Raquel Varela
It was a movement of captains from the middle ranks of the army who were neither generals nor ordinary soldiers. They could understand that it was impossible to win the war militarily. They started off organizing in defense of their own corporate interests, but they later decided to mount a coup to end the colonial war. They also put forward a vague program of democratization.
Their conspiracy involved around two hundred officers. They agreed to stage the coup of April 25, 1974. These officers mainly came from Guinea-Bissau, where the army was heavily defeated and the liberation movement had already declared independence, though without being recognized by the Portuguese state. There was involvement by officers from Angola and Mozambique as well.
They organized themselves to mount a very successful coup. The regime did not know what was going to happen, and neither did the spies of the US embassy. It came as a huge surprise to people around the world. The MFA took control of the main military, communications, and transport sectors, telling people not to leave their homes.
However, many people disobeyed these instructions, taking to the streets or going to their workplaces. Suddenly you had thousands of people in the streets, embracing the soldiers, with children playing on their tanks. Everyone was smiling and celebrating.
The regime had forbidden trade unions and political parties. The Communist Party was organized as an underground party with around three thousand members. There were other left-wing groups, mainly Maoists but also some Trotskyist organizations and others inspired by the guerrillas of Latin America. Together these groups had another three thousand or so cadres, mostly coming from the universities and the opposition of young people to the colonial war.
After Israel, Portugal was the country with the highest percentage of its population incorporated into the army anywhere in the world. The war in Africa was a key factor in the radicalization of young people and the development of Marxist intellectuals and leadership teams in Portugal.
In the absence of legal parties or unions, the people themselves went to their workplaces: doctors, nurses, teachers, actors, factory workers. They began to elect their own representatives from popular assemblies, with a mandate that could be revoked if they did not carry out their instructions. Thus was born a situation of dual power, which is a feature of most revolutions.
Within days of the revolution, you had the formation of workers’ commissions and neighborhood councils in the empty space left by the absence of unions and parties. Already on April 25, workers started going to the headquarters of the state censorship body and the political police, occupying those buildings and releasing prisoners.
They also went to the headquarters of the state-sponsored trade unions and occupied them. They went to the municipal headquarters and began electing provisional commissions, while electing neighborhood commissions outside as well. These were incredible, beautiful days when we saw people making decisions in a way that they had never done before in their lives.
First of all, a national salvation junta was formed under General António de Spínola, which was trying to keep the state intact. But Spínola wanted to maintain the political police in the colonies and move toward a situation of neocolonialism. The mid-ranking officers of the MFA were totally against this, as they wanted to stop the war immediately. This created a division inside the MFA between the pro-Spínola faction and their opponents, who were the majority and won out.
The workers’ councils, known as commissions in Portugal, called a large number of strikes. There were two million people in the streets on May Day, the first one that could be celebrated in forty-eight years. They were putting forward demands for a minimum wage, an eight-hour working day, rest days on Saturday and Sunday, extra pay for night work, etc. These demands were already on the agenda in the streets a week after the revolution.
Mario Soares was the leader of the Socialist Party, which had been founded in West Germany at the beginning of the 1970s. It was a vanguard party, like the Communists, but even smaller. The Socialists did not play an important role in the opposition to the dictatorship, unlike the Communist Party or the Maoists. But Soares had the support of the United States and the West German Social Democrats, who transferred large amounts of money to fund his party.
Immediately there was a big discussion in Spain, which was still ruled by the Franco regime, about how to avoid what they called the contagious effect of the Portuguese Revolution through opening up the regime. In Greece, the dictatorship of the colonels fell in July 1974, and the first legal newspapers were celebrating the Carnation Revolution. The US president Gerald Ford spoke about the danger of a Red Mediterranean, because there were also big Communist Parties in France and Italy at the time.
In this context, Soares and the Communist leader Álvaro Cunhal returned from exile, and they were invited to form the first provisional government. This government also included the right-wing party, which called itself the Social Democratic Party because of the impact of the revolution.
They wanted to bring Cunhal and his party into the government in order to control the workers’ movement. In doing so, they broke the Cold War taboo against Communist participation in government, hoping that the coalition would be able to control the social movement, although that didn’t happen.