant groups outside of these areas were scant. In this comparison with the traditional extreme right, it noteworthy how insignificant MAN was in Coimbra, a city that always represented a fertile ground for the militancy of radical nationalism. This fact can be attributed to a lack of university militancy within MAN. Regarding the district of Lisbon, the most important centre of MAN was the one founded in the council of Amadora. In the capital, it is important to highlight

144  The far right during the consolidated democracy the important centre in the southern border of the Tejo River, in particular in the council of Almada (district of Setúbal). The figures from Almada joining the ranks of MAN in 1986–1987, along with even more coming in 1988–1990 allowing for a bigger centre for the movement, was important for two reasons. First, Almada, a zone that had traditionally been communist, proved to be a source of radical militancy at the end of the 1980s, as it had been in the 1960s, when many youths who lived there had contributed to the growth of the Movimento Jovem Portugal (MJP). Second, in the 1960s, the militants from Almada within MJP modified the social structure of the movement, bringing elements of the working class into an essentially student and bourgeoisie milieu. The same proved to be true at the end of the 1980s with the militants from Almada in MAN, as they came from the proletarian or sub-proletarian classes, exhibiting a certain tendency for the skinhead subculture (which represented the most renowned centre in Portugal). In other words, the militants from the southern margin triggered the process of the MAN moving closer to the neo-Nazi subculture. At the time of the constitutional court case, the attorney general of the Republic would point to this factor, that the leader of the skinheads from Almada joined the organization in 1987, as proof of the politicization strategy of the skinheads by the MAN. Regarding the district of Porto, the increase of MAN militancy began in 1989 when the core of skinheads from Matosinhos joined the MAN, producing within the movement the same effect that the group in Almada had on Lisbon. In 1989, MAN tried to increase its overall presence in the north of the country. In December, leader Paulo Henriques asked the leaders in the north to organize a dinner to promote the merging of MAN and the figures from the skinhead movement. The legal authorities considered this to be further proof of MAN contributing to the politicization of the skinheads. However, in reality, the meeting was a failure and led to the movement’s arrest in the region – so much so that in 1990 there was a sudden fall of applicants in the north, when still in Lisbon there was a small increase. As for the other districts in the country, the few entries to the movement were mainly in 1989 and 1990, when MAN was still the target of heated controversy in the national media. This would lead one to believe that the movement’s diffusion, although fleeting, in the Portuguese province was made easier by its involuntary spread through the media, rather than by any planned strategy from its political direction. It was not that the leaders of the MAN were not interested in amplifying the structure of their organization, as is clear, but they were completely incapable of doing so, this being attributable to the paralyzing centralism of its leader as well. In terms of political identity, the ethno-nationalism was central in MAN’s parable. The first official documents of the movement – the Manifesto (March 1985) and the 24 Pontos programáticos (June 1985) – did not present any explicit reference to the immigration phenomenon, nor the “racialist” identity battle. These two documents, however, did denounce the typical cultural substrate of Portuguese nationalism. First, it proclaimed people as an organic community and the State as the politically organized Nation. Universal order was the natural imperial

A new cycle in democracy 145 dimension of the nation, where “assimilation is not synonymous with bastardization” (point 20). Liberalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism were instruments of bourgeoisie domination, introduced by the 1789 Revolution. Democracy was a divisive tyranny of parties, whereas African nationalism served as instruments of North American and Soviet imperialism against Portugal. And finally, the new man, rooted in tradition, was the only path to salvation against modernity. Since MAN’s foundations, there were ominous signs within its publications of its evolution: in the first edition of the official bulletin Acção (1986), the opening article spoke of a “spiritual race” that it was necessary to preserve, along with the State and the nation. In the subscription form for the movement, reproduced in the newspaper, there were programmatic points of an ethno-nationalist nature like blocking immigration and the start of repatriation, the end of foreign aid, the principle of national preference, primarily in finding work for white Portuguese people. In the following edition of Acção, a definitive break with traditional Portuguese nationalism could be found, through its call to fight for the repatriation of all African and Asian immigrants as the only solution “for the survival of the nation, of the culture and identity of our people: a white and European people. This means to keep the body pure for the Portuguese nation” (Acção n°2, 1986: 1). The article denounced miscegenation, a consequence of massive immigration, leading to cultural and ethnic deformation and to Portugal’s disappearance, because for the radical nationalists, the future mixed-race inhabitants could never be called Portuguese. Truth be told, however, the ethno-nationalist discourse was not something completely new in democratic Portugal for the extreme right. Before MAN would fall off the map, some small groups in Porto, without any large audience, had supported racialist positions through its bulletins Ordem Nova (1978–1980) and Último Reduto (1983–1995), breaking apart from the comrades in Lisbon. These tendencies were favoured by the arrival of youths who had come back from Africa to Portugal, mainly from Mozambique, resistant to multi-racial nationalism still in vogue in the Metropole. For this reason, these radical factions’ publications were full of texts from the Ku-Klux-Klan, the neo-Nazi Spanish CEDADE, revisionists, and North American white supremacists. In these texts, one could read for the first time in the Portuguese extreme right affirmations such as: “we are racists. That is exactly why we defend our white race that runs the risk of disappearing” (Ordem Nova, n°6, 1980: 1). These were the pioneers for the publications which, in the second half of the 1980s, become instruments of self-organization and propaganda vehicles of the more extreme European right wing. The most emblematic of these publications was the newspaper Jovem Revolução that began to publish in September 1987 through the initiative of Júlio Prata Sequeira, a former member of CEDADE Portugal founded in 1980. A contemporary of MAN, the newspaper brought with it a national-revolutionary discourse, wary of the cooperation among nationalists for a white Europe, united and free from the USA-USSR stranglehold. The newspaper’s supporters were integrated in the European networks of the extreme right: they spread in Portugal the activities of the Italian Movimento Sociale Italiano, the French Front National,

146  The far right during the consolidated democracy the Spanish Coordenadora Estudiantes Nacional-Revolucionarios, the Russian Pamyat, Dutch Jongeren Front Nederland JFN, and the New European Order of Gaston-Armand Amaudruz. In the same year of its foundation, the newspaper supported the Manifesto for the European Nation, signed by European comrades from the Troisieme Voie and Forces Nouvelles (France), National Front (UK), Vlaams Blok (Belgium), Aktion Neue Recht (Austria), Le Rat Noir (Switzerland), Bases Autonomas (Spain), Bevara Averige Svenskt (Sweden), Euftheris Skepois (Greek), Nation Europa (RFA), Nordic Order (Norway), The Scorpion (UK), Vento del Nord (Italy), and Orientations (Belgium). Jovem Revolução was full of neo-Nazi references, dedicating much space to revisionist authors on their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories: the first number of the journal published the article “Suplemento história – Os judeus em Portugal”; the third was dedicated to the Argentinean economist Walter Beveraggi Allende. In the same way, various neo-Nazi ideologues were introduced from Spain (CEDADE), from Germany (Freiheitliche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei and Wiking Yugend), and North American supremacists (David Duke and the National Association for the Advancement of White People). The Jovem Revolução spread the most extreme of the European right media in Portugal. This included the Italian Avanguardia, the Belgian Revolution Européene and L’Assaut, the Spanish La Peste Negra, Mundo NS, and Revisión (from the Centro de Estudios Históricos Revisionistas Español – CEHRE), the Greek The Antidote, the French Annales d’Histoire Revisionist, the British Holocaust News, not to mention material from radical editors like the Spanish Ediciones Occidente, the Brazilian Editora Revisão, and the Argentinean Distribuidora IPIR. The director of Jovem Revolução gave much importance to spreading these editorials, so much so that he would be the founder of the Hugin publishing house, which, along with the Nova Arrancada, would represent the only two publishing houses of the radical milieu in the 1990s. The “racialist” evolution of MAN may also be attributed to the sociological change experienced during the 1980s when Portugal started registering a rising number of foreigners. The official number of legal foreign residents rose from just over 50,000 in 1980 to a little more than 100,000 by 1990, with a stable population of around 10 million inhabitants. Although this percentage was one of the lowest in Western Europe, its concentration was in the metropolitan areas of the two largest cities (Lisbon and Porto) with a rise of slums and neighbourhoods for resettlement, which had an impact on the extreme right’s militancy (Pinto 1995: 123). In this sense, the testimonies of the Portuguese skinheads of the 1980s and 1990s coming from Lisbon’s peripheral neighbourhoods converged here. They identified the racial issue as the main factor in the politicization and radicalization of some gangs of young white men as a reaction to the formation of young Afro-descendant gangs. This radicalization developed in the absence of extreme right organizations which had disappeared from the political scene with the end of the transition. As there was no driving organizing centre of militancy and doctrinal training, this meant that the young nationalists sought out their own political identity in

A new cycle in democracy 147 foreign radical organizations whose activism was more attractive in comparison to the desolate situation of the traditional Portuguese milieu. In this sense, new urban tribes started to become fashionable from the early 1980s on, in particular the skinhead one, and the musical production of the international circuit Rock Against Communism (RAC) thanks to the vector of Portuguese emigrants abroad. This circulation resulted in the creation of several musical groups of the Oi! genre like the Maravilhas de Portugal, the Guarda de Ferro, and later, the LusitanOi, whose self-produced cassettes and skinzines functioned as catalysts for the young nationalists (Marchi and Zúquete 2016: 56–57). MAN became a centre of spreading propaganda on like-minded European movements, mainly from the Anglo-Saxon area, where messages of white pride and racial battles could be found in droves. MAN found political compass in these organizations abroad that traditional local radicalism was not able to offer to them, whether due to its organizational decline and its persistence in univeralist nationalism, impenetrable to the openly ethno-nationalist wording. As such, MAN’s leader made a concerted effort in creating connections with foreign comrades, namely with English from the National Front, the British National Party and the International Third Position. The Portuguese movement even got some financial support from the German Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) and worked with the Spanish Terceira Via Solidarista, Frente Sindicalista de Juventud, and the French from Troisiéme Voie. With these last two groups, MAN signed the “Manifesto for the European Nation” in 1987. In 1988, Paulo Henriques created the “Grupo Terceira Via” to align MAN with the European centres of the Third Position network, active in the ethnic battle to defend Europe against immigration. That the ethno-nationalist theorization in the Portuguese extreme right was something rather new could be seen in MAN’s simplistic discourse, inconsistent in its approach to immigration due to its faulty ideological substrate. It was only in 1990 that they attempted to systematize their identitarian discourse and antiimmigrant politics with the publication of three editions of the newspaper Ofensiva. The newspaper was limited in scope, reproducing slogans against the corrupt political class, the traitors of 25 April, North American imperialism, Zionism, and spreading classic battles of the European extreme right against immigration (in its biological and social aspects), as well as against multi-culturalism. The nature of these articles was, however, superficial, so much so that the most interesting article of the newspaper’s first edition was the translation of a German text on the “right to difference” that condemned the cultural imperialism of the West for destroying the African identities and supported the right of each people – including the white European – to defend themselves against cultural genocide. Indeed, at the time of the Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional – TC) lawsuit in 1993, a key figure in MAN confirmed that the movement looked for its concept of “racialism” in foreign organizations, without, however, having ever internally debated these subjects. MAN assimilated as such the ideological shift from white supremacist racism to identitarian differencialism as reached by the European extreme right at the end of the 20th century (Zúquete 2011: 668).

148  The far right during the consolidated democracy Whereas racism postulated the superiority and dominance of one race over others, “racialism” advocated for the right of each people to have their space to themselves, free from being forced to emigrate to carry out cheap labour. In this sense, MAN advocated for the repatriation of immigrants not out of xenophobia but to defend all people from being exploited and having their identities destroyed. In this aspect, when before the Constitutional Court, another militant from MAN claimed to never have been racist, but to have always been made deeply aware that any nation is defined by its differences from others, and that the massification of contemporary society worked only for capitalist elites. As such, the integration policy implemented in Portugal was racist for uprooting immigrants and treating them in a paternalistic and neo-colonial way, with their compulsory education rooted in Portuguese culture. These policies denied minorities the right to their cultural historic identity and relegated immigrants to lowly jobs. The testimony revealed traces of the traditional Portuguese nationalism among some of MAN’s militants: when the judge asked if people of African descent that identify with Portuguese culture could be considered Portuguese, the person responded: Unfortunately, there is more Portuguese in black people that fought for the Portuguese flag than the white cowards that betrayed us on 25 April 1974. (Marchi 2015: 438) In this aspect, however, there was not a clear and unequivocal position within MAN. The militants from the FNNM, for example, claimed that Afro-­descendants were Portuguese as a result of the old imperial ties between them. On the contrary, MAN’s militants only saw eye-to-eye on condemning immigration, but the consensus waned on the ethnic identification of the Portuguese man. The skinhead component of MAN rejected any possibility that a foreigner could be considered Portuguese just by obtaining nationality and accepting the country’s culture. For MAN’s militants leaning towards monarchical nationalism, though, differences in identity did not impede cultural contaminations. In other words, an Afro­-descendant who had been raised since childhood in Portuguese cultural parameters could be considered Portuguese. In spite of how important the cultural factor was over the ethnic one, the non-skinhead militants accepted physical crossbreeding as an individual choice and not as a mass phenomenon as ethnic chaos entailed the rupture of the community’s ties. These finely nuanced positions are the result of the imperial myth of a pluricontinental and multi-racial empire having gone to the wayside for the younger generations, as well as the lack of any doctrinal guide. Rodrigo Emílio, a veteran of the radical milieu, and founder of MAP during the transition, promoted an attempt to fix this fracture with the old extreme right and to provide MAN with a more solid doctrinal foundation. He collaborated in MAN’s publications and taught some of the organization’s militants, albeit not officially becoming the movement’s mentor. His contributions in ethno-­nationalist issues seemed to be a personal attempt to get closer to the sensibilities of the radical youth in the

A new cycle in democracy 149 1980s as opposed to passing down the doctrinal heritage of Portuguese radical right’s veterans. In an article from 1988, published in Acção and aimed at MAN’s supporters, Rodrigo Emílio explained how the imperial European projection of Portugal in the tropics had been the heart of his generation’s militancy in the 1960s. This was also the main cause to which he subordinated his entire perception of race. In this sense, 25 April 1974 had radically changed the rules of the game: with the fall of the Empire, the pluri-continental and multi-racial integrationism no longer made any sense. Now, the battle had to be in defence of the Portuguese genius, understood as a mix of blood and earth. This subject was later delved into more deeply by the article “Em defesa da mocidade nacionalista” (“In defence of nationalist youth”), but was never published in Ofensiva out of fear of what the judicial repercussions could be. In the text, Rodrigo Emílio laid out the difference between the traditional Portuguese extreme right’s concept of race and that of MAN’s. The old extreme right’s view corresponded to the “Lusíada race” concept, with faces of many kinds and colours, all included within the same pluri-continental borders of the Empire, imbued of the same ideal and towards the same integrationist project. MAN rather saw the “Lusíada race” concept as restricted to the geographical limits of Portugal on European territory. Due to decolonization, this legitimized the principle of “black power” in Africa, which, according to Emílio, affirmed the parallel legitimacy of “white power” for Europe, through the ethnonationalist battle of the extreme right. Otherwise, the intellectual nationalist emphasized how European sovereignty of Portugal in Africa had been a civilizing project, whereas African presence in Europe was devoid of any civilizational project and resulted in merely a transfer of sovereignty to the Marxist ideology of Negritude. This attempt to link universalist nationalism with ethno-nationalism was unable to mend the inter-generational fracture. The veterans generally expressed disdain for MAN, as well was represented in a text written by a former leader of the Movimento Nacionalista (MN) from the 1970s, published in the weekly O Diabo in 1988: There are fringe groups on the rise that confuse socially advanced revolutionary nationalism that is politically undogmatic and decidedly anti-racist with white supremacists like Le Pen, the Klan, and others; a Portuguese nationalist has to understand that Portugal was made by overcoming the racial barrier and not by building up an artificial one. (Marchi 2015: 441) The radical youth in MAN were not less hard-hitting in their critique of the veterans. Some of them considered the imperial golden age to be harmful for Portugal’s racial identity and openly accused the traditional radical right wing: These men, in order to achieve their goal, were ready to promote their socalled “integration”, a shameful word that ended up destroying an entire

150  The far right during the consolidated democracy people. This Portuguese empire was only in name as it is obvious that when you mix ten million white Portuguese with 19 million black people the result will be the assassination of the Luso race. The future Portuguese would be a caricature of his ancestors, a sad product of an unnatural crossbreeding. Anyone who would salute the Portuguese flag would be a hybrid sub-race of black and mixed folk, making us lose our noble Portuguese culture and blood forever. Nothing could befit better the international crypto-Judaism which nothing more seeks than the destruction of the white race. (Marchi 2015: 441) Indeed, several militants claimed that joining MAN was not for any connection to Salazar’s regime but out of necessity to defend European Portugal. Many stated that if they had lived during the New State they would have rejected colonialism by considering it as just a way of exploiting people, muffled by universalist propaganda in much the same way as the current democratic regime. Therefore, the resistance of immigrants to integrate in Portuguese society was an indicator of the multi-racial model having failed, but also a just rebellion against exploitation, uprooting, homogenization, and the denial for the right to be different. MAN’s notoriety did not derive from ideological innovation in the Portuguese extreme right, but rather of less flattering facts on crime news from its militants. On the eve of 28 October 1989, a group of skinheads from Almada got involved in a scuffle with militants from the Partido Socialista Revolucionário (PSR) in Lisbon in front of the party’s extreme left headquarters, resulting in the death of the party’s cadre José Carvalho from stab wounds. Following the homicide and the prison sentences, in November 1989, the authorities began a general investigation into the radical right milieu, with the goal in clearing up the skinhead phenomenon in Portugal and their connections with MAN. The investigations finished in the spring of 1990, and proved MAN’s growth due to its connections with the skinhead movement. This fact opened up a new investigation on MAN at the start of 1991 with house raids and interrogatories to the leaders of the movement. This second investigation proved the presence of skinheads in MAN but not the existence of a project within the group to organize the Portuguese skinhead movement. In spite of this, in July 1991, the Constitutional Court oversaw the process in MAN’s trial under national law on the extinction of organizations that fit the profile of fascist ideologies (Art. 46, n.°4 of the Portuguese Constitution, of Law n.°64/78 and of Art.10° of the Constitutional Court’s Law). In the framework of this trial, MAN was accused of setting off a revolutionary process to overthrow the political constitutional system and restore, in Portugal, a Nationalist State. The trial went from September 1993 to January 1994. In this period, the movement had been officially self-disbanded three years before. The TC’s conclusions underlined some of the movement’s characteristics that were in line with a fascist organization’s typology: ultra-nationalism, anti-democratic ideology, and apology for regimes and personalities from the historic fascist movements. However, it was impossible to prove the implicitly violent practice of the movement, which

A new cycle in democracy 151 pushed the TC to ponder whether these traits all together or singularly could qualify MAN as fascist. Considering the juridic-constitutional issue, the Court recognized that the movement’s self-dissolution did not require any further measure to do the same. In truth as the legal consequences for those who would have been implicated would have been duly heavy, the TC found a way to not lay them down with a sentence, as that would have meant several years in prison. With MAN’s disappearance at the start of the 1990s following the police investigations, trials, and media pressure, this reduced the extreme right once again to disorganization and youth spontaneism. This crossing of the desert coincided with a decade of Portuguese democracy being consolidated under the alternance in government between the PSD and PS, with the third government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva (1991–1995) and with António Guterres twice (1995–2002). This was greeted favourably by Portugal’s further integration in the European Union and the positive effects this had on their economy (Magone 2000: 135–136). In this climate, veterans’ initiatives in the nationalist milieu to reorganize the radical milieu in the 1990s did not have a wide-reaching effect. In 1991, António da Cruz Rodrigues created the Olivera Salazar Groups for Studies (Núcleo de Estudos Oliveira Salazar – NEOS) that allegedly brought together some hundreds of admirers of the New State’s founder. More promising, however, was the editorial project from the newspaper Agora! being launched in 1993. The newspaper had 14 numbers up to 1996 with its editorial staff composed of António da Cruz Rodrigues, Manuel Maria Múrias, Rodrigo Emílio, and MAN’s former leader, Paulo Henriques. Agora! showed a nostalgic nationalism for Salazar’s time, the African Empire, along with the revanchism against decolonization, partitocracy, North American imperialism, and European integration. The newspaper was largely focused on domestic politics and cultural matters, but it also spread classic European extreme right figures like Julius Evola, Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, José António Primo de Rivera, and Jean Ousset. This showed how the radical right’s themes had stagnated over the last 30 years. On an international level, Agora! supported the French Front National, Belgian Vlaams Blok, the Austrian Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPO), and the Movimento Sociale Italiano. In the last two cases, it is worth pointing out the enthusiasm towards FPO’s radicalization through the rising figure of Jörg Haider and the refusal of the post-fascist evolution of the MSI in the Alleanza Nazionale as promoted by Gianfranco Fini (Agora! n°11, 1995: 7). António da Cruz Rodrigues launched two new organizational projects in 1996, with his base group in Agora! and with his sights set on giving new life to Portuguese nationalism. These projects were the National Alliance movement (Aliança Nacional) and the publishing house Nova Arrancada. Between 1997 and 1998, the Aliança Nacional, in collaboration with lesser organizations like the Nationalist Founding Action (Acção Fundacional Nacionalista – AFN) from Porto, tried to create a political party to bring together the radical right, but it was not even able to assemble the 5,000 signatures required by law (Costa 2011: 773). How stale and scantly organized these initiatives were that the generations of the 1960s and 1970s stood behind could also explain how the overwhelming

152  The far right during the consolidated democracy majority of the nationalist youth remained in the skinhead counter-culture over the course of the 1990s. From an organizational point of view, among the youth, only the ephemeral National Defence Front (Frente de Defesa Nacional – FDN) marked the first half of the decade. FDN was a split from MAN, led by militants dissenting from the group’s self-dissolution. Not having a strong base did not, however, impede the skinhead milieu from growing, also due to a new generation that entered political activism at the end of the 1980s (Almeida 2014: 210). This world of nationalist youth, neo-Nazi skinheads, and football fans, mainly from Benfica, Sporting, and Porto clubs, caught the attention of the national and international media on 10 June 1995. After a typical commemorative dinner for Portugal’s national day, dozens of skinheads met in Bairro Alto, the heart of Lisbon’s night life, and started fights, mainly against Afro-descendants. The scale of violence resulted in a dozen wounded, culminating in the beating and ultimate murder of Alcindo Monteiro, a Portuguese citizen of Cape Verde origin. Several nationalist militants were detained, and the trial that followed, in 1997, resulted in 10 skinheads being condemned to prison of 16 and 17 years, with another six who were involved being sentenced to anywhere from 2 to 13 years. These were some of the toughest punishments for hate crimes committed by extreme right militants and a heavy blow to the nationalist milieu. These sentences resulted in further undoing an organizational network that was already thinly put together. Until the end of the 1990s, few militants remained active, usually in small groups like the White Pride (Orgulho Branco), Lusitanian Order (Ordem Lusa), Aryan Brotherhood (Irmandade Ariana), or dedicated in ephemeral bulletin of limited circulations, like Ler e Pensar (1997–1998) and Justiça & Liberdade (1998). All these fringe groups were of a neo-Nazi mindframe, concerned with themes like racial combat, defending freedom of speech, historical revisionism, and connections with radical foreign groups: international skinhead networks like Blood and Honour and Hammerskin Nation, the North American newspaper The Truth At Last and the Danish neo-Nazi radio programme Radio Oasen. Despite their irrelevance and marginal status, at the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century, these Portuguese extreme right fringe groups (the nostalgic Salazarists, the national-revolutionaries from the transition, and the racialist one of the 1990s) were able to join forces and create a project. Notably, up to now, it has been the longest lasting in this political spectrum: the National Renewal Party (Partido Nacional Renovador – PNR).

Notes 1 The air disaster is still shrouded in mystery. After several media investigations, lawsuits and parliamentary commissions of enquiry, the hypothesis of a terrorist act is still present in the Portuguese public debate. 2 In 2016 the movement Nova Portugalidade (NP) was founded, taking up the ideological baton from NM. The movement was led by a former young activist from CDS and was backed by the former leader of FNNM Miguel Castelo Branco. The NP claimed its doctrinal specificity with respect to the current Portuguese extreme right rejecting any

A new cycle in democracy 153 kind of ethno-nationalism and supporting the universalist nationalism of the Lusophone tradition. It has been unable, however, to avoid its blending with the extreme right by the media. In March 2017 the movement was involved in polemic due to their organization of a speech on populism by Jaime Nogueira Pinto at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The protests by the left-wing student organizations and the support of the extreme right groups spotlighted the NP on the media as just another new actor of the radical milieu.

Bibliography Almeida, Fábio Chang de (2014). A direita radical no Portugual democrático: os rumos após a revolução dos cravos (1974–2012), PhD Thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, Programa de Pós-Graduação em História. Bale, Jeffery (2002), “National revolutionary groupuscules and the resourgence of leftwing fascism: The case of France’s Nouvelle Résistance”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 36(3): 24–49. Bale, Jeffery (2006). “Fascism and neo-fascism: Ideology and ‘groupuscularity’ ”, in Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, Andreas Umland, eds., Fascism Past and Present, West and East – An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right (Studgard: Verlag), 78–86. Costa, José Mourão da (2011). “O Partido Nacional Renovador: A nova extrema-direita na democracia portuguesa”, in Análise Social, 46(201): 765–787. Davies, Peter and Lynch, Derek (2005). The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right (London, New York: Routledge). Griffin, Roger (2003). “From slime mould to rhizome: An introduction to the groupuscolar right”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 37(1): 27–50. Ignazi, Piero (2003). Extreme Right Party in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press). Kaplan, Jeffrey and Weinberg, Leonard (1998). The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Kriesi, Hanspeter (1999). “Movements of the left, movements of the right: Putting the mobilization of two new types of social movements into political context”, in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John D. Stephens, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 398–423. Magone, José (2000). “The transformation of the Portuguese political system: European regional policy and democratization in a small EU member state”, in South European Society and Politics, 5(2): 119–140. Marchi, Riccardo (2010). “At the roots of the new right-wing extremism in Portugal: The national action movement (1985–1991)”, in Totalitarian Movements & Political Religions, 11(1): 47–66. Marchi, Riccardo (2015). “A identidade de Portugal no discurso da direita radical: do multirracialismo ao etnonacionalismo”, in Estudos Ibero-Americanos, 41(2): 425–445. Marchi, Riccardo and Zúquete, José Pedro (2016). “The other side of protest music: The extreme-right and skinhead culture in democratic Portugal (1974–2015)”, in JOMEC Journal, 9: 47–69. Merkl Peter H. and Weinberg Leonard (2013). The Revival of Right Wing Extremism in the Nineties (London, New York: Routledge). Mudde, Cas (2000). The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

154  The far right during the consolidated democracy Pinto, António Costa (1995). “The radical right in contemporary Portugal”, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan, eds., The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (New York: Longman). Pinto, António Costa (2008). “The legacy of the authoritarian past in Portugal’s democratisation, 1974–6”, in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9(2–3): 265–291. Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (2000), Visto da Direita. 20 anos de Futuro Presente (Lisbon: Huguin). Pinto, Jaime Nogueira (1996), A Direita e as Direitas (Carnaxide: Difel). Zúquete, José Pedro (2011). “The flight of the eagle: The charismatic leadership of Sá Carneiro in Portugal’s transition to democracy”, in The Leadership Quarterly, 22(2): 295–306.

8 The new party strategy at the dawn of the new millennium (1999–2015)

The end of the 20th century opened a fourth phase of history for the extreme right in Portuguese democracy with the founding of the National Renewal Party (Partido Nacional Renovador – PNR). In comparison to other actors of the Portuguese extreme right, the PNR can be distinguished by its structural solidity and longevity over its, at the time of writing, 18 years of existence. As such, the party has received more attention from scientific literature (Zúquete 2007; Costa 2011; Almeida 2012). In 1999, the difficulties that the promoters of Aliança Nacional faced when trying to legalize a political party at the end of the 1990s were overcome by the entering of the nationalist militants in a party already registered in the Constitutional Court: the Democratic Renewal Party (Partido Renovador Democrático – PRD). The PRD was founded in 1985 by supporters of president of the Republic Ramalho Eanes. In the same year, they managed to elect 45 deputies in the legislative elections. Such success in a new party was unheard of in Portuguese democracy, but it proved to be fleeting: in the 1987 elections, a mere seven deputies were elected and it disappeared from parliament in 1991. As such, in the 1990s, the project was already in decline, and the party was inactive. In 1999, the nationalists joined the PRD, making a deal with the party’s former leaders by paying off their debts and leading the party themselves. Afterwards, they redesigned the PRD: António da Cruz Rodrigues was nominated president, the party leadership was made up of extreme right militants, the name of the party was changed to Partido Nacional Renovador (PNR) and its symbol was a flame, in line with other, like-minded European parties, like the former Movimento Sociale Italiano and the French Front National. In the first years of PNR’s existence as a party, there was already friction between president António da Cruz Rodrigues and the high cadres of the party, as they were critical of his centralizing leadership. The confrontation worsened and led to the removal of Cruz Rodrigues who did not accept the diminution of his powers by being given the less important role of coordinator. As such, former leading figure of MAN and AN, Paulo Rodrigues, took on the role of president, who promoted the frontist strategy open to all nationalist currents, including the racialist ones ostracized by Cruz Rodrigues. Finally, in 2005, the presidency was taken over by José Pinto Coelho, with his origin in the ranks of nationalist

156  The far right during the consolidated democracy militancy of the 1970s and 1980s. Up to the present day, he has become the public face of PNR and its political line. The new leadership took it upon themselves from the very start in rejuvenating the image of Portuguese nationalism, having its agenda be more in line with European populism. As such, the radical anti-system discourse was accompanied by the formal acceptance of democratic rules and the anti-immigration propaganda, which had already been present during Cruz Rodrigues’ leadership, but which now was paired with anti-Islamism. Pinto Coelho’s goal was to reproduce the practices and ideas of the post-industrial new extreme right parties and have their success be replicated in Portugal too. In practical terms, at the very beginning the new leadership has had as its main objective to at least get one parliamentary seat in 2009. It was the heart of the party’s newly laid out foundation: strengthen its territorial roots, make parliamentary gains, and win over more support. Yet, it was in how to get new supporters that the PNR seriously undermined this goal in Pinto Coelho’s first phase as president: the decision of handing over mobilization efforts of the militant basis to figures in the skinhead movement. In particular it was Mário Machado who had an important role in this process. He had been a member of the skinhead movement since the 1990s, as well as founder of the Irmandade Ariana in 2000 and leader since 2005 of Portugal HammerSkin (PHS), the Portuguese section of the transnational neo-Nazi network. To find his way in the PNR, in 2004, Machado released the Forum Nacional on the Internet. The platform was accessed by hundreds of nationalists all over the country, paving the way for the creation of the National Front (Frente Nacional), a cartel of organizations and individuals from the extreme right who were willing to expand PNR’s militant base. As such, PHS became key in the PNR’s activist base, with a seat for the FN being reserved in the party’s steering bodies. However, the simultaneous implication of the skinhead group engaging in violent activity typical of their subculture resulted in the PNR getting involved in a judicial operation on 18 April 2007 against the neo-Nazi milieu. Thirty-one figures of PHS were detained, all connected with the PNR, which had heavy repercussions on the party, particularly in the media. As such, despite their attempt to modernize themselves, the party has remained lodged in an area that political science defines as the old extreme right or traditional extreme right (Ignazi 2003). The PNR does not recognize the values of the Carnation Revolution on 25 April 1974 nor those of the demo-liberal regime put in place after the revolutionary period of 1974–1975 and with the 1982 constitutional revision. The party does not copy the revanchist discourse of the old Salazarism, but it still holds the figure of Salazar in high esteem as the greatest Portuguese statesman of the 20th century. Furthermore, they recognize the authoritarian regime’s contribution in defending national interests and traditional values. In this aspect, the party’s militant base expresses little or no satisfaction with how Portuguese democracy works. They believe that the current government is a partitocracy controlled since its foundation by the same political elite. The mistrust of nationalist militants has extended to all of the country’s most important institutions: the parliament, the government, the highest offices in the State, and

The new party strategy 157 all parties who had parliamentary seats from the right (CDS-PP) to the extreme left (Bloco de Esquerda). The only institution that got some general consensus is the Catholic Church, considering it to be the ultimate beacon for defending traditional values, although Pope Francis’ opening to immigration and Islam garnered some heavy backlash from the party. The media are, however, seen with particular repulsion, accused of being at the service of the “System”, and boycotting the party and the nationalist milieu in general. PNR’s anti-system stance and alignment with right-wing European populism can be surmised from its rejection of the right/left dichotomy in favour of a national identity unconcerned with partitocracy’s diatribes. From a politically strategic point of view, the first years under president Pinto Coelho were dedicated in gaining further media visibility, with provocative initiatives that were able to attract the interest of national media. This also was needed to make up for the lack of charismatic figures in the Portuguese extreme right, that in other European countries serve as added value for parties often marginalized by the media. These campaigns to make waves in the media had, at first, a certain level of success, as they approached subjects uncommon in the Portuguese political agenda. The main themes explored were the opposition to Turkey joining the EU, the right to adoption, and getting married for same-sex couples (which the PNR considered against nature – they were also against any rights granted by law for civil unions), the opposition to abortion, as PNR regularly participates in initiatives by Catholic pro-life social movements. Finally, they were against the growing number of Brazilian immigrants in the first years of the 2000s and the security threats faced by the Portuguese community in South Africa. The most striking issue for the media was, however, the PNR opposition to immigration and the model of the multi-cultural society. In the PNR’s first few years, the president Cruz Rodrigues, despite his background in multi-racial nationalism, decided to invest in an anti-immigration agenda. Under Pinto Coelho, the party fully developed the ethno-nationalist discourse that had been rising in the Portuguese extreme right since the 1980s. At present, the party replicates the classic discourse of the European extreme right and considers immigration to be an invasion, dangerous for national identity, to safety, work, and local commerce. The PNR was opposed to the reform on the nationality law put forth in 2006 by José Socrates’ socialist government that reinforced the principle of “jus soli” as opposed to “jus sanguinis”. The same principle appears in the PNR opposition to extending Portuguese nationality to Afro-descendent citizens, more accurately, to extend citizenship to those born in Portugal from immigrant parents from the former African colonies at the end of the 1970s and start of 1980s. The party wishes to abolish the Schengen Treaty, reduce immigration to zero, get rid of “family reunion” (the right for family members of immigrants to join them in Portugal), introduce the principle of reversibility (immediately ban anyone guilty of a crime and repatriate immigrants unable to sustain themselves economically), block subsidies to poor immigrants, and stop funding to associations that provided support to immigrants. These

158  The far right during the consolidated democracy measures are accompanied by requests for more funding for homeland security policy as well as lowering the criminal age from 16 to 14 years old. This last measure is connected to the party’s campaigns denouncing the micro-criminality connected to ethnic minorities. Lately, however, the PNR has dedicated itself to campaigns against the arrival of refugees in Portugal, joining the common battle of European extreme right movements. In addition to these measures against immigration, the PNR stands for the principle of national preference, according to which the need to defend the rights of native-born citizens became all the more urgent. This is so as the migratory phenomenon is becoming a process of demographic replacement, the only result of which being the deformation of Portugal’s ethno-cultural traits. To avoid accusations of racism and xenophobia, the PNR uses populist discourse according to which the anti-immigration campaigns simply reflect the will of the people against the impositions of technocrats in Brussels, guilty of exposing the European Union’s member states to alien invasions. Similar to many of their likeminded European peers, PNR claims to not be against the immigrant as a person, but against immigration as a phenomenon, determined by global capitalism, which also helps lead to the most serious issues among second and third generation foreigners: criminal and terrorist networks. With their stance on these issues, the PNR got the attention of the national media before the police operation in 2007, mainly due to three initiatives: the 2005 protest and two billboards placed in Lisbon’s city centre in 2007 and 2008. Regarding the protest, the PNR took advantage of a small-scale crime that took place on Lisbon’s seaside and was blown out of proportion by the media. Through the Frente Nacional, the PNR were able to mobilize some hundreds of people against multi-racial society and criminality in a parade that was the most participated in and media visible organized by the extreme right since the end of the democratic transitional period. This was, however, one-off and made easier by the alarm that sounded off through social media. Interestingly, a similar protest was organized in 2010 due to a similar event, but there was no interest in the political rally in terms of participation. Regarding the billboards, the party bought public space in an important arterial road of the Portuguese capital, erecting clearly xenophobic posters: the first inviting immigrants to leave Portugal and go back to their country of origin; the second utilized the controversial image of the Swiss Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) whereby white sheep push the black sheep out of national territory. Both of these events sparked different reactions from Portuguese opinion makers: the City Hall of Lisbon called for a removal warrant, which led some renowned Portuguese analysts to sympathize with the party in the name of freedom of speech for all legally recognized political forces, and, subsequently, ensured media favourable coverage for PNR. As for inviting immigrants to leave the country, the campaign was the target of sarcasm of a famous Portuguese comic group that copied the xenophobic billboard with an identical one, but with an opposite meaning, ironically ridiculing the extreme right’s message and leader. Both of these events showed how institutional repression against the legal political activity of

The new party strategy 159 the extreme right offered the PNR a chance to present themselves as victims and achieve some solidarity, whereas the sarcasm against some of their activities left the party incapable to react, becoming the object of public ridicule. In general terms, the media campaigns on the subject of immigration that the party carried out under the lead of Pinto Coelho let the PNR achieved notoriety on a national level. But this did not guarantee the substantial consolidation they expected in terms of militancy or territorial roots. Since the start of the economic crisis, the party slightly changed its political strategy. In 2011, after Troika intervention in Portugal, which was made up of the IMF, ECB, and European Commission, the PNR centred its initiatives on the subject of the bankruptcy caused by the political class on 25 April and the dangers of globalization. In comparison with their anti-immigration campaigns, however, the PNR did not succeed as much in their provocations against the Troika, losing out on an opportunity that arose from the financial bailout asked for by Socrates’ socialist government and managed by the right-wing government of Pedro Passos Coelho. As such, these subjects that were less susceptible to accusations of racism and at the same time struck closest to the populist sentiments of protest existing in Portugal did not bring clear advantage to the party whose image in the public eye continued to be extremist and politically of little appeal. Another key issue for PNR in addition to anti-immigration is Europe. In all three electoral campaigns for the European elections (2004, 2009, and 2014), the party spoke out against the hazards of the European Union for Portugal, from both a national and international point of view. In a national level, ever since the beginning of the transition to democracy, the extreme right had traditionally been Eurosceptic. They blamed the leading parties in parliament (PS, PSD, and CDS) for being responsible for the process to have Portugal join the EEC which finished in 1986. For the extreme right, joining the EEC condemned Portugal to be reliant on subsidies from Brussels and to be subject to EU directives, destroying key sectors of the national economy (agriculture, fishing, maritime commerce) and devastating the environment with useless infrastructure programs (building highways and the construction industry boom). The most serious consequences of joining the EU – increased corruption and clientelism in managing public funds and the loss of purchase power for Portuguese people with the implementation of the Euro – got even worse in 2011 with the suspension of national sovereignty to benefit from the financial bailout controlled by the Troika. The Portuguese extreme right also uses the populist claim of betraying the people’s will in their case against the European building process: in the three fundamental stages of this process (joining EEC in 1986, the Economic and Monetary Union in 1998, and the Treaty of Lisbon in 2007) the governments always avoided consulting the people. For PNR, the Portuguese rulers followed in the footsteps of European partners that sent off national referendums with anti-European success, in an anti-democratic attitude of the European elites against their respective people. On an institutional level, the Portuguese extreme right refuses the federalist model for Europe out of cultural and geopolitical reasons. Regarding the cultural

160  The far right during the consolidated democracy reasons, PNR’s nationalism considers the Fatherland as the supreme value. This value is perfectly safeguarded by bilateral relations among independent States, but it is threatened by any supranational structure, mainly one like the EU that is a step in the direction of a global government in the debris of national distinctness. For the extreme right, the alternative to European integration is full national sovereignty with multi-lateral agreements, mainly of an economic character, with other European states, with the common objective to promote the continent’s competitiveness in global markets. The extreme right always maintains a clear distinction between the European Union and Europe. Europe is recognized as a natural dimension of Portugal, with its historical and cultural heritage, rooted in the apogee of the Catholic occident. On the contrary, the EU is considered a technocratic superstructure at the service of neo-liberal globalization and of global progressive forces. This adherence to a well-defined European identity allows the Portuguese extreme right to spread anti-Islamic messages typical of others in Europe. To note as well is that the extreme right by now is free from its former Euro-African fascination that typified traditional Portuguese nationalism. In particular, the PNR considers its opposition to Turkey entering the EU a step in the battle against anti-European policies encouraged by the USA to create in Europe dangerous Muslim enclaves, as had happened with recognizing Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo. Different from other parties of the new European extreme right, the PNR is openly antiAmerican, denouncing Europe’s pledge to the USA, mainly regarding armed forces from European countries participating in imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. That is why the PNR so bitterly criticizes Portugal’s participation in NATO, considering it an organization that had acted like a beacon against Sovietic communism in the Cold War, but today was merely an instrument of Zionist and North American control. The party requests that Portugal leaves NATO and resumes its military sovereignty. In spite of its isolationist tones, the PNR recognizes how pernicious and unrealistic it would be for the country to immediately leave international organizations. In its electoral campaigns, it prefers to speak of a gradual and negotiated exit. However, it asks for substantial modifications in public policies in at least three ways: confront the unfair competition suffered by Portuguese workers due to the liberalization of the international labour market; allocate more resources to nativeborn families through reducing expenses in support programs for immigrants in Portugal; increase the birth rate and lower the death rate of native European populations. To reach these goals, the PNR already has a long rooted tradition in working with other nationalist parties in Europe, with or without seats in the European parliament. An example of this collaboration is when PNR participated in 2009 and 2010 for the creation of the Alliance of European National Movements (AENM) and the European Alliance for Freedom (EAF) with radical parties like the Hungarian Jobbik, Italian Fiamma Tricolore, British National Party, and the Swiss National Democrats (Zúquete 2015: 76). On State reform, the PNR is less clear in its discourse in comparison to other key issues on their agenda. In particular there is a clear divergence between how

The new party strategy 161 radical their criticism of the system is and the weakness of the party’s proposed reform. Within its critique, the PNR uses all the keywords of the protest and antisystem populism: corruption of the parties in power and lobbyists; the need for a judicial revolution like the one that led to the fall of the First Republic in Italy; clientelism and waste of public money on local administrations, those also controlled by the same parties in the government; and the politicization of the judiciary that took the right for the people to have functional and equal justice. The populist discourse is particularly evident during the electoral campaigns when the PNR hardens its anti-elitist line against all of the parties that ruled the country. Among them, the party of the Portuguese moderate right, CDS-PP, is accused of being complicit in the government turnover during the 40 years of democracy between the two centrist parties (PS and PSD) with whom they governed in coalition. The PNR try to gain credit as an anti-system party capable of winning over an electorate that is still frozen in absenteeism, aiming to avoid the pitfall of the useful vote that had always been handed over to the moderate right, even from a significant amount of people who were open to more radical proposals, especially regarding immigration, security, and Europe. Indeed, CDS-PP was always aware of their ability in attracting the right-wing voters. In particular, Paulo Portas’ CDS long leadership from 1998 to 2016 radicalized the party’s centrist discourse on controversial matters during electoral campaigns or during periods in parliamentary opposition. The PNR’s marginality, however, cannot be attributed to CDS-PP’s strategy, seeing as their discourse has been strongly moderated since 2016 under new leader Assunção Cristas, which has not benefited the nationalist party. Regarding its reformist proposal, PNR’s agenda is characterized by a certain hybridism between statism and liberalization. In this sense, the party follows a strategy that is somewhat different from the clearly neo-liberal nature of many of the more successful formations of the post-industrial new extreme right (Kitschelt 1995: 2–3; Betz 2003: 81). The PNR accuses the incumbent government of having created a State like a totalitarian leviathan that sought out more and more resources from its citizens in exchange for increasingly fewer and worse services. The party calls for the modernization of the State by cutting its public debt, assuring that the welfare state would continue to exist and reducing civil servants without increasing the retirement age. For the private sector, the party calls for less taxation, a more just redistribution of wealth, and developing traditional small commerce, threatened by excessive fiscalization. It refuses total market liberalization as well as precarious work and it defends the role of the State as a price regulator of primary goods, although they are opposed to drastic interventionist measures like nationalizing the bank sector. The party generally approves of a public-private co-participation for the promotion of the national economy. At the same time, it is always opposed to the large-scale public works (high-speed train, new airport in Lisbon) from José Socrates’ former government, considering it a waste in favour of a particular few and the system’s parties. At the time of the centre-right’s rule as led by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho (PSD), the PNR criticized the programme of privatization and opening the Portuguese economic

162  The far right during the consolidated democracy system to foreign capital that largely came from China, Brazil, and Angola, considering these measures to be signals of subservience to the Troika and submission to emerging economies. The protectionist tones are counter-balanced with the party’s acceptance of private capital in the welfare state sectors, like in pension funds and the national systems of health and education. For the PNR, the State must guarantee these services, concerned however with the system’s stability more than its exclusively public aspect. In particular, the extreme right suggests a partnership between the public and private in the health and education sectors through a check that each citizen and family could use if they wished to fall back on private institutions, offsetting as such the costs and avoiding the problems of the public service. Regarding education, the check proposal is related to the extreme right’s battle for the family’s freedom of choice in what kind of education they want for their children. The State has to just be limited in providing a minimum national curriculum for all Portuguese students, letting families decide later the orientation of studies especially in sensitive subjects like sexual education that the PNR prefers to be optional and not obligatory in public schools. In that sense, the PNR supports private institutions of teaching, especially Catholic ones, due to their conviction that, in Portuguese democracy, public education had become a playground of the left wing for propaganda to influence the youth. In general, on the subject of the welfare state, the PNR prefers to emphasize the problem of the population ageing, calling for greater support from the State for Portuguese families and not immigrants. In that sense, immigrants could not be considered a solution for financing welfare, as all parties who were represented in parliament thought. The claim for greater State support for Portuguese families is counter-balanced by a hard critique from the PNR on measures that favoured social parasitism, like social subsidies and minimum wage. The extreme right asks for greater fiscalization in that field to put an end to the abuse. In terms of electoral performance, PNR’s results are further proof of the extreme right’s irrelevance in the Portuguese political scene. In its first electoral run in 2002, PNR got an insignificant 0,09% with 4,712 votes. In 2005 they managed to improve on their previous outing by double, getting to 0,16% with 9,347 votes. In 2009, there was a slight improvement, with 11,628 votes (0,2%), and later in 2011 with 17,548 votes (0,31%). In 2015 the voter turnout was at 27,269 votes (0,5%), which, 15 years after its foundation, still makes the PNR believe in reaching the necessary 50,000 votes that would grant them access to public financing to resolve their fragile financial situation. For the European elections, the PNR got in 2004 8,405 votes (0,25%), with a slight improvement in 2009 (13,214 votes, 0,37%) whereas in 2014 (15,036 votes, 0,46%). On a municipal level, elections did not significantly change anything. It is a clear sign of how weak their efforts to make inroads in the entire country were, despite the recent exertion to appear on lists in more and more municipals, with their sights set on the local voting in 2017. Since 2005, when the party became known at national level, the PNR tripled its votes in legislative elections. However, its marginal status has continued so,

The new party strategy 163 particularly when compared in absolute values with the moderate right’s electoral performance at the start of the 21st century and the extreme right at the end of the 1970s and 1980s. Although PNR got little more than 17,500 votes in 2011, CDS-PP (the most right-wing party in parliament since the transitional period to democracy) got between 400,000 (7%) and 650,000 (11,7%) from 2005 to 2011 (in 2015 they ran in a coalition with PSD). Earlier, when looking at the legislative elections between 1976 and 1987, the Partido da Democracia Cristã (PDC) had an average of 40,000 in its six legislative election performances. Looked at another way, the best result so far for PNR (27,269 votes in 2015) matches the worst result from the PDC in 1976 (29,874 votes), and is rather far from the Christian Democratic Party’s best result in 1979 (72,514 votes). Another interesting comparative indicator is the New Democracy Party’s (Partido da Nova Democracia – PND) performance, which was a right-wing group that split from CDS-PP and ran in the 2005, 2009, and 2011 elections. With a gradual decrease in votes, from its initial 40,358 votes (0,7%) to 11,806 votes (0,2%), it is clear that the majority of rightwing voters decided to come back home to the CDS-PP and did not adhere to the PNR’s more radical proposal. In spite of all these numbers, PNR still believes that its performance is positive and a sign of the slow but inescapable march towards parliamentary representation. As such, the party has focused on consolidating its image in the public eye over the last years, the goal being in getting the protest vote represented from the growing number of absenteeism (44% in the 2015 elections). In any case, the goal is to reach the 50,000 votes necessary to get public financial support. From an organizational point of view, after the police operation in 2007, the party has clearly distanced itself from the skinhead movement and secured its own autonomy from any radical movement outside of the party. Also at the international level, PNR has detached itself from the transnational alliances with other far right parties to avoid the charges of collaboration with neo-fascist forces. From a political perspective, PNR has developed its discourse style of national opposition during the centre-right government (2011–2015), taking advantage of the austerity measures under the weight of the Troika. Since 2015, the party has been critical of PS’ government supported in Parliament by the extreme left (BE and PCP) which is an unprecedented formula in Portuguese politics. Both oppositionist strategies failed to work, however, for the extreme right-wing party.

Bibliography Almeida, Fábio Chang de (2012). “The ‘New’ extreme right: The factional nature of neofascist organizations in Portugal and Argentina”, in Locus: Revista de Historia, 18(1): 187–208. Betz, Hans-Georg (2003). “The growing threat of the radical right”, in Peter H. Merkl, Leonard Weinberg, eds., Right-Wing Extremism in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge), 74–93. Costa, José Mourão da (2011). “O Partido Nacional Renovador: a nova extrema-direita na democracia portuguesa”, Análise Social, XLVI (201): 765–787.

164  The far right during the consolidated democracy Ignazi, Piero (2003). Extreme Right Party in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press). Kitschelt, Herbert (1995). The Radical Right in Western Europe (Michigan: University of Michigan Press). Zúquete, José Pedro (2007). “Portugal: A new look at the extreme right”, in Representation, 43(3): 179–198. Zúquete, José Pedro (2015). “The new frontlines of right-wing nationalism”, in Journal of Political Ideologies, 20(1): 69–85.

9 The identitarian movement in Portugal

PNR’s vicissitudes in the first decade and a half of the 21st century are not completely representative of the Portuguese extreme right’s political panorama. In addition to their experience as a party, there was a renewed militant activity for social movements, as the relative success of Frente Nacional displayed, as well as the skinhead movement in PNR’s first phase. This mobilization was the fruit of the circulation also in Portugal of the ideas and practices from the French and Italian identitarian milieu which have been supported in Portugal not just by the generation of the 1990s but also by younger militants who were quickly disillusioned with the party strategy. The importance of the identitarian movement in renewing the extreme right in Europe and in the USA is today largely recognized in scientific literature (Zúquete 2018; Virchow 2017; Braouezec 2016: 647; Froio and Gattinara 2015: 89). The dynamic of the Portuguese identitarian movement does not differ much from the traditional groupuscular aspect of the extreme right youth that was common in the authoritarian regime and in democracy. However, it is interesting to show how this political area, which had been subdued on a national level, was able to take part in the international milieu. Indeed, its relative marginality in Portuguese civil society stands in contrast with the degree of integration within the European identitarian network. There had been a similar phenomenon in previous decades, but the international integration has been improved by the generalization of the use of the Internet. Nowadays the contacts with foreign comrades has shifted from the strict circle of the leaders to the militants themselves, who started participating in these international circuits on their own. On the national level, since its beginning, the Portuguese identitarian movement was characterized by its break from traditional nationalism. The dynamic was similar to what happened in the 1980s with the skinhead movement, but, now, it was less subcultural and was more aware of its image and message. The first relevant event to come from the identitarian movement in the Portuguese extreme right happened in Lisbon on 13–14 October 2001 during the first ­Portuguese Nationalist Congress (1° Congresso Nacionalista Português), entitled “Os nacionalistas portugueses no presente e no futuro” (Portuguese nationalists in the present and future). The event brought together members from different roots of Portuguese nationalism: there were orthodox Salazarists, traditional

166  The far right during the consolidated democracy monarchists, Catholic integralists, fascist intellectuals from the 1950s/1960s, national-­revolutionaries from the 1970s, and the younger neo-Nazi militants from the 1980s and 1990s. Of the many speeches at the Congress, two in particular resulted in great controversy from the panellists Miguel Ângelo Jardim and Duarte Branquinho. As he presented his speech “O nacionalismo do século XXI: rumos e soluções” (Nationalism in the 21st century: paths and solutions), Miguel Jardim stated that his inspiration came from the Frenchman Guillaume Faye, whom he described as an “author that is as prophetic as he is genial” (Jardim 2003: 117). In particular, he pointed out two subjects that could not be avoided in Portuguese nationalism: clashes between ethnic groups in Europe’s largest cities, resulting in native-born insecurity, and how Europe was transforming into the third world through the “invasion” of Afro-Asian immigrants radicalized by Islam. With that in mind, Jardim affirmed, “our ethno-cultural identity is our last hope if we wish to be viable as a national reality” (Jardim 2003: 119). For him, this “last hope” had to do away with the Euro-African myth that was typical of Portuguese nationalism and go for a Eurocentric geopolitical option, where the enemies were the USA and Islam: The geopolitical and international vision of Portugal must be subordinate to the construction of a gigantic geopolitical and geo-economic space grounded in a common collective, cultural, and civilizational memory: our European home. In the future, Russia will be included in that, and for obvious reasons, Turkey will not be. . . . As for our position on Africa, our relations will be guided by mutual respect of our own geopolitical spaces and simultaneously maintain the best commercial and economic ties, but giving up any notion of a possible political integration, which would, at the very least, be suicidal for Portugal as we now imagine it. (Jardim 2003: 120) Strongly influenced by Faye regarding his idea on Europe as a homeland and his ethno-cultural defence against the third world invasion, Miguel Jardim’s speech was warmly greeted by, among others, Duarte Branquinho. Coming from the skinhead milieu in the 1990s, Branquinho openly supported European nationalism against “rectangular Portuguese nationalism”, or worse, imperial Portugal from the Minho region to Timor. Indeed, Branquinho was already familiar with French authors on the subject, in particular Faye, whose theorization he had attempted to introduce in his organization at the end of the 1990s, Lusitan Order (Ordem Lusa). Jardim and Branquinho’s speeches were met with applause, but they were also controversial among nationalists who believed in the Empire and did not trust the ethnic European myth. The most striking criticisms came from the veteran fascist intellectual, António José de Brito, who attacked these ethno-centrist stances as they represented the worst enemy for nationalism in the future: There are people who call for Europe to extend from the Atlantic to Vladivostok, as it is composed of sovereign nations and guided by the “nordic-Aryan”

The identitarian movement in Portugal 167 ethnicity. What’s curious about this is that its proponents are in favour of racial homogeny, one of them even negatively referring to Brazil as ethnic chaos (to use an expression from H.S. Chamberlain). At least one of those nations, free and sovereign from exalted Europe, is an ethnic chaos with Slavs, Mongols, Tatars, etc. And why all of a sudden are such different races able to have the same ethic and consider themselves to be Nordic-Aryan? Conventional baptism? What fanciful motive is there for Japanese and black men to be excluded from this ethic? If it can be extended to Mongols, then why are Japanese and black people excluded? (Brito 2003: 47–48) For José de Brito, devotion to the political community is synonymous with duty, loyalty, courage, and honour. It is a universal ethic that could not be reduced to a Nordic-Aryan dimension, or at least “it has nothing to do with Europe, arbitrarily made up, nor with the north and south, nor with unfortunately dead or moribund nations, or skin hues, whatever they may be” (Brito 2003: 49). In that sense, the intellectual fascist recognized as comrades the black soldiers who fought to defend the Portuguese empire more than the white ones who betrayed the Fatherland in 25 April 1974. Those black soldiers are similar to the Arab soldiers that defended French Algeria more than German citizens that denigrated the Third Reich. As such, for Brito, the motto of nationalist organizations in the future had to be “Universal Empire of Order, Authority, and Hierarchy” and not “the false idols revered in Portugal [like] a whimsical Europe” (Brito 2003: 50). In the second edition of the Congresso Nacionalista Português (15–16 November 2003), controversy was sparked again, where Miguel Jardim spoke on “Nacionalismo e as etnias” (Nationalism and ethnicities). The focus was on ethnic identities within Europe, which once again shocked those in the audience who adhered to the pluri-continental and multi-racial nationalism. One example of this was Luís Silveira, leader of Núcleo de Estudos Oliveira Salazar (NEOS) and spokesperson of the Africanist theses with the speech “Portugal Europeu ou Atlântico?” (European or Atlantic Portugal?). On this occasion, the fracture could be seen from how another radical militant, Rui Pereira, from the 1990s reacted. Active in the identitarian movement, he publically supported Miguel Jardim’s statements and accused Luís Silveira’s style of Salazarist nationalism of being out of date with respect to the need for defending Europe’s ethnicity against alien invasions. Both of these instances emphasized how the new generation of militants was looking for structure, increasingly unsatisfied with classic nationalism and more open to identitarian ideas, mainly coming from France. These ideas had not been very circulated within the radical right. They were pushed mainly from the journal Futuro Presente in the 1980s due to admirers of Nouvelle Droite (Marchi 2013: 122–132). Some of these veterans even kept in touch with the French milieu in the 1990s, including with people in the identitarian milieu from Table Ronde organized by Pierre Vial’s Terre et Peuple. However, in Portugal, they did not strengthen any ties with the younger generation. The gap between the militants at the start

168  The far right during the consolidated democracy of the 21st century and those from the 1960s and 1970s would never close. The majority of the extreme right’s veterans had given up radical militancy at the end of the Empire. Indeed, when faced with the extreme right’s attempts to reorganize at the end of the 1970s, former national-revolutionary leader José Miguel Júdice from Coimbra wondered: After the African territory project collapsed, what great idea, subject, or doctrinal body could interest and motivate Portuguese youth to political action when aren’t mentally colonized by Marxist stereotypes? (O Diabo 12/8/1980: 2. In Marchi 2017: 378) As in the 1980s, the lack of references from the veterans proved to be a considerable obstacle in the organizational lift-off of the Portuguese identitarian movement. This obstacle was made worse by there being few figures in the nationalist milieu in the 1990s as a result of the repression they faced following the homicides in 1989 and 1995. However, the dawn of the new century helped in intensifying discussions in the nationalist milieu on the need to organize based on youth interest in militancy inspired by new movements from abroad. Their wish was to get out of the closed circuit of informal meetings and lunches. Over the table there were militants of many different ages, with or without having been in former groups. All of them shared the desire to create something in Portugal that was similar to what was being done in France. What was clear for them was to move beyond Portuguese nationalism, whose best days were long gone, through ethno-cultural European nationalism. In this phase, the spread of the Internet played a fundamental role for the Portuguese extreme right, as several authors had already noticed in different contexts (Simpson and Druxes 2015: 2; Caiani and Parenti 2016: 12). The first identitarian informal group began looking for doctrinal-political material online from France and started getting in contact with the organization’s intellectuals and getting exposed to the French identitarian experience. The first embryonic initiatives were born with the informal group National Moment (Tempo Nacional). This group took the idea of Europe from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains from works by Saint-Loup and Jean Mabire. With that firmly planted, the idea of defending the Old Continent from third world immigration and North American globalization was conveyed. In winter 2003, the first tangible initiative arose: the newsletter Identitário, whose subtitle “a voz do nacionalismo identitário europeu” (the voice of European identitarian nationalism) clearly inserted the bulletin in the extreme right identitarian milieu. Identitário would publish three more editions as the official organ of the Identitarian Cause (Causa Identitária) in 2007–2008, but even in its first edition, the newsletter attacked classic Portuguese nationalism impenetrable to symbols and ideologies coming from abroad. As such, the newsletter deplored comrades who: Shut themselves off in their little “chapels”, looking at everything that gets at us from the outsider like conspiracy threats from their small podiums and

The identitarian movement in Portugal 169 pedestals. Political, ideological, and cultural autism has proven to be devastating for whoever wishes or dares to build up any kind of efficient organization, capable of shaking the current demo-liberal system. (Identitário n°1, 2003: 1) In Identitário, it was clear that they were for the idea of Portugal being part of the unified Europe as an alternative to the USA and other blocs, namely the Islamic one. The newsletter’s promoters drafted their first organizational structure, which at that time was active only on the Internet, and made up of the Identitarian Block Association (Associação Bloco Identitário) by the publishing house Plataforma Identitária and the Portuguese version of the news agency Altermedia. This Portuguese structure was put in a larger European network that made up, according to the newsletter itself, French groups like Les Identitaires, Terre et Peuple, from the Granika forum, from the Nouvelle Droite (from GRECE, the Krisis journal), Italians from Casa Montag and Lega Nord, Belgians from Vlaams Blok, and Spanish from Red Vertice and Eje Futuro 2003. These online contacts with the French identity groups were finalized in 2004 when Miguel Jardim, the key figure of the group, was invited to Université d’été of GRECE, where he met, among other French intellectuals, Pierre Vial, at the time president of Terre et Peuple and still in good relations with the former comrades of GRECE. Jardim brought much material for his Portuguese comrades from France, in particular Guillaume Faye’s texts. The experience strengthened his wish to create something that reproduced in Portugal this European nationalist rejuvenation. This would as such fill the hole left by the previous generation who had not kept up relations with French comrades for quite a few years. Jardim’s career was atypical for a Portuguese nationalist: he was part of the extreme left at the Lisbon Law Faculty at the end of the 1970s, and in the 1980s, he dedicated himself to studying theology in France, becoming a pastor at a German evangelical church. Through the evangelical church, he went deeper in the subject of migratory processes, and interpreted them as invasions, whereby he ended up getting closer to the radical right at the end of the 1990s, in particular with the PNR, which was founded in 1999. Through the PNR, Jardim developed relations with the party’s youngest members, becoming a reference point for young people without much political knowledge outside of generic anti-immigration nationalism, as he was known for his intellect and linguistic abilities. All of these aspects explain his presence, since the beginning, among the activists that brought about the first organizational manifestation of identitarian ideas in Portugal: the Identitarian Cause (Causa Identitária – CI). CI was founded on 1 May 2005, in honour of Workers’ Day, in a European nationalist sense. In this phase, CI did not yet have a legalized structure. The initiative kicked off with a group of young nationalists that were connected to João Martins, a former militant for MAN in the 1990s. He invited comrade Rui Pereira to be the organization’s president, who was already at the PNR’s top of the

170  The far right during the consolidated democracy list in the district of Setúbal’s 2002 legislative elections as well as a member of the political commission since Pinto Coelho gained the party leadership in 2005. CI’s founders characterized its political line as being similar to PNR’s: an alternative to the system, against the “politically correct”, against left-wing multi-culturalism and right-wing neo-liberalism. This alternative sought to overstep the ideologies of the last two centuries and build up, for the future of Portugal and Europe, a society rooted in its history but technologically developed. Or as was written at CI’s foundation, “something that the visionary Guillaume Faye would design for arqueofuturism”. Quoting the 1998 work by Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, was important. In that regard, Duarte Branquinho remembered that L’Archéofuturisme did not have immediate impact in Portugal, mainly due to the linguistic barriers of the younger militants, but the ideas expressed within played a significant role in getting the Portuguese youth closer to the European identitarian current. In its first few months, Causa Identitária sought to gain visibility through street activism similar to what the French were doing. On Portugal’s national day, 10 June, the occasion was celebrated by nationalists through a political rally in Lisbon’s city centre. The event brought CI the publicity it wanted thanks to confrontations between the police and anti-fascist counter-protestors. This first exposure to the media allowed CI, through social media itself, to explain their main idea, which had not yet become a key point in Portuguese nationalism: anti-Islamism. As such, in interviews given over social media, the CI warned about the danger Islam represented by second generation immigrants born in Portugal. At the same time of these activities, CI participated in events organized by PNR, which expressed their wish to not oppose other nationalist organizations. For their protest on 10 June, in Porto, CI worked with PNR to do the event together. On 18 June 2005 the group took part in the successful protest against the rise in microcriminality, organized by PNR and Frente Nacional. In much the same way, on 17 September 2005, CI participated in a protest organized by PNR against the gay lobby and in defence of the traditional family. From a propagandistic point of view, from July 2005 on, CI published Voz Dissidente, the organization’s official journal that would be released with some regularity until 2009. The first edition’s first page was dedicated to the nationality law as promoted by the social government, reinforcing the principle of jus soli and not jus sanguinis. Similarly, to PNR, these subject would become key in CI’s political action to contrast Europe’s allegedly changing ethnicity. In much the same tone, a pamphlet from November 2005 explained their anti-globalization stance: antiglobalism is the complete alternative to neo-liberal globalization and the Marxist alter-globalization, which represent two sides of the same “world steamroller” destroyer of identities, mainly the European one, through alien invasions. At the beginning of its militancy, CI copied many of the classic themes from the European radical right in general and from the PNR, in particular, focusing on the subject of identity and the common European fatherland. This activity did not go beyond the usual: distributing handouts and putting up posters at the universities in Lisbon, publishing booklets for the political formation of its cadres (the first

The identitarian movement in Portugal 171 was “A Nova Aristocracia – do ideal grego ao Aristos identitário” that is “A New Aristocracy – from the Greek ideal to Identitarian Aristos”), spreading Voz Dissidente, and posting on their Internet site. It was, however, able to find its own niche in the Portuguese extreme right, so much so that in 2006 the general media, in its reports on the far right milieu, presented it as one of the most structured and characteristic in the nationalist area. This vantage point that CI got in the nationalist milieu also caused tensions with other organizations, expounding as such classic factionism of the Portuguese extreme right. In particular, CI’s leadership did not fit with the group Portuguese Hammerskin (PHS), also founded in 2005 and hegemonic on the Frente Nacional platform. To close CI’s ranks, that were somewhat shaken by the skinhead offensive, Jardim invited veteran Duarte Branquinho to be the organization’s president, who had to that point been outside the association. Branquinho’s presidency kicked off a second phase in CI, which was less concerned with street activism and more focused on metapolitical action and international collaboration with European identitarian organizations. This strategy was supposed to leave political action for PNR and its satellite organizations, like Frente Nacional, as such avoiding any issues that could obstruct CI in spreading their doctrination to the nationalist milieu – in doing so, they could introduce the European identitarian ideology to Portugal. To strengthen this role, CI put their efforts on integrating an international identitarian network and making Lisbon one of its European capitals by creating identitarian events. CI’s interest in international connections came in its first months of activity: on 4–6 November 2005, a Portuguese delegation participated in the second Colóquio de Segorbe (Valencia), “Eurosiberia, The Creation of an Ethno-Policy Power”. The meeting had been organized by Tierra & Pueblo, presided over at the time by Enrique Ravello, a Spanish version of the same organization by Pierre Vial. In Spain, the identitarian Portuguese personally knew the European intellectuals who were present there, among whom were Italians Gabriele Adinolfi from Polaris, Salvatore Francia, former militant of Ordine Nuovo and now director of the magazine Identità, French Pierre Vial from Terre et Peuple, German Pierre Krebs from Thule-Seminar, and Spanish Ernesto Milá, future director of IdentidaD. The Portuguese received their invitation following the contacts they made over the Internet by Causa Identitária themselves. The trip was made possible as the location of the event was physically close to Lisbon, which shows to what extent the Portuguese militants lacked materials and funding. In this phase, the CI was still just getting started: there was the president’s role, but no established hierarchy beyond a collective that had spontaneously appeared. Different from other European identitarian groups, mainly the French ones, the question on how to structure CI was never made into a priority, as the idea was not to build a mass organization or a mass recruitment. Instead, the goal was to create an elite taking advantage from the nationalists with higher education and shared interests in political experiences from abroad. They dedicated themselves to making their identitarian ideas rock solid, and then spreading them in the Portuguese nationalist milieu, which already had many active organizations on the street. The experience in Segorbe,

172  The far right during the consolidated democracy however, convinced the Portuguese on the need to structure CI better to become more efficiently integrated in the European network. Their Italian, French, and Spanish comrades warmly welcomed them, however, considering that until then Portugal had been a country off the European nationalism map in the last years. By reading Adinolfi’s Nos belles annés de plomb (Editions de l’Aencre: 2004), CI’s leaders had learned some of the most innovative strategies coming from Italy, in particular occupying public buildings. These experiences brought into the European network by the Italian organization Casa Pound (CP) were followed by Portuguese activists through the Internet since its beginning days, namely Casa Montag, which was created in 2002, one year before Casa Pound. At the Segorbe conference, however, Adinolfi warned the Portuguese to not blindly copy Italian experiences, as it would be better to mould their own strategies based on the conditions imposed by their local reality. In other words, ideas that worked through transnational ways had to be shaped according to local peculiarities. The Portuguese were convinced by Adinolfi’s strategic insight, and they returned to Lisbon with the intention of becoming a Portuguese antenna in the European network and work like a transmission current of identitarian ideas and practices along with political groups, especially PNR. Indeed, almost all CI members were PNR militants, including president Duarte Branquinho, also at the time high cadre of the PNR. The first official sign of being integrated into the international work was CI joining the Declaration of Moscow on 10 June 2006. Branquinho signed along with others who would become points of reference for the identitarian Portuguese in terms of replicating ideas, symbols, and militant practices: Pierre Vial (Terre et Peuple, France), Guillaume Faye (France), Pierre Krebs (Thule Seminar, Germany), Enrique Ravello (Tierra y Pueblo, Spain).1 In the same period, CI started Novopress, a Portuguese antenna of the news agency created by French identitarians. Novopress Portugal’s goal was to spread texts and initiatives by European identitarians or by Portuguese intellectuals on the Internet. Other than going to Spain, these first international collaborations were done exclusively online, in particular with French identitarians Phillippe Vardon from Nissa Rebela and Fabrice Robert from Les Identitaires. Online activism was met with enthusiasm by the Portuguese for two reasons: as it was so efficient that in just a matter of months Portuguese nationalism was no longer isolated and was side-by-side with renowned intellectuals of European radicalism. The second reason was that younger activists in CI welcomed with fervour the militancy practices coming from abroad. Causa Identitária’s consolidation as the Portuguese knot in the international network was further advanced on 2–8 October 2006 when Branquinho participated in, for the first time, the XI Table Ronde of Terre et Peuple. In this first trip, Branquinho got in touch with more figures from the network, namely with Phillippe Vardon, president of Jeunesses Identitaires and with Éric Rossi (alias: Euguène Krampon) and Bertrand Le Digabel (alias: Pierre Gillieth) from the journal Réfléchir & Agir. It was the first time that a Portuguese person participated in the Table Ronde as an official representative of a nationalist organization. As

The identitarian movement in Portugal 173 Branquinho recalled, there were few Spanish guests at the time as well: other than a few old Falangist residents in France, Enrique Ravello from Tierra y Pueblo had been participating for only two or three years. In that sense, the Iberian Peninsula was always on the backburner of the radical right’s European networks. The Table Ronde in 2006 allowed Branquinho to tighten relations even further with Adinolfi and especially with Vial, who came to be a key figure for ideas and practices to be organizationally reproduced in Portugal. As a result of strengthening these ties, Causa Identitária was allowed to host their first international conference in Lisbon with the title “A  Nova Reconquista da Ibéria à Sibéria” (“The New Reconquista from Iberia to Siberia” at 25 November 2006). A hundred nationalists listened to Vial, Faye, Ravello, and Humberto Nuno de Oliveira (PNR’s candidate for European elections), Jardim, and Branquinho. Although it was not a reserved meeting, CI did not attempt to promote the event through social media, exactly to be able to circulate innovative ideas in the heart of the existing nationalist organizations, neglecting proselytism. In this sense, Branquinho insisted on creating a training school for members to rejuvenate Portuguese nationalism, different from the practices of French identitarians who were more inclined for public intervention. This was an option that would, as will later be seen, lead to dissidence with Causa Identitária itself. As one can deduct from the title of the first international conference, the objective was to introduce the battle for Eurosiberia in Portugal, promoted by Faye among European nationalists. Although traditional Portuguese nationalism normally opposed any pan-European ideal, even coming from the radical right, the members of PNR did not boycott the event, and some of them even participated by speaking in front of the crowd – as was the case with Nuno de Oliveira – although they did not officially adhere to it. Problems arose, on the contrary, from the skinhead milieu from the Frente Nacional, that showed up at the conference with the attitude of wanting to settle a position in front of an organizational reality on the rise and with whom previous tensions in terms of interpersonal relations already existed. The attacks on the CI also came from older comrades, in particular from the Internet portal Alameda Digital, supported by former militants in the 1970s and 1980s, and quite influential among Portuguese nationalists at the time.2 The veterans were downright perplexed at the idea of identitarian ideology being replicated in Portugal. They had, in essence, three points of criticism. The first was that the identitarian movement was specific to France, where regional identities are real and rather varied. The second was that a simplistic copy ran the risk of turning Europe into a dangerous Balkan-like zone – even if under the cover of defending Europe from non-European immigration, it pushed the Old Continent towards further fragmentation in a myriad of small States, preferentially ethnically homogenous. The third was that the consequence of this preference for small States, where territorial, political and ethnic dimensions coincide, would be following Israel’s model, either by its ethnic nature or determination to undo the Arabic problem. Significantly, Alameda Digital accompanied their critical text with an

174  The far right during the consolidated democracy image of Faye with the Israeli flag imposed behind him, copying the bitter controversy that divided the European identitarian milieu, particularly the French one. Other than its controversies, the international conference was a success for the CI that, in the following months, was engaged in a series of lesser initiatives. These included meeting for presenting foreign organization as in the case of the Belgian movement Nation introduced by a Portuguese militant living in Brussels, the boosting of a public space obtained by Jardim in a parish council, reading sessions of books by radical right authors, and training sessions for CI cadres. The increase in activism led the leaders to have Causa Identitária legalized in June 2007 and regulating militant sign up. New members to CI were normally militants who were disillusioned with the PNR, whose classic nationalism no longer spoke to the younger generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, fascinated by more dynamic experiences and radical foreign organizations. This generation also began to question the strategy of CI’s collaboration with PNR, and in particular the scheme that gave PNR political combat and CI the cultural combat. Within the CI, the question often came up as well what it meant to be part of both organizations, since the key ideas of both organizations in terms of how they perceived Europe were fundamentally different. The wish for younger militants in going from cultural combat to political combat, independent from the PNR, was the cause for the first internal dissidence within the CI led by João Martins. He was one of the CI founders and conflicted with president Branquinho for his lack of mobilization and his prudence when faced against the PNR and the hammerskin milieu. The dissidents started to develop side activities in addition to the official ones and even planning street actions with militants outside CI that would go against the president’s metapolitical strategy and soured relations with the skinheads from Frente Nacional. The rivalry between the two groups got worse as CI got closer to former FN militants who left by no longer standing the skinhead hegemony in that organization, namely the leader of FN and PHS, Mário Machado. CI’s perspective would turn into a mere counterpart to the Frente Nacional and not the pre-figured think tank by Branquinho, leading to his ultimate step down in a CI general meeting in summer 2007. His stepping down also paved the way for a new militant generation to follow after the one in the 1980s and 1990s, as new president Diogo Canavarro implied. This change at the top of the identitarian movement also coincided with one of the most relevant events for the Portuguese extreme right at the start of the 21st century: the massive police operation in 2007 against Portuguese nationalism and the lawsuit that followed, leading to imprisoning three dozen nationalists, mainly from the skinhead milieu and police house raids on various leaders, including the PNR and CI. Despite this turbulent period Portuguese nationalism experienced, CI’s new leadership was able to put into effect two considerable initiatives. It published the journal O Identitário, which would have three issues from March 2008 to January 2009, and the conference that took place on 23 February 2008, called the 2nd International Conference to display the association’s continual operative status, despite the changes since Branquinho’s time as president.

The identitarian movement in Portugal 175 The conference in February 2008 was called “Pensamento global – Acção local” (“Global thought – Local action”), in which several different organizations participated. CI itself, of course, as well as Lusitânia Express (Portuguese antenna for the Radio Bandiera Nera – RBN, European network of Casa Pound’s web-radio), two Spanish ones (Asamblea Identitária and Colectivo Kosovo No Se Vende), and two French ones (Bloc Identitaire and Nissa Rebela). Gianluca Iannone from Casa Pound failed to show up at the last minute, but the Italian leader would later be in Lisbon in September 2008, through an invitation from Lusitânia Express, with the goal to spread the Italian identitarian experience in Portugal. On this last event, it is worth noting how Iannone’s conference was boycotted by the Frente Nacional’s hammerskins as suggested by the Italian hammerskins, who at the time were at odds with Casa Pound. In other words, Portuguese nationalism did not just replicate these foreign organization’s symbols and practices, they also suffered the same fractures that occurred among them in Europe. In that sense, issues between groups in other countries affected the Portuguese identitarian milieu, such as in France between Bloc Identitaire and Terre et Peuple. According to the news that arrived in Portugal, Bloc Identitaire began to be interested in the electoral strategy they initially refused, and for that reason distanced itself from Pierre Vial’s radicalism and the newspaper Réfléchir & Agir, which they did not consider helpful in getting votes. After the early convergence with Casa Pound, Bloc Identitaire ended up following the more successful strategy of the Italian secessionist party, Lega Nord, getting closer to its more rightwing internal current, namely with its MEP Mario Borghezio. This collaboration would even be denounced in March 2009 by the documentary “Europe, Ascenseur por les fachos” produced by Canal +. In the French documentary, the eurodeputy Borghezio seems to provide advice to French identitarians on dissemination strategies through anti-Islamism and localism. Causa Identitária followed these French vicissitudes in Portugal, following the path taken by Bloc Identitaire. The localist strategy was already favourably being analyzed in Portugal. On 10–11 November 2007, Jardim had participated, on behalf of CI, in the III Convention Identitaire at Beaune in Burgundy, France, where he spoke before Mario Borghezio from Lega Nord and Josep Anglada from Plataforma por Cataluña, on the need to unite European identitarians. During the 2nd International Conference that took place in February 2008, an entire section had been dedicated to this subject, with the title “Against mundialism, local roots!” accompanied by examples of localist militancy from Vardon of Nissa Rebela and João Pais do Amaral (CI and current vice-president of PNR). Indeed, CI developed a series of localist actions, which was rather unusual for the political culture of Portuguese nationalism. In truth, municipalism and administrative decentralization were always heritage of the radical right’s political culture, according to the monarchical tradition taken up by Integralismo Lusitano at the start of the 20th century. Beaten during the era of New State, the battle for local independence ended up being a battle cry for the Portuguese extreme right during the years of democratic transition, when faced with the hegemonic project of the PCP and extreme left who were constructing a socialist centralized State in

176  The far right during the consolidated democracy Portugal. After the communist danger passed, however, the extreme right returned to its more common position of defending national integrity against any divisive threat, as they showed in their opposition to the referendum on regionalization in May 1998. According to this localist line, on 17–18 October 2009, a delegation from CI participated in Orange, France in the “IV Convention Identitaire” with the explicit intent to learn new political strategies from French identitarians. After all was said and done, the Portuguese from CI were interested in seeing how groups like Ligue du Sud from Jacques Bompard could be created, and began to plan how this localist combat could be recreated in Portugal as well. Despite this new strategy they obtained from their trip to France, CI’s stubborn core was unable to involve their militant base in a path of political professionalization. After just five years of founding the movement, the ranks began to slow down. The end of the decade recorded a considerable drop of militancy for CI, which would end its experience without being able to replicate the electoral strategy of their European comrades. In this sense, CI suffered from the same problem other Portuguese youth groups had in previous decades: inability to professionalize their most active members and develop as such a definitive militant base, going from a spontaneous movement to consolidated organization with the ability to transform into a political party or pressure group towards other already existing ones. At the same time CI was following the steps of Bloc Identitaire, CI’s former president, Duarte Branquinho, created a Portuguese section for Terre et Peuple. He had always considered Pierre Vial to be a doctrinal master and strategical reference for cultural combat. Although there was no exact reproduction of the divisions between French identitarians, from this moment on there would be two identitarian organizations in Lisbon, dedicated to recreating symbols, practices, and different strategies from the French experience. In October 2007, Branquinho took part in the XII Table Ronde in Villepreux, Paris, where he was invited to speak of the recent political and police repression against Portuguese nationalism. During the XIII edition in October 2008, he was officially invited by Vial and Spanish comrades to found a Portuguese section of Terre et Peuple. The new organization continued on with the elitist and metapolitical strategy begun by Branquinho in CI. It had a journal that would be published just once in 2009, but it also spread on the Internet cultural initiatives from the association, as well as doctrinal texts of Terre et Peuple, and the organization of the 1st Jornada de Reflexão “Combate cultural: exemplos passados perspectivas futuras” (First Day for Reflection – Cultural combat: past examples, future perspectives) on 25–26 April 2009 in Figueiró dos Vinhos, Leiria. Both Portuguese identitarian organizations replicated the diverging lines between their French comrades. On the one hand, after the Convention Identitaire in 2007 from Bloc Identitaire, called “Une stratégie Identitaire: Anti-mondial! Pro-local!” (“An identitarian strategy: Anti-globalization! Pro-local!”) the CI organized, in 2008, the conference “Pensamento global – Acção local” (“Global thought – Local action”). On the other, after the Table Ronde of 2008 called “Le

The identitarian movement in Portugal 177 combat culturel, pour qui faire?” (“Cultural combat, who to do it for?”), Terra e Povo organized, in 2009, the meeting “Combate cultural: exemplos passados perspectivas futuras” (Cultural Combat: examples from the past, perspectives for the future). These parallels were also clear in the European reference points each organization chose. Terra e Povo made two trips to Italy, taking young Portuguese comrades to visit the network of squats organized by Casa Pound. The first trip was in May 2009, under the name “March on Rome”, crowned by a conference Branquinho headed over in CPI’s headquarters on Portuguese nationalism. The second trip was in November 2009, under the name “Return to the Eternal City”. Both the titles and graphics for each conference denoted a clear inspiration in Casa Pound’s style, which was already typical of Novopress Portugal, and its associated blogs Dissidente and Inconformista (Portuguese version on the transnational portal Zentropa). Although the Portuguese identitarian movement’s leadership took its lead mainly from the French milieu, the younger militant base clearly showed a preference for the Italian militant style. The trips the young Portuguese took to Rome for both of the events of Casa Pound Italy (commemorating Acca Larentia on 7 January and the movement’s national party in June) became constants even today for mobilizing Portuguese militants. The French influence in Portugal’s Terra e Povo stood out more in using some of their pagan-style practices, like candle rituals in meetings among militants and celebrating the winter and summer solstices. These practices were even very common in some European radical right sectors, but not so much in Portuguese nationalism, where the religious rift was also less accentuated, so much so that contemporary anti-Islamism was mainly perceived through the myth of the Christian reconquest of the Peninsula ended in the 15th century. Terra e Povo’s international activism reached its peak in 2009. In July, the movement organized the Summer University, like the Université d’été in GRECE and Adinolfi’s Università d’Estate. PNR leader Humberto Nuno de Oliveira, Pierre Vial (Terre et Peuple), Enrique Ravello (Tierra y Pueblo), and Gabriele Adinolfi (Polaris) took part in the event. The meeting being mentioned in the official newspaper of Terre et Peuple and in Thule-Seminar’s yearbook formalized Portuguese Terra e Povo’s joining the European network. As these works were under way, controversy was lit by a veteran of nationalist militancy in the 1970s who supported Terra e Povo’s focus on cultural questions, immigration, and Islamism, but criticized the replication of European identitarian symbols (Edelweiss, wild boar, Stonehenge, Triskelion) that had nothing to do with Portuguese tradition. The controversy emphasized yet again how difficult it was to join together all the different generations of nationalism. As such, when some nationalist veterans left PNR in 2010, they did not join any of the already existing identitarian organizations, but they did start another small group that did not last for long, the National Opposition Movement (Movimento de Oposição Nacional – MON). On 4 October, Branquinho took part in the “XIV Table Ronde” as an official speaker in front of an audience of around 300 people. This event’s edition was possible the most participated (nearly a thousand people) and the most followed

178  The far right during the consolidated democracy by the media (Canal +) due to the heated climate that was being lived in France with the ethnic riots of that year. In November 2009, the president of Terra e Povo was invited to speak at a conference of the French organization Synthese National, and, in November 2010, in the V Jornadas de la Disidencia, in Madrid, organized by the Movimento Social Republicano (MSR). At the same time, he began working with the Spanish journal IdentidaD by Enrique Ravello and Ernesto Milá. In line with the strategy followed as CI president, Branquinho published in the Spanish journal an interview with PNR’s leader, José Pinto Coelho, called “Lo Identitario en Portugal: entrevistamos a José Pinto Coelho, presidente del Partido Nacional Renovador” (IdentidaD n°3, 2008: 40). Thanks to its international connections, Terra e Povo became one of the most efficient vehicles in circulating identitarian ideas of the French/Spanish/Italian kind in Portuguese nationalism. However, this organization was not able to avoid the intense decrease of militant activity and typical divisions of the Portuguese extreme right. In 2011, Branquinho was nominated to be the head of O Diabo, a weekly that had an important role in the Portuguese right during the transition, but currently without any particular relevance. This set off a noticeable decrease in Terra e Povo’s activity, with the organization of the following events: honouring Dominique Venner (July  2013), presenting the project for South Africa by the ONLUS Solidarité-Identites (Sol-ID) and Casa Pound (September 2013), and participating in the conference L’Universe Esthétique des Européens, organized in Paris by Institut Iliade (April 2015). Also in this case, the leader of the movement was unable to consolidate his militant base, as such being unable to pass the project he began to the younger generation, which would guarantee its continuity. After more than 15 years since the start of the new millennium, the Portuguese extreme right has shown severe signs of fragility in both movements and political parties. The only political party that exists has managed to maintain a constant presence since its foundation, but has shown no significant growth since in terms of consolidation or electoral performance. The movements, on the other hand, continue to suffer from fragmentation, internal conflict, and inability to captivate or consolidate their militant base. As such, both CI and Terra e Povo did not ensure any rite of passage of leadership from the generation of its founders, in the 1990s, to the younger militants interested in European identitarianism. At the end of both of these organizations, the youngest militants left without leaving any trace for what could follow. As such, in the most recent identitarian structures (Editora Contra Corrente in 2013 and the civic association Portugueses Primeiro in 2016), there were still veterans from the first years of the Portuguese identitarian movement and a handful of 20-something militants, without the slightest glimpse of a qualitative evolution from what began at the start of the century. On the editorial front, the initiative that is still to this day the most solid one, was the review Finis Mundi (2011–2015), which tried to cross the paths of Nouvelle Droite tradition and the innovation of the identitarian line. It lost, however, its initial appeal and left almost no trace in the nationalist milieu.3 In the largest panorama of innovation within the European and North American extreme right, Portugal remains among the least important countries in radicalism,

The identitarian movement in Portugal 179 always present in importing and circulating ideas and practices, but without any considerable role to contribute.

Notes 1 The other persons who signed were: Anatoly Ivanov (Synergies Européenes, Russia), Yann-Ber Tillenon (Britain), Pavel Tulaev (Athenaeum, Russia), Eleftherios Ballas (ARMA, Greece), Galyna Lozko (Ukraine), Cercle Proudhon (Switzerland), Roeland Raes (Vorpost, Flanders), and Vladimir Ardeyev (Russia). Declaração de Moscovo, in Duarte Branquinho’s particular archive. 2 The short text “A trági-comédia nacionalista” (“The nationalist tragicomedy”) was signed by F. Santos (www.alamedadigital.com.pt/n9/tragi_comedia_nacionalista.php). After a long period of silence, Alameda Digital (www.alamedadigital.com) started again in December 2017 edited by the former cadres of the Movimento Nacionalista, José Luís Andrade. 3 It is still too early to evaluate the most recent initiatives from the identitarian milieu all of them started in 2017: the review Plus Ultra, the Social New Order (Nova Ordem Social NOS) by Mário Machado and the Identitarian Shield (Escudo Identitário). This last one was founded by a new generation of identitarian militants quite detached from the previous organizations but equally inspired by the European identitarian milieu mainly by the Italian CasaPound.

Bibliography Braouezec, Kevin (2016). “Identifying common patterns of discourse and strategy among the new extremist movements in Europe: The case of the English defence league and the bloc identitaire”, in Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37(6): 637–648. Brito, António José de (2003). “Nacionalismo ontem e hoje”, in AA.VV. ed., Rumo ao futuro (Lisbon: Nova Arrancada), 27–50. Caiani, Manuela and Parenti, Linda (2016). European and American Extreme Right Groups and Internet (London, New York: Routledge). Froio, Caterina and Gattinara, Pietro Castelli (2015). “Neo-fascist mobilization in contemporary Italy: Ideology and repertoire of action of CasaPound Italia”, in Journal for Deradicalization, 2: 86–118. Jardim, Miguel (2003). “O nacionalismo do século XXI: rumos e soluções”, in AA.VV. ed., Rumo ao futuro (Lisbon: Nova Arrancada): 117–120. Marchi, Riccardo (2013). “La presse d’extrême droite au Portugal: avancées et reculs pour une nouvelle culture du radicalism lusitanien”, in Olivier Dard, ed., Supports et vecteurs des droites radicales au XXe Siécle – Europe-Amérique (Berne: Peter Lang), 122–132. Marchi, Riccardo (2017). A Direita Nunca Existiu: As direitas extraparlamentares na institucionalização da democracia portuguesa 1976–1980 (Lisbon: ICS). Simpson, Patricia Anne and Druxes, Helga eds. (2015). Digital Media Strategies of the Far Right in Europe and the United States (London: Lexington Books). Virchow, Fabian (2017). “Post-fascist right-wing social movements”, in Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring, eds., The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 619–646. Zúquete, José Pedro (2018). The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press).

Conclusions

The 70 years of Portuguese extreme right between late authoritarianism and democracy show a persistence of endogenous characteristics that allow for a delineation of a global profile in this political area. In the international extreme right context, Portuguese radicalism stands out for its total absence from the references of its European counterparts. Comparatively, in the context of Iberian authoritarianisms, the Spanish Falangism, at least the joseantonian formulation, achieved a certain autonomy from Francoism and represented a model for vast sectors of post-Second World War European radicalism. Conversely, Portuguese revolutionary nationalism has remained totally marginal, more so when compared to the relevance of Salazarism within the mainly European Catholic ultranationalist milieus. This subalternity in relation to Salazarism is inscribed in this political area’s more general limitations that are particularly evident in the doctrinal and operational dimensions. From the doctrinal perspective, the Portuguese extreme right demonstrates, throughout the years, a constant repetition of the classical topics of autochthonous nationalism with scarce capacity for ideological renovation and a certain predisposition for the acritical introduction and reproduction of foreign references. The anti-Communist Occidentalism of the 1970s, the anti-imperialist third-worldism of the later years of the New State, the counter-revolutionary and anti-European nationalism of the transition, and the “differentialist” ethno-nationalism in the consolidated democracy appear as consecutive stages of the same inability to achieve an autonomous deepening of the national and international reality, and of the inclination towards a simplistic appropriation of external analyses, particularly foreign ones. At the end of the New State and during the transition, the explanation of the urgency of political struggle over the theoretical elaboration determined by the African War and by the resistance to communist escalation might be acceptable. However, this same attitude is protracted in the four decades of consolidated democracy, rendering it a constitutive element and not just a contingency of the extreme right identity. The impoverishment in terms of human and intellectual resources, suffered by the extreme right since the 1980s, does not justify the sclerosis. As other international contexts demonstrate, the extreme right’s cultural renovation came frequently from very reduced elites, themselves critical of the ideological sterility of the means in which they operate.

182  Conclusions From the organizational perspective, the Portuguese extreme right has never led the front line of political combat. On the contrary, it always acted in the shadow of more powerful sponsors that were, nonetheless, strangers to its political identity. The founder of the New State, the “ultras” elite in the Marcelist institutions, the military milieu of general Spínola, the mainstream anti-Marxist parties, and the Catholic Church during the transition represented successive hats under which the extreme right has sheltered its political action. This tactic of continuous subalternity – marked by the contingent reality of strength relationships – has determined the constant vulnerability in face of the regime’s paternalism or the convenience of stronger allies. A vulnerability that has been paid for with the progressive loss of autonomous operational capacity and the inexorable marginalization within the national political scene until the current state of irrelevance. The operational narrowness was not even contradicted by greater liveliness in terms of organizational strategies. The forms of organization were consistently repeated throughout the decades: newspapers and magazines of unstable existence, small groups undermined by leaders’ personalisms and extremely permeable to fractionism, and routine and low-range action repertoires. The few experiences that stand out at the end of the 1960s and 1970s were but sporadic exceptions that, in general, have confirmed the rule of the Portuguese extreme right’s resistance to renovation. This character has enveloped through the years also due to the extreme right’s majority attitude, prone to a “reaction against” more than “action towards”. From a transnational comparative perspective, it is relevant to specify these general features of Portuguese radicalism in its different acting periods.

At the end of the New State With the Axis powers having lost the Second World War, Portugal did not become the last breeding ground of fascist ideas in Europe. In a more prosaic manner, the Atlantic country represented an authoritarian regime, a trustworthy partner for the West in the new, bipolar world order during the Cold War. The internal crisis that the New State faced after the War had less to do with the doctrinal identity that already found itself losing ground in Western Europe as a result of an established democratic model. Instead, it was its determination in defending the imperial geopolitical dimension, differently from other European allies. Therefore, to find, in Portugal, that radicalism with fascist tendencies present in several European countries after the Second World War, should not follow the lead of institutional architecture, culture, or even the predominant public opinion. Instead, it was due to the meanderings of a small number of politicians and members of the regime’s elite that had, however, little influence on the internal dynamics of the New State. That said, the political culture of the European extreme right did succeed in catching the interest of three generations in a row of radical militants, who entered politics in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. These thoughts spread and developed primarily through the universities and leading intellectual spots in Lisbon, Porto, and Coimbra. Their supporters were part of a young European generation that, both under authoritarian and democratic

Conclusions 183 rule, radicalized in a nationalistic and revolutionary manner in response to the challenges presented by the so-called “subversion against the west”, both at home and internationally. Furthermore, each of these generations were sparked by a particular moment of crisis in the regime and in the nation. As such, this renewed activism of the democratic opposition after the fall of fascism in 1945 incited the Portuguese radicals of the 1940s and 1950s; the onset of the African War in 1961 produces the radicalization of the militants of the 1960s; and Caetano’s liberalization efforts set off the right wing revolts in the 1970s. The African War in particular played an important role. In contrast with the extreme right from the 1950s, the young nationalists of the 1960s were more inclined to street activism and were more notable for their ability to mobilize the social milieu in which they acted. Of course, this latter part is relative – in a political area like the extreme right, generally speaking they are not known for their mobilizing capacity, particularly when compared with the anti-Salazarist opposition in student milieu. Although the extreme right’s expansion was clearly visible from the 1960s on, they suffered however from the constraints of the authoritarian regime. First, the causal link between the regime’s crisis and the success of the radical’s mobilization resulted in the extreme right’s organizational efforts to weaken when the political situation calmed down. This relationship also shaped what extreme right activism meant: in the regime’s last decades, this became more of a “reaction against” as opposed to an “action for”, whereby the extreme right was always reactive. There were few instances when the extreme right took a pro-active stance. Next, as the regime conceded logistic and material support to the extreme right as an anti-subversive player, this also resulted in them losing some of their political independence. The extreme right, as such, had limited freedom as a result of decisions made by Salazar and Caetano by not allowing them to carry out activities that could be of harm to the regime. This reliance would weigh heavily on them during the transitional years to democracy when their former sponsors would vanish from the political scene. Finally, the gradual increase of extreme right-wing activism went hand-in-hand with the progressive and general de-mobilization of the regime’s supporters, which provoked radical militant factions to be isolated in an increasingly deserted field non-receptive to mobilization calls. Regarding identity, the main supporters of the extreme right were intellectual individuals or small groups who belonged to the urban upper middle class – although with some exceptions – in a country that was predominantly agricultural. They had in common the political culture of classic Portuguese nationalism from the first half of the 20th century in addition to the ambiguous relation with the fascist phenomenon in the inter-war period. For this reason, it is inaccurate to label the Portuguese extreme right after the Second World War as a Lusophone version of European neo-fascism. It would be more correct to point out the radicalization of Portuguese nationalism after the 1960s. With that in mind, it is possible to identify signs of a neo-fascist ideology in a few organizations through the usage of symbols, subjects, and slogans produced in large part by the French and Italian extreme right in the middle of the 20th century.

184  Conclusions The ideological evolution of the three extreme right generations in the twilight of the regime points towards a progressive disengagement from orthodox counter-­ revolutionary ideas, favouring instead an ideological heterodoxy in line with third position stances. The first generation’s interest in Lusitanian Integralism, along with its criticism of National-Syndicalism paved the way for an increased interest in more activist and socially centred political topics. This provided as well alternatives to the New State’s nationalism, being inspired by some of the more modern currents of European neo-fascism, connected to the fight for cultural hegemony, for the Europe Nation, and for the Euro-African dimension to oppose US and USSR imperialism. Seen from this perspective, it is possible to find traces of neo-fascist political culture also in Portugal. Its evolution had developed an important role in the 1960s and 1970s on the basis of wider phenomenon linked to the revolution of the collective imagination of a sizeable number of European youths. Far from being consensual among Portuguese extreme right supporters, this culture triggered more controversy than unanimity among the different factions of Portuguese nationalism, exactly because it represented a reality foreign to the national tradition. The controversy centred around identity; however, it was not something new since in the first half of the century, the influence of Action Française, Italian fascism, and National Socialism were on the agenda of the critics of Lusitanian Integralism and of National-Syndicalism. The extreme right’s radicalization was closely tied to the defence of the Portuguese empire when faced with the scorn of the international community and the military offensive of African independentist guerrillas. In stark contrast to the regime’s internal factions, the extreme right stood out by speaking out about its dissatisfaction with how the New State went about with its warlike management of the overseas crisis. In that sense, Salazar was admired for having gone with a military approach, but was met with criticism by insisting that the military presence in Africa should be a mere policing operation than actual revolutionary war. Caetano, on the other hand, was criticized from the very beginning due to his ambiguous attitude and stance on autonomy for the African territories. The extreme right did not exhibit such a determined attitude regarding possible political-military alternatives, however. In terms of its pro-active capabilities, the extreme right only showed some initiative in the regime’s last 10 years or so of existence. In particular, during Caetano’s five and a half year period, a part of the extreme right dedicated themselves in updating their ideological heritage and mobilization repertoire. With their ideological elaboration and their militant practice, they were able to distinguish themselves from the conservative and Salazarist factions. In doing so, they showed how revolutionary nationalism was compatible with a clear critique on Portuguese colonialism as implemented well before the New State. This was not enough, however, to transform revolutionary nationalism into a viable alternative among those deeply entrenched in the New State, much less among the oppositional forces against the regime, but who were sensitive to preserving the pluri-continental dimension of Portugal. Impervious to the regime’s

Conclusions 185 rhetoric, those who supported this national-revolutionary stance were not quite as lucid in other aspects. For example, they did not understand the impossibility to build the Portugal they envisioned by remaining within the New State. At the start of the 1970s, the Portuguese extreme right found themselves confined by their relations with renowned military and civilian personalities connected to the regime, without being able to create an efficient, structured pressure group as a result. Both political and sociological reasons explain this minority, as they came from upper middle-class families professionally reliant on the regime. Many of the political figures involved feared any kind of blow that could compromise the regime and with it their respective societal position. In the same way, its leading figures at the top of the New State were linked to the high finance milieu that flourished under the regime’s protection. This nationalism – revolutionary but respectful of the political order – reached a dead end, however, with the military coup d’état of 1974 stamping it out entirely. The fall of the Estado Novo and the revolutionary period that followed it freed the extreme right from the constraints of the authoritarian regime and quickly transformed it into an anti-system actor. However, this process did not favour those who championed what it stood for. Its high degree of politicization in comparison with other right-wing figures shaken due to the revolution showed all of its intrinsic limitations in the years of the transition to democracy.

Transition to democracy The process of democracy building in Portugal was developed between the overthrow of the regime by the military coup d’état in 1974 and the end of the military supervision of the Revolutionary Council that ruled until constitutional amendments were made in September 1982. Over the course of these eight years, the Portuguese extreme right exhibited how fundamentally incapable they were to organize a cohesive and coherent project under a unifying leader to reach a larger right-wing electorate. The reasons for the extreme right’s failure were endogenous and exogenous to the extreme right and determined by the nature of the transition to democracy in and of itself. This historical period was divided into two distinct phases for the extreme right. The first was defined by the pressure they felt from revolutionary forces and the high degree of repression against those tied to the fallen regime. The second was characterized by the extreme left’s drop in revolutionary vigour and less pressure being applied against the anti-communist forces. This first phase ended on 25 November  1975, and was characterized by the repressive peaks of 28 September 1974 and 11 March 1975. Here, the extreme right had no great chances to become legitimized. The transition by rupture made it easier for those who had been associated with the former regime to be victims of revolutionary repression and worsened some already harmful factors for the extreme right. These factors are several and varied. First was the massive support for the downfall of the regime, also some right-wing figures were already highly disillusioned with Caetano’s reforms. Another was the objective organizational

186  Conclusions advantage of the PCP against upcoming political parties and the ability of the communists to control the revolutionary process after the coup. Finally, the disbandment of the key figures of the New State and the unavailability of other prominent elements of the authoritarian regime in leading made the hosts more aware about the dangers of revolution. Although these three factors were determinant for the immediate reaction of the extreme right, the political options taken by who decided to join the political arena also had a decisive influence on the failure of this political area. Although the relevant actors involved already belonged to a consolidated relational network, at least in the final stages of the New State in the opposition to Caetano, there was not one trace of any attempt to create a uniform political subject. The factions that made up the right-wing opposition against Caetano from 1969 to 1974 suffered the same fragmentation following the 1974 coup. This strategic choice was rather disconcerting considering the hostility in the air, especially bearing in mind the existence of a common political objective spanning the width of the ideological differences among the nationalists. They had the wish to preserve the pluri-continental concept of Portugal, threatened by decolonization, at the centre of the political agenda in the first months of the transition to democracy. The option to split into micro-parties was all the more head-scratching considering how all of them, excluding the ultra-right wing MAP, followed Spínola’s strategy. Mobilization under Spínola and the vulnerability they displayed on 28 September demonstrated the organizational weakness of the extreme right had followed them from their time under the regime. Indeed, during its last decades, they never managed to have any true political autonomy under Salazar’s rule. Even in the moment when they were an internal oppositional force, they were never considered to be a serious threat to Caetano’s nomination or governance. The effect of this subalternity was the lack of any autonomous organizational plan in preparation for the expected and imminent fall of the regime. Although their vulnerability to the revolutionary forces’ offensive could be understandable in the immediate aftermath of the coup, less justifiable was their insistence on the losing Spinolist strategy during the underground phase. In this regard, the extreme right could hardly be held responsible for the events on 11 March 1975. They underwent another wave of repression due to their close ties with the former president of the Republic as opposed to actually being involved. However, Spínola’s inability to handle the repeated confrontational situations with the revolutionaries does not make the decisions of various notable members of the extreme right to join his underground movement in exile, the MDLP, any clearer either. The extreme right should, however, be recognized for their efficiency in underground operations. Armed conflict from the summer to the end of 1975 backed the extreme left into a corner, especially in the north of Portugal, and made clear to both sides that a civil war would be unsustainable. Despite their skills in these operations, the extreme right played a subordinate role to the anti-communist forces as a whole. Their performance on the front line, but never in a leadership role, was only possible due to their involvement in the resistance organized by the

Conclusions 187 mass parties (like PS, PSD, and CDS) and the Catholic Church with its civilian networks (Plano Maria da Fonte). Even with all of this said, terrorist action as carried out by the right wing was minimal, despite hundreds of armed operations and some deaths being reported. In their most radical factions (the ELP), the anticommunist area could rely on former members of paramilitary organizations and the regime’s political police, not to mention former combatants trained in guerrilla warfare in Africa. However, all of these forces together were far from creating the tense political climate caused by the extreme right in Spain or Italy at the end of the 1970s. The second phase of the transition, from 25 November 1975 to the start of the 1980s, represented a chance for the extreme right to become consolidated in the institutionalization process of Portuguese democracy. The victory of the moderate MFA took some of the vigour out of the extreme left’s offensive, although this officially upheld the PCP in its role in Portuguese democracy. As the political climate softened, various figures from the extreme right who had been incarcerated or forced into hiding during the PREC came back to public life. In the second half of the 1970s, however, the extreme right failed to achieve what it set out to do, in terms of both political parties and civic movements. A further result of which was their disappearance as a political force to be reckoned with in the last two decades of the 20th century. This failure has been determined by endogenous and exogenous factors with respect to the extreme right. As for the aforementioned endogenous factors, the clearest of which was their ideological ambiguity. Although the extreme right shared the political culture of the former regime, no one who was an active player on the right of the CDS following 25 November took it upon themselves to claim New State’s legacy or Salazar’s governance. Just one small group from the weekly, A Rua, claimed this identity, mainly to be seen as an autonomous group of the PDC’s lists in the 1979 legislative elections and in the coalition between the PDC and MIRN/PDP in the 1980s. All other figures involved avoided any identification with the regime, wavering even on assuming the right-wing label, at a time in which they could have taken advantage of the mainstream parties being unable to fill the void. Such an attitude could be expected after 25 April, but it is unthinkable for the same to still be true at the end of the 1970s when public opinion, especially from the right, was open to a more radical proposal than the CDS’ against the remains of the PREC’s extremism. Instead, the extreme right failed to present a renewed formula to be viewed as a credible and alternative force to the right wing of the political spectrum. This demonstrates, moreover, scant interest as well in more daring and innovative experiences, such as those undertaken in the cultural plan, by Portuguese fans of the French and Anglo-Saxon new right. The second endogenous factor was how the leaders of the extreme right used their parties for personal gains as opposed to enhance the party. Many of them were less interested in leading a consolidation project of an activist community, but rather more in using the parties as vectors of personal promotion. The MIRN arose as an electoral committee of Kaúlza de Arriaga. The PDC was

188  Conclusions on the receiving end of continual diatribes from its leaders, with four secretary generals being replaced in just five years. Furthermore, the political performance of Kaúlza, Pinheiro de Azevedo, and Sanches Osório in their respective parties (MIRN and PDC) is further proof on how the extreme right was subordinate to military men and their personal ambitions. The third factor dealt with the few territorial inroads the extreme right made beyond the two main cities, Lisbon and Porto, which is where parties and movements alike were based. At the time of the legislative elections, they succeeded in being listed for the districts, but this did not translate in local nucleus bodies that would ensure national presence after the electoral campaigns. This weakness was also reflected in the scant numbers that showed up to mobilize in the streets. During the transition, the extreme right preferred to mobilize at rallies and meetings in closed off areas. Regarding street mobilization, the extreme right took part in organized protests by other leaders of the anti-communist front, as was the case of the 1 December marches. Only youth groups did not follow this pattern, establishing a consistent presence on the street in the second half of the 1970s, through rallies at schools, nationalist protests on 10 June, and violent confrontations with the extreme left. The extreme right’s structural deficiencies and their leaders being unable to prepare a common project shut the windows of opportunity as presented by the political situation at the time. Only during the 1980 elections did a unifying strategy emerge from the nationalist forces. In 1976, the PDC ran alone, as the group, A Rua, supported the CDS, while General Kaúlza de Arriaga remained undecided if he would enter politics. In 1979, the electoral deal reached by A Rua and the PDC was weakened due to the MIRN’s decision to not run in the elections. Furthermore, the three nationalist factions (and the same was true for all other actors in the right wing) entered into individual negotiations with the anti-communist parliamentary parties, never acting as a cohesive force. This last point was key for the first of the exogenous factors that weakened the extreme right: the Democratic Alliance (Aliança Democrática AD) was unwilling to officially co-opt the far right within the coalition. Indeed, the extreme right’s participation in the elections of 1979 and 1980 was a result of PDC and MIRN having been rejected by the AD’s parties (PSD, CDS, PPM). When considering how the AD’s parties agreed to ostracize the extreme right, it is worth noting the role the CDS played in boycotting the parties more on the right. The boycott can be explained by the CDS’ desire to capitalize as much as possible the adjustment to the right wing and secure the most right-wing electorate possible. This way, the CDS could avoid the appeal the PSD had and also stand a chance against new, alternative right-wing parties. The most effective instrument in disbanding the extreme right was the co-optation from its most prepared members, but co-optation on an individual level, and never as an organized group. Over the course of the second half of the 1970s, CDS’ strategy, and generally speaking, that of the AD’s as well, worked. The potential electorate for the extreme right ended up voting for the AD or abstained. Various surveys done at the end of the 1970s and start of the 1980s showed that extreme right wing support was above the 1,2% registered in 1979.

Conclusions 189 Under the low capacity of aggregating people and zero chance to partner with other right-wing parties, not to mention the normalization of the democratic process, this could only lead to one result: sponsors with means to support the extreme right with financial and logistic aid had been progressively disappearing since the begin of the transition.

Consolidated democracy and new millennium The failure to institutionalize the extreme right during the transition to democracy had an effect during the years of consolidated democracy as well. The 1980s was defined not as much by political parties but rather by youth movements. This was highlighted by the extreme right’s groupuscularization and the arrival of a new generation of militants who were ideologically and organizationally detached from previous nationalistic milieu. The most relevant effect was the emergence of the ethno-nationalistic current that was increasingly far from the myth of a pluricontinental and multi-racial Portugal. This new, young ethno-nationalism was determined by socio-economic and socio-political changes in democratic Portugal. Unprecedented in a Portuguese context, this nationalism was on the contrary, and in comparative terms, completely in line with the dynamics of the Western extreme right: the Americanization of the radical subcultures through the importation of white supremacy and racial war from the Anglo-Saxon world. In the last two decades of the 20th century, these themes became central in the political mind-frame of these tiny extremist militant groups, tied to the skinhead movement. The old concept of multi-racial nationalism was swapped with a vision of belonging to the white race, dedicated to countering the onslaught of non-white races and fighting against international Zionism. The “white resistance” agenda already had elements that could be detected in Christian-inspired Portuguese nationalism – promoting birth-rate policies, being anti-abortion, rejecting the gay movement’s demands. However, it introduced elements not so relevant to that point, such as the opposition to immigration, national preference in work policies and welfare state, or issues still inexistent at all, such as the Portuguese’s pagan roots, as well as the Islamic threat to the Western world. The break from the older nationalism was also sociological. The nationalist militants at the end of the authoritarian regime as well as during the transitional period were part of the upper middle class. They had a university student profile, had liberal professions, or worked for the state. In comparison, the ethno-­ nationalist groups of the 1980s and 1990s came from a distinctly lower social class, similar to their European and North American counterparts. The militant base was made up of young people from the suburbs, mostly from the lower middle class, with less education and often doing unqualified jobs. The result of which was a tendency for marginal and violent militancy with deadly consequences: the two homicides from 1989 to 1995. This impoverishing that the extreme right suffered in the last quarter of the 20th century echoed in the first phase of the, up to now, most lasting Portuguese

190  Conclusions nationalist party project in democracy: the PNR. Since its foundation in 1999, the party assumed a typical party agenda of the new extreme right: anti-elitism, chauvinism, rejecting multi-culturalism, opposing immigration, anti-Europeanism, anti-Islam. At the same time, however, it maintained some typical traits of the old Portuguese extreme right by defending the New State and criticizing all involved in 25 April 1974. This trait it had was the catalyst for more radical components of Portuguese nationalism, including the skinhead movement, which aided in diminishing their image to the public eye in the first phase of their existence. From 2007, the PNR changed its image, distancing themselves from their extremist supporters from the marginal fringes. Although the party has consistently been gaining in support (no matter how marginal) in municipal, general, and European elections since then, their image has remained compromised. Contributing factors to this are persistent hostility by the national media and being ostracized from other centrist and right-wing political and social forces. From an internal point of view, the PNR’s leaders have struggled in coming across as charismatic, appealing figures not just to the public, but also to their own potential electorate and nationalist base. This has been a big reason for their standstill in gaining headway in the nationalist political scene. Even with a greater presence on municipal election sheets from 2017, the data do not convey any meaningful expansion for the party’s territorial aims. Many of its militants abandon the party, or are kicked out, and though these schisms are largely insignificant, they have undermined the party’s development. The PNR’s inability to become a recognized point of reference for the Portuguese extreme right can also be seen through the existence of other groups that have little or no contact with the party. They were the loudest critics against the PNR in the nationalist political realm: they blamed the party’s leadership to turn to civic nationalism to the detriment of ethnic nationalism as well as the resistance to any way of thinking not in line with the current party leaders. These groups maintained a constant presence in the first decade and a half of the new millennium, with a high level of alternation between failed projects and new starts, often led by the same people. From an ideological point of view, they frequently imitated the ideas and practices of the European identitarian movement, particularly from Italy and France. This shows how in Portugal as well that the most recent identitarian political culture has largely replaced the national-revolutionary culture typical of the 1960s and 1970s. This last dynamic has long been part of the Portuguese extreme right’s history, at least in four ways: the attention traditionally paid to models followed by other like-minded European organizations; the preference for the more mainstream aspects of the European extreme right (conservative, counter-­revolutionary, orthodox ones); a certain reluctance in implementing heterodox practices and new intellectual elaborations; and the specious character of the reproduction of foreign models as a tool, albeit almost failed, for fixing the extreme-right inaction. Almost two decades into the new millennium, both the party and the autonomous organizations with the related cultural initiatives (magazines and newspapers) are still in early stages of development. Considering the success that extreme

Conclusions 191 right parties have had in other European countries, Portugal is far from being a reference for the neo-nationalist wave currently crossing several European countries. Those that have been a part of this political area all fall into the concept of the old extreme right as defined by political science. Despite recent attempts to re-classify themselves in line with other, more successful European models, Portugal still has no political figure that adheres to the concepts of the “new extreme right” and “right wing populism”. At the most, it has seen different candidates with some kind of a populist political agenda from civil society or parliamentary parties (PSD and CDS). How these initiatives have been shaped, with their weak echo in radical nationalism and systemic inefficiency within the wider picture of Portuguese democracy precludes them from a political history of the Portuguese extreme right. However, the diachronic perspective on the Portuguese case is important for the contemporary history of the European extreme right and provides some interesting indicators in a comparative perspective as well. Among which is the subjection of pro-fascist factions to the authoritarian institutions they were part of, as well as political weakness that characterized them when transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy. The vulnerability they displayed when up against the revolutionary forces, their subordinate position in one of the two fronts that fought over the balance of power at the peak of the transition, and their failure to take advantage of the window of opportunities during the transition were all defining elements that explain their present position. The consequences of their political culture changing, which led to the generational fracture among generations of the extreme right in consolidated democracy are also of note, in particular the prevalence and impact of rootless subcultural characters in the radical milieu. Finally, one last defining element was the inability of the traditional extreme right in promoting successfully their discourse shaped on the new extreme-right political agenda, even in the absence of any competition from other right-wing populist players.

Index

Academic Legionary Organization (Formação Legionária Académica FLA) 43, 51 Acção Popular 27, 32 Acção Realista Portuguesa 19, 33n1 Adinolfi, Gabriele 171 – 173, 177 African War 2, 4 – 5, 10 – 11, 30, 181, 183; and the authoritarian regime 35, 38, 42 – 43, 45, 60, 66; and the consolidated democracy 138; and the transition to democracy 74, 92 Aginter Press 41, 61, 93 Agora 32, 47, 49 – 50, 75, 151 Ala Liberal 55 – 56, 61, 65, 133 Alameda Digital 173, 179n2 Algeria 38, 42, 44 – 45, 167 Aliança Democrática (AD) see Democratic Alliance Almeida Araújo, José Harry de 79, 84 A Nação 20, 22 – 24, 31 Angola 128n1, 162; and the authoritarian regime 33n2, 35, 41, 43, 47, 59 – 60; and the transition to democracy 74, 88, 92, 97n7, 101 – 103 anti-communism 3 – 4, 128n1, 133, 181, 185 – 188; and the authoritarian regime 45, 51, 59; and democratic normalization 101 – 107, 109 – 113, 115; and the revolution 73 – 74, 78 – 80, 82 – 87, 89 – 97 anti-elitism 161, 190 anti-extremism 107 anti-fascism 10, 78, 82, 84, 135, 170 anti-Islamism 156, 160, 170, 175, 177, 190 anti-Marxism 6, 60, 182; and the transition to democracy 73, 75 – 77, 107, 110, 115 anti-Salazarism 183; and the authoritarian regime 26 – 30, 35, 38, 47, 63; and the transition to democracy 72, 74, 77 – 78, 80, 82

anti-Semitism 23, 42, 135, 146 anti-socialism 103, 139 Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Farças Armadas MFA) 3, 5, 97n1, 97n3, 97n4, 187; and the revolution 72, 76, 78 – 79, 81, 84 – 86, 93 – 97; and the transition to democracy 105, 112, 117, 128n1 Arouca, Luís 79 – 80 A Rua 121, 125, 134, 187 – 188; and democratic normalization 102 – 104, 107, 109, 111 – 116, 118 Associação Académica de Coimbra (AAC) 26, 44 – 46, 57, 59 Barbosa, Arnaldo Miranda 45, 57, 59 Bandarra 80 – 81, 103 Beirão, Caetano de Mello 23 – 26, 29 – 30 Belgium 38, 146 Bessa, António Marques 62, 103, 122 – 123, 125, 127 Bloc Identitaire 175 – 176 Braga da Cruz, Guilherme 44, 75 Branquinho, Duarte 166, 170 – 174, 176 – 178 Brazil: and the authoritarian regime 31, 61, 64; and the consolidated democracy 141, 146, 162, 167; and the transition to democracy 72, 88 – 92, 113, 128n1 Brito, António José de: and the authoritarian regime 24 – 30, 32, 40, 43; and the consolidated democracy 138, 166 – 167; and the transition to democracy 75, 125 Caetano, Marcelo 2 – 5, 10 – 12, 97n1, 134, 183 – 186; and democratic normalization 104, 106, 108; and the intellectual milieu 23, 27, 32; and the Marcello Caetano government 55 – 56, 58 – 66; and

194 Index the revolution 71 – 72, 74, 77, 81, 88, 93; and the war in Africa 35, 51 – 52 Câmara Corporativa see Corporative Chamber Cardoso, Agostinho Barbieri 86, 94 Castelo Branco, Miguel 137, 140 – 141 Catholic Church 157, 182, 187; and the authoritarian regime 3, 7 – 8, 19 – 20, 24, 33n3; and the transition to democracy 80, 88, 94 – 95 Catholicism 181; and the consolidated democracy 134, 160, 162, 166; and the intellectual milieu 21, 23, 25 – 27, 29, 31; and the Marcello Caetano government 55 – 56, 58 – 60; 73, and the transition to democracy 76 – 79, 89, 105, 110, 125; and the war in Africa 38, 45 – 48; see also Catholic Church Causa Monárquica 29, 49, 80, 137 CEDADE Portugal 52, 61, 136, 145 – 146 censorship 12, 30, 45, 51 – 52, 58, 61, 125 centrism 28, 199; and the consolidated democracy 135 – 136, 161; and democratic normalization 104, 106 – 107, 110 – 111, 113 – 118; and the revolution 73, 77, 79, 85 Centro Académico da Democracia Cristã de Coimbra (CADC) 23, 27, 45, 58 Círculo de Estudos Sociaias Vector (CESV) 56, 60, 78 Centro Democrático Social CDS see Social Democratic Centre Centro do Nacionalismo Lusitano 19, 33n1 César, Amândio 24, 26, 30 Christian Democracy 23, 77; see also Christian Democratic Party Christian Democratic Party (Partido da Democracia Cristã PDC) 187 – 188; and the consolidated democracy 135, 140, 163; and democratic normalization 104 – 108, 110, 112, 114 – 116, 118; and the revolution 77 – 79, 85, 87 Christian Democratic Party (Partido da Democracia Cristã PDC) 187 – 188; and the consolidated democracy 135, 140, 163; and democratic normalization 104 – 108, 110, 112, 114 – 116, 118; and the revolution 77 – 79, 85, 87 Círculo de Estudos Sociais Véctor (CESV) 56, 60, 78 Club de l’Horloge 123 – 124 colonialism 7, 135, 184; and the intellectual milieu 32; and the Marcello

Caetano government 56, 58 – 59, 61, 63 – 64, 66; and the war in Africa 35, 42 Comandos Operacionais de Defesa da Civilização Ocidental (CODECO) 101 – 102 Combate 45 – 48, 50, 61, 74, 121 communism 181, 186; and the consolidated democracy 144 – 145, 160, 176; and the intellectual milieu 23, 26, 28, 31; and the Marcello Caetano government 66; and the transition to democracy 78, 82 – 83, 87 – 88, 90; and the war in Africa 35, 42, 45; see also anti-communism Comte, August 21 – 22 Congo 38 Congresso Nacionalista Português 165, 167 Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional TC) 147, 150 – 151 Cooperativa Livreira Cidadela 56, 58 COPCON (Comando Operacional do Continente) 81, 84, 94, 96, 97n3 Corporative Chamber (Câmara Corporativa) 65 – 67 coup d’état 3, 5, 44, 185; and the transition to democracy 71 – 72, 74 – 75, 92 – 93, 105 de Arriaga, Kaúlza 55, 135, 187 – 188; and the transition to democracy 71, 106 – 107, 111 – 112, 115, 118n1, 118n2 de Benoist, Alain 6, 50, 121 – 123, 126, 127 decolonization 6, 9 – 10, 149, 151, 186; and the transition to democracy 71, 73 Delgado, Humberto 28, 30, 33n5 democracy 1 – 4, 8 – 13, 181, 183, 185 – 187, 189 – 191; and the authoritarian regime 20, 22 – 24, 26, 62; democratic normalization 101 – 102, 104, 110, 113; and the identitarian movement 165; and new party strategy 155 – 156, 159, 161 – 163; and the revolution 71 – 75, 78 – 79, 81 – 82, 87, 94, 96; see also Christian democracy; social democracy Democratic Alliance (Aliança Democrática AD) 6, 188; and the consolidated democracy 133, 139; and the transition to democracy 107, 115 – 118, 123 Democratic Movement for the Liberation of Portugal (Movimento Democrático para a Libertação de Portugal MDLP)

Index  195 128n1, 186; and the transition to democracy 88 – 92, 94 – 96, 101 – 102, 112, 123 democratic normalization 71, 97, 106, 110 – 112, 135, 189 Diário da Manhã 29, 31 – 32, 47 Direcção-Geral de Segurança (DGS) 11 – 12, 48; and the transition to democracy 72, 86 – 88, 90, 92, 111 Eanes, António Ramalho 96, 104, 106, 110, 113, 155 Easter massacre 85 – 86 Emílio, Rodrigo 75, 148 – 149, 151 ethno-centrism 166 ethno-culturalism 158, 166, 168 ethno-nationalism 3, 7, 181, 189; and the consolidated democracy 144 – 145, 147 – 149, 153n2, 157, 168 ethno-tribalism 62 Eurocentrism 38, 62 European Economic Community (EEC) 3, 113, 117, 133, 159; and the authoritarian regime 47, 56, 61 – 62 European Union 151, 159 – 160 Eurosiberia 171, 173 Exército do Libertação de Portugal (ELP) see Portuguese Liberation Army fascism 4 – 5, 182 – 183, 191; and the consolidated democracy 135, 137 – 140, 142, 150 – 151, 166 – 167; and the intellectual milieu 19 – 20, 22 – 29, 32, 33n1; and the Marcello Caetano government 59, 62; and the transition to democracy 75, 78, 87, 94, 107, 115, 125; and the war in Africa 36 – 38, 42 – 46; see also anti-fascism; neo-fascism Faye, Guillaume 126 – 127, 166, 169 – 170, 172 – 174 federalism 64, 74 – 75, 159 Fernandes, Luís 50 – 52 Ferreira, Zarco Moniz 39 – 41, 43 – 44, 49, 52, 108 – 109 First Republic 2, 19, 21 – 22, 25, 63, 161 First World War 22, 44 Força Nacional Nova Monarquia (FNNM) see National Force New Monarchy Formação Legionária Académica (FLA) see Academic Legionary Organization France 190; and the authoritarian regime 35, 38, 48 – 50, 52, 65; and the consolidated democracy 136, 146,

167 – 169, 172 – 173, 175 – 176, 178; and the transition to democracy 86, 90, 92, 112, 121 Franco, Francisco 135, 140; see also Francoism; Franco regime Francoism 1, 181 Franco regime 5, 48, 62, 88 – 90 Freitas da Costa, Miguel 33n6, 80 – 81 Freitas do Amaral, Diogo 133, 175; and the transition to democracy 73, 77, 102, 104, 112, 114 Frente 50 Frente dos Estudantes Nacionalistas (FEN) see Nationalist Students Front Frente Nacional (FN) see National Front Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) see National Liberation Front of Angola Futuro Presente 116, 121 – 127, 133 – 136, 167 Galvão de Melo, Carlos 73, 79, 111 – 112 Germany 52, 86, 146 Gonçalves, Vasco 83, 88 – 89, 91, 96, 117 Greece 1 – 2, 62, 146, 171 Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européene (GRECE) 122, 124, 169, 177 Group of the Nine (Grupo dos Nove) 95 – 96 groupuscular right wing 6, 13, 142 – 143, 165, 189 Grupo dos Nove see Group of the Nine Guedes, Fernando 29 – 30 Henriques, José Paulo 142 – 144, 147, 151 Hipólito Raposo, José 81, 103 hot summer 94, 111 Identitarian Cause (Causa Identitária CI) 168 – 176, 178 identitarian movement 7, 165, 167 – 168, 173 – 174, 177, 190 immigration 1, 6, 189 – 190; and the identitarian movement 166, 168 – 170, 173, 177 imperialism 7, 31, 93, 160, 181, 184; and the Marcello Caetano government 59 – 60, 65; and the war in Africa 39, 42, 44 – 45, 49 Independent Movement for National Rebuilding (Movimento Independente para a Reconstrucão Nacional MIRN)

196 Index 187 – 188; and the consolidated democracy 135, 140; and the transition to democracy 105, 107, 115 – 116, 118 Independent Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata Independente PSDI) 79 – 80 Instituto do Estudos Português (IEP) see Portuguese Studies Institute integralism 105, 137, 166; and the authoritarian regime 19, 23 – 24, 28, 47; see also Integralismo Lusitano Integralismo Lusitano 184; and the authoritarian regime 22, 26 – 27, 33n1, 38; and the consolidated democracy 134, 175; and the transition to democracy 78, 80 – 81 integrationism 62 – 67, 71, 74 – 75, 149 Internet 13, 156, 165, 168 – 169, 171 – 173, 176 Islam 157, 166, 169, 189; see also antiIslamism Italy 121, 187, 190; and the authoritarian regime 48 – 49, 52, 65; and the consolidated democracy 146, 161, 172, 177 Jardim, Jorge 94 – 95 Jardim, Miguel Ângelo 166 – 167, 169, 171, 173 – 175 Jeune Nation 32, 40 Jovem Portugal (JP) 39 – 42, 44, 47 – 48 Júdice, José Miguel: and the authoritarian regime 55, 57 – 58; and the consolidated democracy 168; and the transition to democracy 74, 90, 103, 116 – 117, 123, 125 Junta de Salvação Nacional (JSN) see National Salvation Junta jus sanguinis 157, 170 jus soli 157, 170 justicialism 41, 59 Kameradschaftsring Nationaler Jugendverbände (KNJ) 40 Lagoa, Vera 103 Legião Portuguesa see Portuguese Legion Le Pen, Jean Marie 124, 140 – 141, 149 liberalization 3, 5, 22, 55, 160 – 161, 183 Liberal Party (Partido Liberal PL) 76, 79, 81 – 84 Libertação 93 – 94

Lucas Pires, Francisco 57, 82, 104, 112, 123 – 124, 141 Machado, Mário 156, 174 Marcelism 182; and the authoritarian regime 27, 32, 64, 66 – 67; and the transition to democracy 71, 78 Marcelist Spring 67 Maria da Fonte Plan (Plano Maria da Fonte) 89, 94 – 96, 187 Maritain, Jacques 27, 78 Marxism: and the authoritarian regime 24, 37 – 38, 47, 59; and the consolidated democracy 149, 168, 170; and the transition to democracy 80 – 81, 85, 93 – 94, 108, 117, 122; see also anti-Marxism masonry 23, 42, 80 Melo, Cónego Eduardo 95 – 96, 97n8 Mensagem 23 – 29, 31, 39, 43, 75 Ministry of National Education 46, 51 Mocidade Portuguesa see Portuguese Youth monarchism 7; and the authoritarian regime 21 – 24, 26 – 28, 38, 46, 62; and the consolidated democracy 137 – 139, 166; and the transition to democracy 78 – 79, 109, 115 Moreira, Adriano 64 – 65, 113, 139 Movimento das Farças Armadas (MFA) see Armed Forces Movement Movimento de Acção Nacional (MAN) see National Action Movement Movimento de Acção Portuguesa (MAP) see Portuguese Action Movement Movimento Federalista Português (MFP) see Portuguese Federalist Movement Movimento Independente para a Reconstrução Nacional (MIRN) see Independent Movement for National Rebuilding Movimento Nacional Sindicalista 19, 33n1 Movimento Popular Portugues (MPP) see Portuguese People’s Movement Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) 106, 141, 151; and the authoritarian regime 30, 40, 52, 58, 61 Movimento Vanguardista 51 – 52 multi-culturalism 147, 170, 190 Múrias, Manuel Maria: and the consolidated democracy 134, 151; and the transition to democracy 80 – 81, 103 – 104, 107 – 109, 115, 118;

Index  197 Nasserism 62 National Action Movement (Movimento de Acção Nacional MAN) 136, 142 – 151, 155, 169 Nationaldemocratische Partei Deutschlands (NDP) 32, 50 National Force New Monarchy (Força Nacional Nova Monarquia FNNM) 136, 140 – 142, 148, 152n2 National Front (Frente Nacional FN): and the authoritarian regime 29, 39; and the identitarian movement 165, 170 – 171, 173 – 175; and the transition to democracy 104 – 105, 108, 116 nationalism 4, 6, 8 – 13, 183 – 186, 188, 190 – 191; and democratic normalization103, 105, 108, 112, 116; and the intellectual milieu 19 – 20, 22 – 29, 31 – 33, 33n1, 33n2; and the Marcello Caetano government 55 – 62, 66; and modernization 126; and a new cycle in democracy 134 – 143, 146, 148 – 152; and the new party strategy 155 – 157, 160 – 161; and the revolution 73 – 76, 78, 80, 82; see also African War; ethno-nationalism; identitarian movement; universalist nationalism Nationalist Students Front (Frente dos Estudantes Nacionalistas FEN) 47 – 48, 78, 80 National Liberation Front of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola FNLA) 92, 97n7, 101 national preference 145, 158, 189 National Renewal Party (Partido Nacional Renovar PNR) 4, 7, 190; and the consolidated democracy 152, 155 – 163, 169 – 175, 177 National Salvation Junta (Junta de Salvação Nacional JSN) 73, 76, 79, 97n1, 111 National Secretariat for Information (Secretariado Nacional de Informação SNI) 29, 75 National Socialism 20, 24, 62, 135, 138, 184 National Union (União Nacional) 2, 77, 141; and the authoritarian regime 27, 29, 56, 64 NATO 28, 32, 78, 160 neo-fascism 6, 9 – 10, 30, 109, 163, 184; and the Marcello Caetano government 58, 61; and the war in Africa 39 – 40, 47, 49, 51 – 52

neo-liberalism 160 – 161, 170 neo-Nazism 136, 141 – 142, 144 – 146, 152, 156, 166 New Culture 123 new right 6, 122 – 127, 187 New State 2 – 6, 8, 10 – 11, 181 – 182, 184 – 187, 190; and the consolidated democracy 133 – 134, 136 – 140, 150 – 151, 175; and democratic normalization 103, 105, 107 – 108, 113, 118n1; and the intellectual milieu 19 – 20, 22 – 31, 33n3; and the Marcello Caetano government 55 – 56, 61 – 65; and modernization 125; and the revolution 71 – 75, 77 – 78, 80, 87, 89, 93; and the war in Africa 35 – 39, 42 – 48, 52 New World Order 23 Nogueira, Florentino Goulart 24 – 27, 29 – 30, 32, 59, 75 Nogueira, Franco 65 – 66, 113 normalization see democratic normalization Nouvelle Droite 116, 121, 123 – 125, 169, 178 Nouvelle Droite 127, 167 Nova Monarquia (NM) 137 – 141, 152n2 O Diabo 102 – 103, 117, 121, 123 – 125, 149, 178 Oficina de Teatro da Universidade de Coimbra (OTUC) 58 – 59 O’Neill, José 20, 31 Ongoing Revolutionary Process (Processo Revolucinário Em Curso PREC) 5, 13, 134, 187; and the transition to democracy 87, 97, 101 – 103 Ordem Nova 39 – 40, 109, 136 Ordine Nuovo 32, 40, 50, 61, 171 Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) 38, 41 – 42, 44 – 45, 52, 93 Osório, José Sanches 188; and democratic normalization 105, 112; and the revolution 79, 85, 87, 90, 94 O Templário 103 Ousset, Jean 58, 78, 151 Pacheco de Amorim, Diogo 103, 123 – 124 Pacheco de Amorim, Fernando 62 – 63, 65, 74, 82 – 84, 90 paramilitary 2, 8, 11, 187; and the authoritarian regime 20, 28 – 29, 39, 41; and the transition to democracy 72, 76, 87

198 Index Partido Comunista Português (PCP) see Portuguese Communist Party Partido da Democracia Cristâ (PDC) see Christian Democratic Party Partido da Direita Portuguesa (MIRN/ PDP) see Right-Wing Portuguese Party Partido do Progresso (MFP/PP) see Progress Party Partido Liberal (PL) see Liberal Party Partido Nacionalista Português (PNP) see Portuguese Nationalist Party Partido Nacional Renovar (PNR) see National Renewal Party Partido Popular Monárquico (PPM) see Royalist People’s Party Partido Social Democrata Independente (PSDI) see Independent Social Democrat Party Partido Social Democrata Português (PSDP) see Portuguese Social Democrat Party Partido Trabalhista Democrático (PTDP) see Portuguese Democratic Workers Party PIDE 11 – 12; and the authoritarian regime 41, 44 – 45, 48 – 50; and the transition to democracy 72, 86 – 88, 90, 92, 94, 111 Pimenta, Alfredo 4, 11, 20, 24, 29, 33, 33n1, 33n4, 37, 138 Pimenta de Castro, Joaquim 19, 22 Piñar, Blas 32, 109, 140, 142 Pinheiro de Azevedo, José 73, 89, 92, 105, 112, 188 Pinto Coelho, José 155 – 157, 159, 170, 178 Pinto, Jaime Nogueira: and the authoritarian regime 36 – 37, 41, 56, 61, 66; and the consolidated democracy 135, 139, 153n2; and the transition to democracy 82, 103, 116, 121 – 122, 124 – 125, 128n1 Plano Maria da Fonte see Maria da Fonte Plan Política 36 – 37, 56, 60 – 62, 121 – 122, 124 populism 1 – 2, 9, 191; and the consolidated democracy 136, 139, 153n2, 156 – 159, 161 Portuguese Action Movement (Movimento de Acção Portuguesa MAP) 148, 186; and democratic normalization 108, 115 – 116; and the revolution 75 – 76, 81, 84, 86, 92 – 93

Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português PCP) 3, 5, 186 – 187; and the authoritarian regime 26, 45; and the consolidated democracy 163, 175; and democratic normalization 101 – 102, 107, 117; and the revolution 72 – 73, 78, 80 – 84, 86 – 87, 89 – 90, 94 – 96 Portuguese Democratic Workers Party (Partido Trabalhista Democrático PTDP) 76, 82 – 84 Portuguese Federalist Movement (Movimento Federalista Português MFP) 74, 76, 80, 82 – 84, 90, 104 Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa) 2, 8, 11; and the authoritarian regime 28 – 29, 31, 39, 41, 43, 50 – 51; and the transition to democracy 72, 75, 87 – 88, 93 Portuguese Liberation Army (Exército do Libertação de Portugal ELP) 187; and the transition to democracy 86, 88 – 80, 92 – 95, 101 – 102, 108, 128n1 Portuguese Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Português PNP) 76, 83 Portuguese People’s Movement (Movimento Popular Portugues MPP) 77 – 78, 80, 82, 84 – 85, 105 Portuguese Social Democrat Party (Partido Social Democrata Português (PSDP) 79 – 80 Portuguese Studies Institute (Instituto do Estudos Português IEP) 109, 128n1 Portuguese Youth (Mocidade Portuguesa) 2, 8, 72; and the authoritarian regime 20, 28, 39, 43, 50 – 51 Processo Revolucinário Em Curso (PREC) see Ongoing Revolutionary Process Progress Party (Partido do Progresso MFP/ PP) 83 – 84, 90, 104 protectionism 56, 162 protests 8, 188; and the authoritarian regime 29, 43 – 45, 47 – 48, 57 – 60; and the consolidated democracy 133, 153n2, 158 – 159, 161, 170; and the transition to democracy 74, 83 racialism 144 – 148, 152, 155 racism: and the authoritarian regime 63 – 64, 66; and the consolidated democracy 135, 140, 145, 147 – 149, 158 – 159

Index  199 radicalism 1 – 2, 9 – 10, 13, 181 – 182; and the authoritarian regime 23, 32, 61; and the consolidated democracy 142, 147, 172, 175, 178; and the transition to democracy 121, 123 realism 62, 113, 115, 121, 126, 136 refugees: and the authoritarian regime 22, 41; and the consolidated democracy 158; and the transition to democracy 86 – 88, 93, 110, 112 Republicanism 21 Resistência 56, 78, 80, 121, 125 Rhodesia 59, 62 right wing see groupuscular right wing; new right; subcultural right wing Right-Wing Portuguese Party (Partido da Direita Portuguesa MIRN/PDP) 107, 115 – 116, 118, 135, 140, 187 Roberto, Holden 30, 92 Rodriguez, António da Cruz 56, 151, 155; and the transition to democracy 78, 80, 85, 105, 127 Royalist People’s Party (Partido Popular Monárquico PPM) 6, 188; and the consolidated democracy 136 – 139, 141; and the transition to democracy 78, 95, 107, 115 Salazar, António de Oliveira 2 – 5, 12, 183 – 184; and the consolidated democracy 134 – 135, 156; and the intellectual milieu 19 – 20, 25 – 30, 32; and the Marcello Caetano government 56, 63; and the transition to democracy 73, 113, 125; and the war in Africa 36 – 37, 42, 51; see also antiSalazarism; Salazarism Salazarism 7, 181, 184; and the consolidated democracy 137, 152, 156, 165, 167; and the intellectual milieu 25 – 26; and the Marcello Caetano government 55 – 56, 64; and the transition to democracy 71, 78, 85, 88, 112; and the war in Africa 36, 38, 41, 46, 48; see also anti-Salazarism Second World War 2, 4, 8, 10, 181 – 183; and the authoritarian regime 20, 22 – 24, 31 – 32, 36, 38, 50; and the consolidated democracy 142; and the transition to democracy 128 Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI) see National Secretariat for Information

Silva, Aníbal Cavaco 135 – 136, 139, 151 skinhead culture 6 – 7, 13, 189 – 190; and the identitarian movement 165, 171, 173 – 174; and a new cycle in democracy 136, 142, 144, 146 – 148, 150, 152; and the new party strategy 156, 163 Soares, Mário 73, 90, 104, 114, 133, 138 – 139 social democracy 13, 73, 77, 79 Social Democratic Centre (Centro Democrático Social CDS) 6, 10, 13, 187 – 188, 191; and the revolution 73, 76 – 77, 82 – 85, 87, 89, 95 socialism: and the authoritarian regime 24, 26, 37, 40, 47, 59; and the consolidated democracy 133, 136, 145, 157, 159, 175; and the transition to democracy 77, 79, 97n4, 101, 107, 114 – 115; see also anti-socialism; National Socialism; social democracy South Africa 62, 88, 128n1, 157, 178 South America 62, 89 Spain 1 – 2, 5, 128n1, 187; and the authoritarian regime 47 – 49; and the consolidated democracy 146, 171 – 172; and democratic normalization 103, 109, 112; and the revolution 78 – 79, 84, 86 – 93, 95 – 96 Spínola, António de 5, 182, 186; and the transition to democracy 73 – 76, 78 – 79, 81 – 94, 97n1, 106 street activism 38 – 39, 170 – 171, 183 subcultural right wing 3, 6, 13, 136, 165, 191 syndicalism 2, 57, 137, 184; and the intellectual milieu 19 – 20, 27; and the transition to democracy 108, 110; and the war in Africa 35, 38, 41 – 42, 45 Teles, Gonçalo Ribeiro 78, 138, 141 Tempo Novo 80 – 81, 102 – 103 Tempo Presente 30 – 32, 39, 44 Terra e Povo 177 – 178 Terre et Peuple 167, 169, 171 – 172, 176 – 177 terrorism 47, 89, 101 – 102, 152n1, 158, 187 Thiriart, Jean 48 – 49 Tribunal Constitucional (TC) see Constitutional Court Tribuna Popular 80, 83 – 84 Turkey 157, 160, 166

200 Index União dos Povos de Angola (UPA) 30, 35, 47 União Nacional see National Union United Nations (UN) 35, 40, 42, 44, 47 universalist nationalism 138, 149, 153n2 University of Coimbra 5, 75, 140; and the authoritarian regime 21, 23, 44, 48, 56, 66 University of Lisbon 30, 32, 35, 39, 47 – 48 USA: and the authoritarian regime 42, 47, 62; and the consolidated democracy 145, 160, 165 – 166, 169; and the transition to democracy 89 – 90, 92, 116 USSR 184; and the authoritarian regime 42, 47, 59, 62; and the consolidated

democracy 133, 145; and the transition to democracy 92 – 93, 117 Valle de Figueiredo, José: and the authoritarian regime 37, 41, 42 – 47, 52, 56; and the transition to democracy 74, 83, 109, 121, 126 Vector see Círculo de Estudos Sociaias Vector (CESV) Venner, Dominique 126, 178 Vial, Pierre 126, 169, 171 – 173, 176 – 177 welfare state 3, 161 – 162, 189 Zionism 189; and the authoritarian regime 23, 31, 42, 47; and the consolidated democracy 147, 160