Portugal's 1969 election: Caetano's first vote and the opposition it shaped

On Sunday 26 October 1969, a photographer caught Marcelo Caetano at the ballot box. The 63-year-old law professor, head of the Portuguese government for just over a year, held out his folded paper across a table while a crowd of voters, officials and a uniformed soldier looked on.2 sources

The same day Mário Soares and his wife, Maria Barroso, voted too. In March 1968 Soares had been deported to the island of São Tomé. Now he led the CEUD, one of the opposition lists. Barroso stood for another, the CDE, in Santarém. Voters could strike out names on a list, and she ended up with more votes than anyone else on hers.3 sources

Everyone knew who would win. The regime's own organisation, the União Nacional, ran under a winner-takes-all system that gave minorities no chance of a seat. What was new in 1969 was that the opposition stayed in the race to the end, campaigned openly for a month, and tested how far the new man in charge would let Portugal change.2 sources

António de Oliveira Salazar had run the government for 36 years. On 3 August 1968, at the Forte de Santo António da Barra in São João do Estoril, his summer residence since 1950, he fell from a chair. His health collapsed over the following weeks.2 sources

On 27 September 1968 the Diário do Governo published Decree 48 597. President Américo Tomás dismissed Salazar as President of the Council, letting him keep all the honours of the office, and named Marcelo Caetano in his place. Caetano had helped draft the 1933 Constitution, served as Minister of the Colonies and Minister of the Presidency, and been rector of the University of Lisbon. Since the late 1940s he had led the regime's reformist current.3 sources

His first months raised hopes that became known as the Primavera Marcelista, the Marcelist Spring. Soares was allowed back from São Tomé, and the Bishop of Porto, António Ferreira Gomes, from ten years' exile. The government widened the right to vote, revised union law in workers' favour, created a family allowance for rural labourers and trimmed some powers of the political police. Caetano's own phrase for his programme was renovação na continuidade, renewal in continuity. It is also often quoted as evolução na continuidade, evolution in continuity.3 sources

On the issue that mattered most, nothing moved. Portugal had been fighting wars against independence movements in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique since the early 1960s, and Caetano meant to keep the colonies. Abroad, the wars left the regime increasingly isolated.2 sources

A decree of 1931, under the military dictatorship, gave some women the vote on stricter terms than men. When the Estado Novo elected its first National Assembly in 1934, voters had to be over 21 or legally emancipated. Illiterates could vote only if they paid at least 100 escudos in tax, and women only if they had completed a special, secondary or higher course of study.2 sources

Decrees of 1945 and 1946 widened the female vote a little. Women who were heads of family could vote if they paid the same 100 escudos in tax as illiterate men, and married women who could read and write if they paid at least 200 escudos in property tax. A man who could read and write faced neither test.2 sources

Law 2137, published on 26 December 1968, ended the distinction. Any Portuguese citizen over 21, or legally emancipated, who could read and write Portuguese could now vote for the Assembly, along with illiterates who had already been registered under the old rules. Women and men finally faced the same test. The law still barred anyone caught by its incapacities, which, in the Inter-Parliamentary Union's summary, included a criminal conviction and professing opinions that endangered the security of the State.5 sources

The literacy test still excluded many people, and the government did not update the electoral rolls. Mainland Portugal, the Azores and Madeira had about 9.5 million inhabitants, but only about 1.8 million were registered, around 29 per cent of the population over 21. The historian José Manuel Tavares Castilho called control of the roll one of the keys to the regime's electoral success.2 sources

In December 1968 about 400 people signed a manifesto, À Nação, drafted by the Associação Socialista Portuguesa of Soares and Francisco Salgado Zenha. It offered dialogue with the government in return for free speech, an amnesty, curbs on the police and censorship, and an honest electoral law. The Portuguese Communist Party saw Caetano as Salazarism under a liberal cover and accused the socialists of collaboration.1 source

The government gave little ground. In February 1969 the civil governor of Lisbon banned the Comissão Promotora do Voto, a cross-party group that wanted a new electoral roll and a new law. By May the socialists had concluded that the vote would be a farce, as before. On 15 June, at São Pedro de Moel near Marinha Grande, the opposition agreed a common platform: civil liberties, the end of the political police, the release of political prisoners and a peaceful, political solution to the wars.2 sources

Unity did not last. The historian Mário Matos e Lemos dates the break to a letter Soares sent the CDE on 28 July. In Lisbon, Porto and Braga the socialists ran their own lists as the Comissão Eleitoral de Unidade Democrática (CEUD), with Catholics such as the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and monarchists such as Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles.2 sources

Elsewhere the socialists joined the Comissão Democrática Eleitoral (CDE). Led by the Catholic economist Francisco Pereira de Moura, it brought together Communists and their allies, other Catholic progressives and the independent socialist Jorge Sampaio. In Lisbon a Comissão Eleitoral Monárquica (CEM) also stood.3 sources

Together the three lists fielded 182 candidates in 22 of the 30 constituencies. Nine were women, more than in any other Estado Novo election. Only Bragança, which withdrew at the last minute, and Portalegre, which could not gather the 50 signatures in time, had no opposition list in mainland Portugal. A CEUD list in Mozambique was rejected on the grounds that its candidates had not proved their nationality, a certificate never asked of União Nacional candidates.2 sources

The election committees were legalised only by a decree-law of 5 September 1969, seven weeks before the vote. Civil governors, appointed by the Ministry of the Interior, could dissolve them on vague grounds. Candidates had to declare that they accepted the Constitution and the established social order, and governors declared five of them ineligible.2 sources

The campaign followed the old pattern. Candidates and activists were beaten and arrested, and campaign offices were raided by police and by the Legião Portuguesa, the regime's militia. Halls were refused, meetings broken up, books and leaflets seized. The opposition had no access to radio or television, and the press was censored. Opposition ballot papers were swapped or delivered late by the post office.2 sources

The fraud continued on polling day. The Assembleia da República's study, drawing on Soares's memoirs and on Eleições no Regime Fascista, published in 1979 by the post-revolution government's Comissão do Livro Negro sobre o Fascismo, records that more than 1,500 certificates were forged and others used in the names of dead or absent voters. Members of the Legião could then vote several times, with the connivance of polling-station chairmen.1 source

Caetano campaigned in person. In September and October he told voters that choosing the União Nacional meant order, peace and the gradual autonomy of the overseas provinces, and that choosing the opposition meant abandoning them and risking communism and chaos.1 source

The União Nacional won every constituency and so every seat. Of 1,784,341 registered voters, 1,115,248 cast a ballot, a turnout of 62.5 per cent by the Inter-Parliamentary Union's figures; the Assembleia da República's study puts abstention at 38.4 per cent. The same study notes that abstention would have been much higher if the fraudulent votes could be counted.2 sources

The opposition's best results came south of the Tagus. The CDE took 34.7 per cent in the district of Setúbal, won some parishes in municipalities such as Almada, Moita, Montijo, Palmela and Seixal, and carried every parish in Barreiro. In the districts of Lisbon and Porto together, just over 296,000 people voted.1 source

On 8 November the Minister of the Interior declared the election committees no longer legal and ordered them disbanded. The political scientist Pedro Emanuel Mendes argues that Caetano, though no democrat, believed a leader needed some democratic legitimacy. He spoke often afterwards of the mandato indeclinável, the mandate he could not refuse, that he said the Portuguese people had given him in 1969.2 sources

Caetano wanted new faces in parliament as well as a vote of confidence. José Guilherme de Melo e Castro, a liberal Catholic who headed the União Nacional's executive committee, recruited young independents for its lists. Among those who accepted were José Pedro Pinto Leite, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Francisco Sá Carneiro, João Bosco Mota Amaral, João Pedro Miller Guerra and Joaquim Magalhães Mota.1 source

In the Assembly they became the Ala Liberal, the liberal wing, about twenty deputies. They believed the regime could be democratised from inside, and they backed Caetano against the hardliners on condition that he moved towards democracy. Caetano expected them to support him. The misunderstanding did not last long.2 sources

Their leader, Pinto Leite, died with other deputies in an air crash during a visit to Guinea on 26 July 1970. In December 1970 Sá Carneiro and Mota Amaral drafted their own constitutional bill, signed by 13 other deputies. It guaranteed civil liberties, removed the basis for prior censorship, protected suspects from indefinite detention and restored the direct election of the President. That had been abolished in 1959, after General Humberto Delgado's opposition campaign in the 1958 presidential election had given the regime a fright.4 sources

Caetano wrote to Mota Amaral of his "deep surprise" and accused the liberals of wanting to "disarm" the government at a time "so full of uncertainties and threats".1 source

On 30 June 1971 the majority voted to debate only the committee's text, built on the government's proposal, and the liberal bill was never voted on clause by clause. Most liberals stayed away from the final sessions, as did the conservative hardliners from the final vote, and the revision passed on 7 July 1971 with the President still chosen by an electoral college.2 sources

Caetano saw it differently. In his memoir Depoimento, published in 1974, he wrote that he had never found secure support among the liberals and so had to seek it in the conservative majority, which he called the liberals' sole responsibility.1 source

After the election the opening closed. In 1970 Soares went back into exile in Paris, and Salgado Zenha and Raul Rêgo were arrested. Much of the change was in names. A decree-law of 24 November 1969 abolished the PIDE and handed its work to a new Direcção-Geral de Segurança (DGS). The União Nacional became the Acção Nacional Popular at its congress in February 1970, and a press law of November 1971 renamed censorship exame prévio, prior examination, while keeping it as a tool of state control.4 sources

Some opponents turned to bombs. In 1970 the Acção Revolucionária Armada (ARA) tried to sabotage two troopships, the Cunene and the Vera Cruz, and in 1971 it caused heavy damage at the air base at Tancos.2 sources

On 30 December 1972 Catholics began a vigil for peace at the Capela do Rato in Lisbon. The next day the PSP police and the DGS broke in and arrested fifteen people. Sá Carneiro gave up his seat on 25 January 1973, saying, as The Daily Telegraph reported, that it would be useless to stay. Miller Guerra followed on 7 February. On 28 and 29 July Magalhães Mota and two other deputies, Oliveira Dias and José da Silva, organised a meeting of liberals in Lisbon.3 sources

The next election, on 28 October 1973, was for an enlarged Assembly of 150 seats. On 11 September Caetano warned that any candidate who withdrew would lose his civil rights for five years. On 25 October the 66 CDE candidates withdrew anyway, leaving the Acção Nacional Popular alone on the ballot. In metropolitan Portugal 1,393,294 of 2,096,020 registered voters took part, 66.5 per cent.3 sources

Six months later, on 25 April 1974, a coup by junior officers of the Armed Forces Movement brought the regime down. Caetano was deposed and went into exile in Brazil.3 sources

The losers of 1969 built the parties of the democracy that followed. Soares's socialists founded the Partido Socialista at a meeting in West Germany in 1973. The CDE became a party, the MDP/CDE. On 6 May 1974, eleven days after the revolution, Sá Carneiro, Pinto Balsemão and Magalhães Mota founded the Partido Popular Democrático, today's PSD, with Mota Amaral among its founders.4 sources

Sá Carneiro became Prime Minister in 1980. António Reis, a CDE candidate in Santarém in 1969 and later a founder of the PS, wrote thirty years on that the 1969 campaign marked the beginning of the end of the dictatorship.2 sources

In Brazil Caetano went back to teaching law at the Universidade Gama Filho, where he directed the Institute of Comparative Law. He died in Rio de Janeiro of a heart attack on 26 October 1980, aged 74, eleven years to the day after the election he had hoped would give him a mandate.2 sources

Sá Carneiro, the deputy who had walked out of his Assembly, was by then Prime Minister of a democratic Portugal. He died on 4 December 1980, five weeks after Caetano.1 source