For fifty years, April 25 has been presented to the Portuguese as an absolute date, almost sacred, before which criticism is frequently taken as moral offense. Yet no mature Nation can live as a prisoner of an official version of events. History should not be venerated as a civic religion. It must be studied, weighed, and judged in the light of its facts, its consequences, and the wounds it left behind.
It is true that April 25 put an end to the Estado Novo and opened the way to free elections. That fact must not be denied. But neither must it be invoked to silence what came after. Portugal, after April 1974, did not immediately enter into a serene, orderly, and pluralistic democracy. It entered, rather, into a period of deep revolutionary agitation, in which the tumultuous pressure of the streets ("a pressão tumultuária da rua"), ideological pressure, military instability, and socialist seduction nearly led the country into a new form of political servitude.
The so-called PREC, Processo Revolucionário em Curso (Ongoing Revolutionary Process), was no minor footnote. It was a decisive and dangerous period in the nation's life, situated between March 11 and November 25, 1975, during which Portugal lived under enormous political, social, economic, and military tension. The Revolution, which had promised liberty, swiftly opened the way to political purges (saneamentos), political persecutions, occupations, intimidation, ideological radicalization, and an attempt by the State to dominate the economy. The Council of the Revolution (Conselho da Revolução), constituted in the wake of March 11, 1975, embodied precisely the institutionalization of military political power during that period.
It was in that environment that socialism revealed its true nature. Not as a simple social concern, nor as legitimate attention to the most fragile, but as a project of power designed to subject civil society to the authority of the State. In the name of the people, an attempt was made to limit the people's own freedom. In the name of social justice, private property was weakened. In the name of equality, suspicion was cast upon those who worked, undertook, saved, invested, and produced.
On the economic front, the facts are clear. On March 14, 1975, the Portuguese banks were nationalized by decision of the Council of the Revolution. This was no mere administrative measure. It was a deep rupture with private property, with economic freedom, and with the trust indispensable to the creation of wealth.
The message conveyed to the country was that the entrepreneur, the property owner, and the independent producer were suspect by their very nature.
Socialism, when it moves from promise to practice, rarely confines itself to protecting the needy. It tends to control the economy, to constrain private initiative, to punish merit, to distrust property, and to transform the citizen into a dependent of the State. That was the logic Portugal experienced during the revolutionary period. It was not merely a matter of correcting injustices. It was a matter of reshaping society according to an ideological doctrine that many Portuguese had never freely chosen.
The 1976 Constitution itself was born marked by that spirit. In its original text, Portugal was described as a Republic committed to its transformation into a classless society, and Article 2 spoke expressly of a democratic State and transition to socialism. This is not interpretation. It is the constitutional text itself. Portuguese democracy was therefore born conditioned by a revolutionary matrix that, for years, conflated political freedom with the State's socialist orientation.
And here lies one of the great contradictions of April. Liberty was proclaimed, yet there was an intent to constitutionally orient the country toward socialism. Pluralism was spoken of, yet a political language was being installed that treated the right, conservatism, property, authority, and tradition as morally suspect inheritances. The talk was of freeing Portugal, but the effort was to imprison the nation's future inside an ideology.
Decolonization, too, remains one of the most painful and poorly explained pages of that period. The end of the Portuguese empire could have been conducted with prudence, with a sense of State, and with effective protection of the affected populations. Instead, thousands of Portuguese were thrown into a human, familial, and patrimonial tragedy. The so-called retornados arrived, in many cases, with no possessions, no support, no justice, and no recognition proportionate to the suffering imposed upon them. Decolonization was treated as a historical inevitability, but the way it was carried out revealed haste, abandonment, and a lack of national responsibility.
On the moral plane, the damage was equally deep. April brought not only freedom of expression and party pluralism. It also brought a culture of suspicion against authority, against tradition, against the family, against religion, against property, and against the very idea of Fatherland (Pátria). Discipline was confused with oppression, order with fascism, patriotism with backwardness, and authority with tyranny.
A society that destroys all its foundations in the name of liberation ends, sooner or later, by losing the sense of its own continuity.
Socialism contributed decisively to this moral inversion. By presenting the State as redeemer and civil society as problem, it weakened individual responsibility, private initiative, and respect for the natural hierarchy of institutions. By transforming social envy into a political virtue, it cast suspicion upon legitimate success. By proclaiming equality as an absolute value, it forgot that a free society must reward merit.
Portugal does not need to erase April 25. What it needs is to free it from the mythology that surrounds it. April had positive aspects, but it also had negative consequences that can no longer be concealed for political convenience. There was liberty, yes. But there was also radicalization. There were elections, yes. There was hope, yes. But there was also fear, expropriation, disorder, hasty decolonization, and an attempt to impose on the country a socialist orientation that many Portuguese had never freely chosen.
True liberty does not lie in repeating inherited slogans. It lies in looking at History without fear. And the truth is simple: April 25 was not merely the beginning of contemporary Portuguese democracy. It was also the beginning of a period in which Portugal came close to exchanging one dictatorship for another form of ideological oppression, this time clothed in revolutionary language and socialist dogmas.
César DePaço
Businessman and Philanthropist
Consul ad honorem of Portugal from 2014 to 2020
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Nutritionals International Inc.®
Founder and Chairman of the Board of The DePaço Foundation
Unwavering Defender of Law Enforcement and Conservative Principles