April 25th, always!

Never in our country's history has the meaning of a date been so falsified as that of April 25th. Not the meaning of the alleged Cortes of Lamego, nor the crisis of 1393/5, nor the English ultimatum, nor the Camões celebrations. Only gradually has the meaning of April 25th been purified of manipulation and emerged in its authentic form.

It's time to make an objective analysis of the events of April 25th. That's why I'm only doing it now. The topic is always relevant.

April 25th was a military pronouncement by captains, following many others in Portuguese history, that initiated a transition from an authoritarian dictatorship to a democratic regime. These transition processes always have their own characteristics, and sometimes very different ones. The Portuguese case, for example, had nothing to do with the Spanish one.

There is always a difficult period between the fall of an authoritarian regime and the fulfillment of the conditions for the formation of a fully democratic regime based on free elections. But while in Spain there was a successor to the authoritarian regime that ensured the transition to democracy, nothing like that happened in our country. Here, authoritarianism was overthrown, and in Spain, it transitioned to democracy; a big difference. In our country, the deposed regime left a complete power vacuum—in other words, nothing that could serve the transition. On the other hand, democratic political parties were very new and still lacked legitimacy until the electorate decided to support them in upcoming elections.

It thus became clear that, given the complete disintegration of the state apparatus, power remained in the hands of the military, as they were the only body that could then act as a repository of political power. However, the transfer of power to groups of military personnel, who soon facilitated provisional governments under their control, bodes ill for the democratic transition and only makes it possible to replace one dictatorship with another. This was almost the case in Brazil.

The military was politically divided, as everyone knows, but the most active faction enabled and fostered access to political power for the most radical sectors of the opposition to the deposed regime, led by the Communist Party. These sectors were served by provisional governments lacking any democratic legitimacy. It also fostered the mobilization of the masses of people who supported them to carry out revolutionary actions, said to be spontaneous, but in practice orchestrated by them. The provisional governments were not caretaker governments aimed at preparing for constitutional elections, but rather instruments of political power for the most radical sectors of the armed forces, sponsored by the Communist Party, expanding their power far beyond what would be necessary to ensure a democratic regime. Indeed, always with the support of the most left-wing military, they backed profound revolutionary transformations, sought to delay the holding of constituent elections as much as possible, and even imposed restrictions on the drafting of the new Constitution through the infamous "MFA-party pact" and the kidnapping of elected parliamentarians, which I witnessed in astonishment. The provisional governments were, in practice, dictatorial governments. Their objective was to consolidate, before the elections, economic "achievements" (nationalizations, agrarian reform) and political ones (union unity, "civic" service, creation of revolutionary bodies without any democratic legitimacy, etc.) that they knew perfectly well would not be possible after the elections. They went so far as, always supported by the military and the Communist Party, to attempt to condition the very functioning of the constituent assembly. Everything was done to ensure that the same constituent assembly would be dissolved, just as Lenin did in 1918. During that period, the military left, with the support of the Communist Party, wantonly arrested approximately two thousand people without charge, using blank arrest warrants, beat and tortured hundreds upon hundreds of people, looted property, occupied properties and businesses, carried out savage cleansings, ruined the lives of thousands upon thousands of people and their families, and did thirty for a single day, as recorded in a series of reports published later. And we remain silent (some) in the face of the military, the very same participants who are still alive today and shamelessly speak out in favor of the broad freedoms and human rights threatened by the "fascism" that is about to arrive. Hypocrisy knows no bounds.

In fact, immediately after April 25th, far-left political factions, both with and without military representation, sought to ride the coattails of history and immediately set themselves up as the authentic and sole interpreters of the "true" values of April, from the transition to socialism, to the nationalizations, the ban on private enterprise, the irreversible gains of workers, the power of workers' committees, the repression of "fascists," etc. This rhetoric continues to this day, but increasingly in vain. The recent elections clearly demonstrated that the Portuguese no longer allow themselves to be fooled.

If it weren't for November 25th, political democracy would not have come to fruition, with all the grave and unforeseeable consequences that this would entail. November 25th was the true starting point for democratic life in our country, followed by truly free legislative elections, free from military oversight, enabling the formation of a government dependent on parliament. Thus ended the turbulent period of transition to democracy, which truly only ended with the constitutional revision of 1982 and the disappearance of that aberration that was the Revolutionary Council.

The difference is that today, with the military sent to barracks and the Soviet Union and its acolytes gone, radical leftism no longer focuses so much on hatred of reactionaries and the bosses but, in desperation, on "inclusion" in the name of gender equality, minority rights, drug liberalization, animal rights, etc. It has a depressed and marginalized urban electorate, as in several European countries. Today, they want to impose on us the 25th of April version of the Left Bloc and its acolytes, just as the Communist Party once wanted to impose its Stalinist version.

In that historical period, the meaning of April 25th was unstable, confusing, and ambiguous. The only consistent project was that of the Communist Party and the military faction that supported it; it wanted the one thing it had always wanted and never lost sight of: dictatorial political power. It took advantage of the disorientation of Portuguese civil society, which at the time seemed like a self-managed madhouse. There was a 25th of April for all tastes: some wanted political freedom, others a partisan dictatorship with military support, others an egalitarian society, and others a libertarian society, others total sexual freedom, others to live off the landlords, others the abolition of exams, others the maintenance of privileges, such as the military, others nudity, others the liberalization of drugs, others revenge, others the assets of the rich, etc. Each used their personal freedom as a weapon of choice. But little by little, things began to settle.

In the turbulent historical period that followed the 25th of April, the most lucid interpreter of its meaning was Mário Soares. He immediately understood what the Portuguese people collectively wanted at that time: political democracy, decolonization, and Europe. He manipulated no one, imposed no predefined ideological models, and resisted the threats of the communist military and the Stalinist party that supported them. He knew how to interpret the historical situation and confronted the attempted communist dictatorship as he had opposed Salazar's in the past. He did what he could, not always without inevitable consequences, but he always headed in the right direction. We owe him that, and that's a lot.

All this is now in the past. But it's best not to forget.

The meaning of April 25th is fortunately much easier to understand today. It's not compromised. It's whatever the Portuguese want it to be through voting and democratic participation in existing institutions. Nothing more. It was April 25th, and only April 25th, that brought us political democracy, fundamental rights, regional and local autonomy, and public and political freedoms—in other words, the conditions for our will to be clarified, valid, and given voice. Alongside this, there was a silent but genuine social and customary revolution, very beneficial in my view, from which we are still drawing conclusions and trying to understand.

The historical circumstances today, 50 years later, are very different. We haven't just emerged from a reactionary dictatorship nor barely avoided another communist one. We are in a time where options are much more abundant and peaceful. We no longer live in the ideological civil war that characterized my generation and that of my family, friends, and colleagues, before and after the 25th of April. Radicalism has gone out of fashion because education and culture, admittedly not always of the best quality, are much more widespread. There are no longer fixed, pre-established ideological axioms, elevated to catechisms, to which we must adhere en bloc or equally reject. Portuguese society is nothing like it was fifty years ago; it is much more open, inclusive, equal, and educated. It has undergone an enormous transformation that is not yet complete. Instruct yourselves with the calm and accurate analyses of António Barreto.

It is also to April 25th that we owe the possibility of allowing democratic will to sway. The will of the people is neither permanent nor homogeneous; it fluctuates according to times and circumstances. It is not forever entrenched in a worldview specific to a given generation, nor is it imprisoned by a rigid ideology. Change is part of democracy. And it is good that it is so. The differences between the generations that still witnessed the Estado Novo and the post-April 25th period and the current ones are abysmal. Only political democracy allows for easy adaptability to changing situations. But change today occurs within the democratic regime, not within the democratic regime itself. Right-wing authoritarianism and communism are not possible in our country today.

April 25th, always! What does this mean today? Political democracy, pluralism, and respect for the popular and individual will. April 25th is us, the Portuguese, and under the historical conditions in which we live, because today we can be that way. It will always be what we, the voters, want it to be. This is the message, and it cannot be anything else. Anything beyond this is an attempt at manipulation. It is unbearable to witness the attempts to appropriate April 25th that emerge from various quarters because, precisely, they embody what it never was and never will be, if we believe in successive election results. They embody a single way of thinking, set up as redemptive, that serves only divisive and exclusionary purposes. They forget that Portuguese society is not what they think it is, nor what they were taught in the few textbooks they read. Above all, they forget what we learn from practice: that the Portuguese people, even when they vote left, aren't really that left-wing, and when they vote right, the rule is the same. Voting isn't as reliable an indicator as one might think, and surprises do happen.

The latest April 25th celebrations tried, as always, to sell us snake oil; but the Portuguese are no longer buying it.