What was the role of national independence struggles in Portugal’s African colonies in bringing about the Carnation Revolution on April 25 1974?

The struggle of the African peoples was a very important part of the struggle against fascism and colonialism in Portugal. The struggle of the Portuguese people against the fascist regime and the anti-colonial struggles converged. 

During the 1950s and ’60s Portugal’s fascist Estado Novo (New State) selected students from African colonies for specialist education in Portugal. Their residency in Lisbon was called “The House of Students of the Empire.”

They soon had contacts with the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). The anti-fascist character of resistance in Portugal impressed itself on these students, including Amilcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Antonio Agostinho Neto who led the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and Samora Machel leader of Frelimo in Mozambique.

As the colonial war surged in the ’60s, Portuguese conscript soldiers made contact through PCP with the leaders of independence struggles. Our struggles converged. 

PCP holds the Leninist thesis that no people can be free if it oppresses another. Our position contrasted with others in the democratic camp, including the Socialist Party (PS), which favoured maintaining a colonial empire. PCP insisted colonial liberation was a precondition for liberation of the Portuguese people. 

For although fascist Portugal was a colonial power, it was itself also colonised by US imperialism. Under the fascist state Portugal became a founding member of Nato in 1949. Nato actively helped the Estado Novo to maintain control. 

After 1974, PCP opened relations with the Soviet Union and socialist countries, which the fascist state refused to recognise. From 1976, a new Portuguese constitution declared Portugal a sovereign country that recognised the freedom of its former colonies. 

What do young people identify as the gains of the revolution today?

The Portuguese revolution was not only a revolution for political freedom. We established a multi-party democracy with elections, a constitutional separation of powers between executive, legislature and judiciary, recognition for Portugal’s autonomous regions (Azores and Madeira). But the revolution was more than that. 

Before 1974, Portugal was a poor country with very poor people. One third of the population lived in the capital, many without access to running water, housing, health or education. The revolution in just five years transformed the lives of our people. 

It established a minimum wage. The public sector pushed up wages across the economy. We established a national health service. We introduced equality between men and women — under fascism, women could only vote if they were civil servants. 

Before the revolution Portugal was a state monopoly run for the benefit of five families. The revolution launched an audacious series of nationalisations beginning with the most strategically important — banks and insurance companies — before moving on to transport, electricity and agrarian reform (redistribution of landed estates to peasants across the south). 

The revolution introduced workers’ rights. Before, there was no collective bargaining or right to strike. Most of this was achieved between 1974 and 1976. 

These revolutionary social and economic changes were embedded in the new constitution from April 2 1976 that declared Portugal’s sovereignty based on democracy and the rule of law “to open up a path towards a socialist society.”

So young people today may not understand all the revolutionary ideas of 1974, but they understand the revolutionary facts — the conquests embedded in the constitution.

The counter-revolution has repeatedly failed to undermine the facts of our revolution, so it has tried to repackage the Portuguese revolution as simply about political liberty. 

Currently, there is an attempt to revise the curriculum in schools, museums and cultural institutions to delete the leading role of PCP in the resistance to fascism from 1926 to 1974. But it’s impossible to talk about resistance to fascism in Portugal without talking about the role of the PCP. 

Counter-revolutionaries depict the struggle of the Portuguese people for national sovereignty as an attempt by PCP to impose a communist dictatorship. For example, the PS today depicts itself as the father of the health service. In fact, healthcare was a conquest of the revolution.

Our party has taken steps to counter misrepresentation. For example, in 2015 the Socialist government proposed transforming historic Peniche prison, where generations of political prisoners were held and tortured, into a hotel.

PCP launched a mass struggle involving many resistance patriots and halted the proposal. This week a new National Museum of Resistance and Freedom at Peniche opens on the 50th anniversary of the revolution.

Young people are the intended victims of political and historical revisionism, but are far from depoliticised. The values of April are still alive in our people. Our political culture is based on the great victories that came from the revolution. All political parties have to justify themselves in the context of April 25. 

In Portugal, as in the main imperialist centres such as the US and Britain, the class struggle is becoming clearer and sharper. Young people are becoming more political. The Portuguese Young Communists are growing faster than for decades. 

What is your analysis of recent Portuguese  elections in which the right-wing Democratic Alliance coalition won the largest parliamentary share?

We are in a difficult period. The period of troika (EU/European Central Bank/IMF) rule from 2012 to 2015 was used to accelerate the counter-revolution.

The EU is a core strategy of the counter-revolution. It was not by chance that Mario Soares (former Socialist prime minister) applied for Portugal to join the EEC in 1985. He hoped the European project would advance a counter-revolution. 

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, in 2010, the Socialist government imposed a national stability and growth programme to cut public spending. When Portugal was bankrupted by the crisis a right-wing PSD [Social Democratic Party] government succeeded them under president Silva, one of the most sinister figures of Portuguese politics. 

This PSD-led government went a long way to destroy some revolutionary advances, through cuts to public spending and the health service. It promoted private hospitals, attacked trade union collective bargaining, cut numbers of statutory holidays, imposed wage freezes and limited workers’ right to strike. It also privatised the national airline (TAP) and parts of the railway system. 

This counter-revolutionary attack was crowned by the declared intention of president Silva to amend the Portuguese constitution. 

Following voters’ rejection of the right-wing parties in 2015, PCP offered PS a governing arrangement based on an agreed budgets. PCP and PS already agreed on the need to reject and block any programme proposed by the right-wing parties. 

This post-2015 period represented a moment of hope. We increased wages, improved workers’ rights and introduced free childcare, as well as halting privatisations of TAP and the railways. Parliament became a centre of political debate. Our party opened this period and successfully blocked the right-wing counter-revolutionary project. 

In 2019 the PS gained seats while our party fell back. The PS perceived a political opportunity, as political opportunists do, and moved to the right to break the pact with PCP, leading to the fall of the government. 

Between 2019 and 2022 problems intensified for the PS government, an example of how social democracy uses illusions to seize power, but then empowers right-wing political forces.

Since 2015, large economic groupings in Portugal have intensified attacks on the PCP. They have decided that a result such as the 2015 general election must never be allowed to happen again. 

One facet of this is the promotion of new populist, ultra-liberal, or extreme right parties such as Chega. As in the rest of Europe, the two Establishment political camps here are in meltdown. In the 2022 general election the CDS [Christian Democrat party] was wiped out. Chega, from its leader down, is the offspring of a failed conservative project. Its leader — a former PSD mayor — seeks protest votes by posing as “anti-system” and a bulwark against socialism. 

Almost 10 years after we turned them back at the 2015 general election, the right wing is preparing again to propose a new attack on the constitution. 

Portugal’s PSD-led governing coalition is a government of the biggest monopolies, so we know for certain they will attack us. We expect they will continue the previously announced right-wing policies of the last PS government, including privatisation of TAP, but they will also attack workers’ rights. 

In this context, this year’s mass popular demonstrations on April 25 (the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution) and May 1 become very important points of resistance to conservative counter-revolution. The Portuguese Communist Party has called our Party Congress for December 13-15 2024.

What is PCP’s analysis of the current drive to war including demands for increases in arms spending on the part of Nato and EU member states?

PCP is trying to simplify as far as possible our message to the Portuguese people. The global situation in terms of the threat of a possible world war is very dangerous, almost critical. 

We are attacked by right-wing politicians because we call for peace. This is ridiculous. What alternative are they proposing?

Volodymyr Zelensky said recently: “Peace and stability can only be achieved by force.” These words are put in his mouth by the big monopolies, particularly the arms companies, which depend on constantly increasing arms budgets. But Europe has nothing to gain from this war in Ukraine, nor from confrontation with China. 

When Emmanuel Macron talks about Europe’s sovereignty, we have to ask, “what sovereignty?” The EU is damaging Europe by cutting it off from other economic regions. 

Despite their claims, leaders of the EU and US are isolating us from the rest of the world. The technological, financial and commercial centres of the world are changing. 

Peace is not just the avoidance of conflict. When a major tectonic geopolitical shift is happening, peace is also a class issue. To struggle against the armed confrontation strategy of imperialism is one of the most important tasks for communists.