The same song that brought 5,000 soldiers out of their barracks to overthrow the dictatorship half a century ago served to open and close the day in which Portugal commemorated a revolution that astonished the world. Shortly before midnight on Wednesday, hundreds of Portuguese gathered in front of the Largo do Carmo barracks, where Marcelo Caetano surrendered on April 25, 1974, a symbol of that dictatorship riddled with mass emigration, poverty and three wars. They sang Grândola, vila morena and they crowded into the square just as had happened 50 years ago. It was just the beginning of the dozens of times that José Afonso’s piece resonated through the streets of the country this Thursday.
And they not only sang in memory of a happy day, which overthrew the dictatorship without violence and without any revenge. Many of those who demonstrated this Thursday along Avenida da Liberdade, in Lisbon, did so with one eye on the past and another on the future, like Joana Sousa and her mother Helena Quintas, two regulars at the march. “We cannot forget that we are at a time when fascist phenomena are emerging throughout the world,” commented Sousa. An opinion repeated by different protesters. “This year is special because of the anniversary, but also because of the political instability and threats to democracy,” said Helena Andrade, 30 years old.
Similar was the opinion of Inés Costa, 19: “We are here, not only for 50 years, but because the result of the elections was very sad.” She voted for the first time on March 10, when the extreme right achieved a historic result at the polls by receiving more than a million votes. “I expected something else in the 50 years of the revolution,” she added. “I think that this year’s massive participation also responds to the need to react to the elections,” agreed António Sampaio Novoa, former rector of the University of Lisbon and former candidate for the presidency of the Republic in 2015.
50 years ago, Sampaio Novoa went out into the street and took three days to return home. He was in all the historical scenarios that marked the collapse of the dictatorship and, after half a century, he considers that “this is the worst moment of Portuguese democracy” after Chega’s overwhelming support for populism. “I think they will grow even more. They are being able to unite all the dissatisfied and disillusioned around them, something that no other party is achieving. And they are dangerous because they have no principles,” he reflected shortly before starting the march along Lisbon’s central avenue.
With those million votes, Chega reached 50 deputies in the Assembly of the Republic. His leader, André Ventura, joked in his morning speech about the coincidence between seats and years of democracy. Ventura does not make frontal attacks against the revolution, but he does minimize it. In his speech at the commemorative session held at noon, attended by former presidents of the Republic and some April captains who led the military coup, he repeated the tactics of other speeches. “Fifty years ago we made a revolution that gave us freedom, but along the way it took away our dignity,” he stated. His angriest words, however, were directed at the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, for having defended Portugal’s reparation to its former colonies. “The president betrays the Portuguese when he says that we have to feel guilty and pay other countries. Pay, why? Pay, for what? I don’t want to take responsibility, I have great pride in the history of Portugal,” he bellowed while his bench gave him a standing ovation.
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What Rebelo de Sousa raised at a dinner with the foreign press has especially irritated the ranks of the right, but no one went as far as Ventura, who the day before said that he would dismiss him if he had the power to do so. The far right, however, is alone in its disdain for the spirit of April. With different rhetoric, all the groups claimed the day that ended 48 years of repression thanks to the rebellion of a group of soldiers, immediately embraced by the citizens. “April is not only a milestone in history, it is a continuous and unfinished revolution,” stressed Ana Gabriela Cabilhas, the youngest deputy in the Assembly, who spoke on behalf of the Social Democratic Party (PSD, center-right), the party that leads the current Government of Luís Montenegro.
The right-wing parties aligned themselves when it came to magnifying the importance of November 25, 1975, when a military countercoup ended the revolutionary project that had been underway since the previous year. The Government of Montenegro has announced the creation of a commission to commemorate that day. Another of those fashionable cultural battles. Because although the right celebrates April, it is the parties on the left that feel more owners of their legacy. “The Socialist Party (PS) is here to defend political democracy and social and cultural democracy from the attacks of its new and old enemies. They were both the ones that April built and both are being attacked,” highlighted its leader, Pedro Nuno Santos. “The nostalgic people are dangerous because they blame democracy and the Constitution for the poverty that has persisted,” criticized Mariana Mortágua, leader of the Left Bloc. For his part, Rebelo de Sousa appealed to the “intelligence of always preferring an imperfect democracy to a dictatorship.”
All the leaders of the left participated in the Lisbon march in the afternoon, but also some representatives of the right, such as the president of the Liberal Initiative, Rui Rocha, who spoke in the chamber in the morning with a white carnation on his lapel. If the symbols serve to reveal something, two details: there was not a single carnation on the Chega bench and its deputies left the seats while the others sang Grândola, vila morena.
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