The radicals rights and the Portuguese liberalism: at the roots of a dictatorship

di Goffredo Adinolfi
in Memoria e Ricerca n.s. 30 (2009), p. 109

The aim of this article is to analyze the continuing clashes that opposed liberals and absolutists in the Portugal between the nineteenth to the twenty’s century. This was a struggle characterized by constant double-crossings and standstill. Losers, never defeated until the end, were never overcome in the new regime, leaving open lines of fracture and continuing instability between: state-church and republic-monarchy. The Miguelistas, absolutist “resistant” to modernization of the country, a symbol of a deep and archaic country, seems to be missing when, facing the crisis of the late twentieth century, riding the fortunes of the new conservative nationalism, came to a new fortune. Oliveira Salazar was one of the main exponents of this deep Portugal based on the old / new ideology laid the foundation for the establishment of the Estado Novo corporatist and organic state.