Liberal political parties in the «first phase of parliamentary rotativism» (1851-1865)

Abstract

In some countries like England and Belgium the political liberalism, a superstructure of capitalism, worked, since the first half of the nineteenth century, as an alternation in power of two big parties, one of them more conservative and the other, also bourgeois, more democratic. In Portugal after the Regeneration movement (April-May, 1851), one tried to put the parliamentary rotativism into practice too. Nevertheless the 1851-1865 period did not correspond, in fact and unlike what is often supposed, to the first phase of such a rotativism. As a matter of fact, Portuguese political parties in that time were not big groups of opinion with a well-defined program and a wide popular substract, and they even could not be like that on account of an incipient phase of capitalism. They were only groups of bourgeois and aristocratic elites with a weak organization, a not precise ideological and programatic characterization, and practicing a systematic «caciquismo» (the power of local political bosses); and a lot of their members, including some of the most influential, used to change sides according to the conjunctural circumstances. Besides the Partido Regenerador (Regenerating Party) and the Partido Histórico (Historical Party), that apparently would represent the parliamentary rotativism, tried sucessive approaches and even unifications. Such a project of «reconciliation» prevailed in the end, in 1865, under a form extended to the whole «liberal family».