Regime stability and the constitutional process

Abstract

The evolution of the post-authoritarian regime, from 1974 to 1989, is punctuated by a succession of political crises, each and everyone connected, if not centered upon constitutional issues. The turning points of the revolutionary period are inseparable from attempts to change, or from effective revisions of constitutional laws. The transition regime established by the 1976 Constitution, as well as the procedures and the timing of its amendment, determined the electoral sequence and the strategies of the main political actors. Moreover, the fundamental law itself became a crucial issue in the political agenda, before and after the first constitutional revision of 1982. Constitutional laws did not function as a stable framework defining the organization of political power, they were rather the limits of the regime's unstable stability, which then became themselves factors of political and institutional instability. The second constitutional revision of 1989, in completing the first revision, brought to an end the process of constitution of a Western regime of pluralist democracy. However, it left unsolved the problems of the regime's political instability.