One Salazar in three distinct persons.

On March 25, 2007, the grand finale of the RTP competition "Os Grandes Portugueses" (The Greatest Portuguese) took place. It was an important date for the public television station, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. A banquet was planned for the celebration, which coincided with the end of the program. The table was set in the studios and lavishly lavish… until the results of the competition were announced. Then, the spotlights went out, a curtain of disbelief descended on the party, plunging it into a long night of secrecy, and the banquet remained there, I suppose untouched.

The finalists in the competition included kings, such as the founder D. Afonso Henriques or D. João II, the Perfect Prince , Nun'Álvares Pereira, the Constable, leading figures of maritime expansion, such as Infante D. Henrique and Vasco da Gama, great poets, such as Luís de Camões and Fernando Pessoa, and controversial statesmen, such as the Marquis of Pombal.

But despite the historical weight of all these great Portuguese figures, the first three out of the ten who remained from the successive elimination rounds were all from the 20th century and all "politicians": Salazar, from the national, conservative and authoritarian right wing; Álvaro Cunhal, from the communist, internationalist and totalitarian left wing; and Aristides Sousa Mendes, a centrist, celebrated for his humanitarian work in facilitating Portuguese passports for persecuted Jews at the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux.

Salazar won with 41% of the vote, followed by Álvaro Cunhal with 19.1%, and Aristides Sousa Mendes with 13%. Sousa Mendes was defended by José Miguel Júdice, Cunhal by MP Odete Santos, and Salazar by me.

It should be said that, at the time, even more than now, no one wanted to bother defending Salazar outside the comfort of their home or a taxi – where the usual approach was "a Salazar on every corner," then in vogue (the idea of ​​Salazar in three distinct persons, two to contradict each other and one to break the tie, hadn't yet arrived here). Therefore, when I was invited, I asked if they expected me to defend him as a lawyer or as a historian. They told me I should defend Salazar as a lawyer, that is, being able to highlight the positive aspects of my "client" and justify, without omitting them, the negative ones.

The victory of the “dictator,” the “fascist” António de Oliveira Salazar [*] – a candidate only admitted to the contest at the last minute and due to protests against his absence from the list of eligible candidates – was due to a very Portuguese phenomenon of reaction to silencing and ideological manipulation, which found in the contest a loophole to express itself. It was not, evidently, a serene appreciation of the History of Portugal, in which the Founder and the Constable, for example, essential to the country's independence, or Prince Henry the Navigator, King John II and Vasco da Gama, key figures in the expansion that gave the Kingdom critical mass to escape the centralist attraction of Castile-Spain, would assume greater importance.

What was at stake was a game. And the game was political. Perhaps that's why, just as in America, France, and England (where Reagan, De Gaulle, and Churchill won), here the figures of the 20th century dominated. And there was also an ideological alignment around two "extremes" that, in some things, overlapped – Salazar and Cunhal were two intelligent men, convinced and consistent in their convictions, very different from each other, but also very different, for better or for worse, from the "moderates," the "corks," the small, large, and medium-sized active or passive corruptors that many people saw and see in the bulk of the political class.

This victory of Salazar, of "fascism," even if only in a contest, was perhaps the first bucket of cold water that unexpectedly fell on the "opinion makers," a premonitory and unpleasant surprise, which they received with the offended incredulity of someone facing a vile betrayal.

Unlike the "opinion makers," whose opinions contributed to the highly successful manipulation of Dr. Cunhal when he used the ruse of "Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar's Nazi-fascism" for his own ends and those of the Soviet Union, he knew very well that his fast track to Auschwitz à la António Maria Cardoso was nothing more than a ruse. And that the repression of the Estado Novo and the Hitlerian Holocaust were not even remotely comparable, even in the relative number of political prisoners; and even less so the excesses and abuses of the Estado Novo and the communist carnages of Maoism and Sovietism. I respect those who are consistent and fight for their ideals even to prison and death, but the "excesses" of the Estado Novo and Hitlerism, or Soviet and Chinese communism, are not and cannot be comparable realities. I tried to explain this when I defended Salazar. And having not been a Salazarist during Salazar's time, having fought against Marcelism and having lived my entire life consciously in opposition, before and after April 25th, I felt I could do it independently and freely.

But in Portugal, where the April military coup, the PREC (Processo Revolucionário em Curso - Ongoing Revolutionary Process), and the Left's control of cultural and media instruments conditioned the perception of 20th-century history, it was stipulated that Salazar's place was in the gallery of horrors; and so that the figures in the gallery continue to play the convenient role of scarecrows or bogeymen that the Left assigned them, their colors are exaggerated to the point of caricature, and all desire for critical distance, analysis, and truth is banished, in the hope that the people will ignore the sorrows of the present and follow suit.

However, when someone, through provocation and because they know who they're talking to, suddenly shows themselves immune to Salazar's Derangement Syndrome (SDS) – a local reflection of the famous Trump's Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which is spreading throughout Euro-America and affecting understanding and the capacity for analysis and relativization – clothes are torn, exalted references are made to the unconstitutionality of "apologies for fascism," the supposed beatification of some Salazarist trinity is condemned, Hitler is evoked…

Unfortunately, this is what has been happening to many of those who, cumulatively affected by the SDS and the TDS, have the noble mission of informing us: at the mention of the trigger name, their understanding collapses and they go bankrupt internally and externally, ignoring supposed objectivity and haphazardly mixing past, present and future, often without realizing it.

On that Sunday in March 2007, when Trump didn't exist yet and Salazar was still in power, the shock was more understandable. So much so that, when Odete Santos, devastated by the "victory of fascism," invoked the anti-fascist principles of the Constitution, I had to calm her down, telling her that the regime hadn't fallen, that it was just a contest.

[*] Those who call Salazar a “fascist” only remind me of those who called Dr. Soares a “communist.” José Luís Andrade recently wrote an essay on Salazar’s “fascism” that is worth reading (J. Luís Andrade, Was Salazar a Fascist?, The Note Book Series, Amazon, 2025).