The origins of Salazarism and the Christian Democracy in Portugal

Abstract

This article is the introduction to a larger work that is an attempt of understanding the ideological matrix of the Salazarist political regime and the differences that, at such a level, separate/approach it as to the Italian fascism. Indeed a comparison between these two regimes immediately shows their diferent historical origins and, above all, the inequality of the ideological grounds where there political conceptions, that were to be embodied (through suffering some other cross-breedings or ideological grafts) in the institutions and practices of the Portuguese New State and the Italian Fascist State. Given the importance ascribed to the political chief in these regimes and in the system of the chiefs political thought, it is indeed relevant that Mussolini had, for his ideological and political matrix, the secularism of the Socialist party and trade union formations at the end of the last century and that Salazar had, for his ideological and political matrix, the social catholicism of the incipient theoretical and organizing expressions of the Christian-democratic thought in Portugal in the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus it is not possible to attain an exact understanding of the social conditionings of Salazar´'s political thought and the influence exerted by him on the implantation of the New State, without a previous incursion into the origins and first developments of the «Christian Democracy» in Portugal. It is like this that one deals, in this introduction, with the following issues successively: the three phases in the growth of Christian Democracy in Portugal; the social Catholic movements, from the anti-liberalism to the anti-socialism; the Christian Democracy, organic and corporatist overpassing of the democratic and liberal party spirit. As a matter of fact, from the double antagonism felt by the Christian Democracy towards either liberalism or Socialism came out a mediating and interclassist function that fulfilled the corporatist project of social democracy, that, allied to the political integrism of the Christian absolute-making of this same democracy, faivoured the appearance of the institutional presuppositions of Salazarism.