António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar GCTE GCSE GColIH GCIC (28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese statesman, academic, and economist who served as Portugal's President of the Council of Ministers from 1932 to 1968. Having come to power under the Ditadura Nacional ("National Dictatorship"), he reframed the regime as the corporatist Estado Novo ("New State"), with himself as a dictator. The regime he created lasted until 1974, making it one of the longest-lived authoritarian regimes in modern Europe.

A political economy professor at the University of Coimbra, Salazar entered public life as finance minister with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the 28 May 1926 coup d'état. The military of 1926 saw themselves as the guardians of the nation in the wake of the instability and perceived failure of the First Republic, but they had no idea how to address the critical challenges of the hour. Armed with broad powers to restructure state finances, within one year Salazar balanced the budget and stabilised Portugal's currency, producing the first of many budgetary surpluses. Amidst a period when authoritarian regimes elsewhere in Europe were merging political power with militarism, with leaders adopting military titles and uniforms, Salazar enforced the strict separation of the armed forces from politics. Salazar's aim was the de-politicisation of society, rather than the mobilisation of the populace.

Opposed to communism, socialism, syndicalism and liberalism, Salazar's rule was conservative, corporatist and nationalist in nature; it was also capitalist to some extent although in a very conditioned way until the beginning of the final stage of his rule, in the 1960s. Salazar distanced himself from Nazism and fascism, which he described as a "pagan Caesarism" that did not recognise legal, religious or moral limits. Throughout his life Salazar avoided populist rhetoric. He was generally opposed to the concept of political parties when, in 1930, he created the National Union. Salazar described and promoted the Union as a "non-party", and proclaimed that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party. He promoted Catholicism but argued that the role of the Church was social, not political, and negotiated the Concordat of 1940 that kept the church at arm's length. One of the mottos of the Salazar regime was Deus, Pátria e Família ("God, Fatherland and Family"), although Catholicism was never the state religion.

Salazar supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and played a key role in keeping Portugal neutral during World War II while still providing aid and assistance to the Allies. Despite being a dictatorship, Portugal under his rule took part in the founding of some international organisations. The country was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, joined the European Payments Union in 1950 and was one of the founding members of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1960; it was also a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961. Under Salazar's rule, Portugal also joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1961 and began the Portuguese Colonial War.

The years between the conclusion of World War II and 1973 represented the best period of economic expansion for Portugal in the 20th century. During this era, growth rates reached unprecedented levels and sustained this momentum over an extended period. Following over a century of either economic stagnation or divergence from wealthier global economies, Portugal's economy began to consistently converge, particularly accelerating during the 1960s. Portugal's GDP per capita in relation to the EU reached 66% in 1973, falling afterwards to below 65% in 2022.

The doctrine of pluricontinentalism was the basis of Salazar's territorial policy, a conception of the Portuguese Empire as a unified state that spanned multiple continents. After Salazar fell into a coma in 1968, President Américo Tomás dismissed him from the position of prime minister.

With the Estado Novo enabling him to exercise vast political powers, Salazar used censorship and the PIDE secret police to quell opposition. One opposition leader, Humberto Delgado, who openly challenged Salazar's regime in the 1958 presidential election, was first exiled and became involved in several violent actions aimed at overthrowing the regime, including the Portuguese cruise liner Santa Maria hijacking and the Beja Revolt ultimately leading to his assassination by the regime's secret police, the PIDE, in 1965.

The Estado Novo collapsed during the Carnation Revolution of 1974, four years after Salazar's death. In recent decades, "new sources and methods are being employed by Portuguese historians in an attempt to come to grips with the dictatorship, which lasted forty-eight years."