Portugal edged close to a leftist dictatorship last week and then barely retreated—but the country lost more freedoms. A crisis had erupted over the issue of whether the country would be able to make its fragile coalition government work or would dispense with political parties altogether and install either a military government or an outright proletarian dictatorship run by workers' commissions and neighborhood committees. President Francisco da Costa Gomes, fresh from a bridge-building visit to Rumania, went into extraordinary, round-the-clock sessions with the 29-member Revolutionary Council, the government's highest authority. Said a Western diplomat in Lisbon: "This is the most...
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