(3 of 6)
When the Government realized that it might be beaten at the polls, it made three decisions that stopped M.U.D.: 1) refusal to postpone the elections long enough for M.U.D. to organize a campaign ; 2) refusal to open the voting registration books, long neglected by many Portuguese, who scorned controlled elections; and 3) warnings that, whatever the outcome at the polls, the new freedom would end on the day after the election. M.U.D. refused to play under those rules; only Salazar's candidates appeared on the ballots. German-trained political police pounced on opposition party headquarters, took recalcitrants to jail, snapped muzzles back on newspapers. 'Army officers who had enrolled in M.U.D. were demoted; "disloyal" students were flunked. Fear replaced brief hope as the country slipped lack into bitter, sullen acquiescence, with little chance that Salazar would ever make another gesture toward keeping his old promise that his dictatorship was merely a "transition." Salazar, at 57, had now become dictator for life, unless revolt unseated him.
The Little Priest. Other modern dictators had been men so evil that their personalities obscured the inherent evil of dictatorship. Franco was a barrack-room bully, Mussolini a strutting iiar, Hitler a ranting sadist, and Stalin a bloody-minded professor of the art of power. But Salazar was a virtuous man—selfless, intelligent, efficient. If despotism could be benevolent, Salazar's character was ideal material for "the good dictator." Born at Santa Comba Dao, not far from Europe's second oldest university, in a typical pink-walled Portuguese Village, he had made such good marks in grade school that his peasant mother, whom he worshiped, called him "the little priest." He entered a seminary, but later decided he had no vocation for the priesthood and became an economics instructor at Coimbra University.
In 1926 he got a first unpalatable taste of politics. National finances were in chaos after 20 changes of government in five years. Salazar was invited to come to Lisbon to straighten them out. He took a look at the parliamentary confusion and, in deep disgust, demanded a free hand with the Treasury. Refused, he caught the next train back to the sedge-lined banks of the Mondego. He expressed his contempt for Lisbon's attempts at democracy and said that "one of the greatest mistakes of the 19th Century (which created the 'citizen'—an individual isolated from the family, the class, the cultural milieu, etc.) was to suppose that English . . . democracy was . . . capable of adaptation to all European peoples."
At the end of two years, continued chaos resolved itself into a government shakeup, and mild, aristocratic General Antonio Oscar de Fragoso Carmona became President. This besashed and epauletted figurehead (still President in name today) made Salazar Minister of Finance, with extraordinary powers, which he used to make himself dictator of the nation.