Salazar Again

Antonio de Oliveira Salazar is a shrewd, cold, and almost entirely frank dictator, and it is because of these qualities that Portuguese elections are affairs quite unlike any other political activity in the West. Those who show up at the polls, as 65 per cent of the electorate is supposed to have done this year, register their votes for the regime calmly and without much interest. Those who actively boycott the election or who support opposition groups may shout and run about at the time, but after November settle once again into silence.

Three years ago such a temporary flush of excitement was provided by Gen. Humberto Delgado, who actually traveled around the country criticizing Salazar and polled nearly a quarter of the vote. Irritated, Salazar revised the electoral system to ensure that the Portuguese would never have another chance to choose anything but a college of electors.

Yet last month the noise started all over again: Catholics, Liberals, and Socialists joined in a bizarre opposition coalition. Last week, frustrated, divided, and harrassed, some 58 candidates withdrew their names. A former associate of the opposition, Henrique Galvao, was more successful. He established himself again as the most extraordinary adventurer of the times by organizing from his headquarters in Morocco the hijacking of a Portuguese airliner to drop boycott appeals all over the countryside.

Slight and ineffectual as these stirrings are, they ought at least to indicate to the Atlantic Alliance (which has never known how to treat an ally whose vicious administration of Angola has disgusted most of the world) that Portuguese politics are not entirely frozen. Salazar is 73, and when he dies sudden spurts of opposition will not vanish after November. NATO has refrained from trying to influence Salazar's regime because it fears a schism, yet the oddities of this election help to show that it may, paradoxically, be burning its own boats. The Alliance will not be able to cope with the unpredictability of the huge political vacuum after Salazar's death unless it attempts to affect the transition now.