António de Oliveira Salazar

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António de Oliveira Salazar GCTE GCSE GColIH GCIC (/ˌsæləˈzɑːr/, US also /ˌsɑːl-/, Portuguese: [ɐ̃ˈtɔni.u ð(ɨ) ɔliˈvɐjɾɐ sɐlɐˈzaɾ]; 28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese dictator who served as 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 Estado Novo ("New State"), a corporatist dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1933 until 1974. Salazar was a political economy professor at 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 clue how to address the critical challenges of the hour. Within one year, armed with special powers, Salazar balanced the budget and stabilized Portugal's currency. Salazar produced the first of many budgetary surpluses. He promoted civilian administration in the authoritarian regime when the politics of more and more countries were becoming militarized. Salazar's aim was the de-politicization of society, rather than the mobilization of the populace. However, Portugal remained largely underdeveloped, its population relatively poor and with low education attainment when compared to the rest of Europe. 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 fascism and Nazism, which he described as a "pagan Caesarism" that recognized neither legal, religious nor moral limits. Throughout his life Salazar avoided populist rhetoric. Salazar was generally opposed to the concept of political parties when, in 1930, he created the National Union. Salazar described and promoted the party as a "non-party", and announced 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 he never turned Portugal into a confessional state. 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 then killed by Salazar's secret police. Salazar supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and played a key role in keeping Portugal and Spain 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 organizations. Portugal was one of the 12 founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (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, and a founding member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1961. Under his rule, Portugal also joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1961 and began the Portuguese Colonial War. The doctrine of pluricontinentalism was the basis of his 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. Salazar`s rule is widely described as dictatoral and was characterized by systematic repression of civil and political rights, mass torture, arbitrary arrests, concentration camps, police brutality against civil rights protestors, electoral fraud and colonial wars that left hundreds of thousands dead. 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." (Source: DBPedia)