Only three? I want 60 Salazars!

For me, we don't need three Salazars. We need 60. One for each Member of Parliament from Chega.

Many readers have probably already encountered a pathetic TikTok figure known as Tiago Grila. This character's tactic for gaining followers and views – or whatever they are – involves spouting nonsense, always escalating, because otherwise it loses its appeal and, consequently, followers and views – or whatever they are. Just to give you some context: this idiot publicly confessed to running someone over in Amadora (it's incredible how these kinds of idiotic acts always end up in the suburbs…) and then fleeing. Of course, when cornered, he recanted and denied it. Sound familiar?

Right now in Portugal, we have 60 Grilas in Parliament. They are the Chega party deputies. A bunch of simpletons who thrive on vulgarity, foolishness, gratuitous insults, and petty squabbles.

Let's go back to Salazar.

André Grila says he has no memory of the man from Santa Comba. I don't think that's an excuse. I wasn't a contemporary of Afonso Henriques, but I read and study about our first King. André Grila should do the same with regard to António de Oliveira Salazar.

We are thus left with the impression that André Grila's knowledge of the former President of the Council is limited to RTP Memória (a Portuguese television channel) and Wikipedia.

Here I must bring up Professor Nogueira Pinto. Didn't André, Grila's mentor, whom he considers a great orator, teach him anything? Didn't he at least recommend the biography written by Ribeiro de Menezes? I make this reference because Nogueira Pinto defended Salazar in a television contest (and won). To cut to the chase: participating in a television contest about the greatest Portuguese of all time is an act of infamy because, obviously, the greatest Portuguese of all time, and for all eternity, can only be the first of that name. But moving on…

Nogueira Pinto could have instructed Grila André that Salazar didn't shout or yell. He wasn't rude. Whether in the National Assembly or elsewhere. To win over the Portuguese people, he didn't say he lived in a favela, nor did he throw papers into the air.

Salazar – though flawed – was educated and sober. And he was also an intellectual. He read and studied. He thought before he spoke.

Salazar, because he wasn't afraid of comparisons, invited the best of the elite from the Estado Novo regime to his government. One only needs to look at André Grila's shadow government to see that it's a mere shadow of that. It's bordering on the ridiculous: a group of people who want to be known, to which are added another group of naive people (poorly instructed by those who had the obligation to better inform them). Out of sheer decorum, I will not make comparisons between this Grila government and any government, whatsoever, of the Estado Novo regime.

I find it hard to believe that Salazar would sit next to a Grila Pinto, whose tavern-like manners wouldn't be the most appreciated. Similarly, it doesn't seem possible to me that Salazar would endorse the style of a Grila Matias, who is a mix between a fishmonger from Bolhão and a 10th-grade student from the Amadora high school.

Like Grila, Tiago from TikTok, Grila André is full of himself. For example, he spends his life affirming his Catholicism (he must have remembered that part of the Gospel where Jesus calls those who tear their clothes hypocrites...). Salazar was Catholic. But, I'm assured, Salazar didn't take communion. Why? Because he wasn't a hypocrite and he was aware that one cannot govern without sin. In other words, Salazar, despite being devout, never had the audacity to claim that he had an open line with God Our Lord (there, I'll take it for granted that technology has evolved and that, at the time, there wasn't an Alexandra Solnado to mediate the communication).

For all these reasons, Ventura is closer to Grila, Tiago, than to Salazar, António.

Grila, Tiago repeats: “Above those who walk, there are those who fly.” That’s the case with Grila, André. He flew from the slum where he was born and from a predictable future patching bicycle tires, to Parliament – ​​with a diploma in hand – at the expense of a regime he now vilifies. Salazar gave everything – even if often in the wrong way – to Portugal, because he knew he owed it everything. He didn’t hide his origins.

My way of expressing my disdain for the Grilas of this world is often mistaken for snobbery. That's wrong. All of us – and I speak up, of course – have had at some point in our family history someone who made the leap "up" on the social ladder. Someone who left "Amadora" (a wealthy neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro). The problem with the Grilas of Chega (a far-right political party) isn't that they left "Amadora." It's that "Amadora" hasn't left them.

Salazar's Portugal, even if for the wrong reasons, did not offend the Portuguese of the empire. That is, those who, despite their different skin color and nationality, shared the same language and history. A thug like Grila Melo would have lost his place in the National Assembly on the spot. Different times.

And a word of caution: Don't infer from my words that I am a Salazarist. I am not. But I understand, since the unofficial defender of the same seems to be asleep at the wheel (Prof. Nogueira Pinto), that the former President of the Council, even with all his flaws (and there were so many and so serious that they don't fit in this text), does not deserve the ignominy of being summoned by a group of ill-mannered thugs. Salazar, however, put a pair of skates on someone more similar – still leagues away (Rolão Preto) – and left him at the border with a one-way ticket. Different times.

Salazar, without ever having set foot abroad (if we don't count a Spanish train station), left the village behind and became a statesman of international stature. If any reader of this text thinks there's a possibility of any of the Grilas in Parliament becoming a Salazar, I can only say they need to change their diet.

Professor Nogueira Pinto imagines Professor Salazar walking around with his backside in the air, in the middle of the National Assembly, picking up sheets of paper – which he himself had thrown – because Dr. Aguiar Branco had ordered him to pick them up? It was a Freudian moment for Grila André. He looked up and saw someone just like the person he saw his father bow down to, and he did the same. If throwing the sheets on the floor was a moment of low class, going to pick them up was one of the saddest things I've ever seen.

In conclusion: over these last few years, some renowned intellectuals (few, it is true) have understood that our regime needed a shake-up, delivered by a Grila of this world.

They also mentioned the shake-up caused by the Liberal Wing during the Marcelo Caetano regime. But they failed to do the most basic thing in a study: comparison. Let me remind you: Pinto Leite, Pinto Balsemão, Miller Guerra, Sá Carneiro. Wouldn't it have been wise to compare these people with Grila André, Grila Pinto, Grila Matias, and Grila Melo? The simple act of comparison can even be offensive to the families of the deceased members of parliament from the Liberal Wing. The idea that this time, in Portugal, a son of the working class, using populism, would fulfill past dreams of hygienist revolutions, is puerile, to put it mildly.

Who was it that spoke of Portugal during the Estado Novo regime as being a slum? I know: the communists. Those who, in those times, said a general cleansing was necessary…

The "Grilas" of Chega are to our current regime what the communists were to the Estado Novo. Those "heroes" who wanted to cleanse Portugal at the time would have led us to live under a communist regime, that is, a totalitarian state with fewer freedoms than those existing in pre-1974 Portugal, bloody, with refinements of cruelty, in addition to an economic disaster. We now know what those regimes were like. At the time, many followed those who advocated the cleansing that the country needed.

Because I don't like revolutions but rather evolutions, and because I distrust those who use the same rhetoric as the pre-1974 PCP (Portuguese Communist Party), I wouldn't trade our regime today for what Chega wants (which nobody really knows what it is, but which is – for sure – a poorly frequented space).

If Salazar were to return to Earth – like Christ in The Brothers Karamazov – he would be arrested by the Grilas party. Why? Because Salazar, who was not a democrat, would have outlawed a party whose leader, in the middle of parliament, offends the Nation.

That's why, for me, Salazar can come. Not 1, not 2, not 3. 60. One for each Grila deputy from Chega. At least we know what they came for (and the level of the discussion would rise).