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Serious Blow. For Socialist Party Leader Mário Scares, Portugal's leading moderate, the creation of the triumvirate is a serious blow. He had insisted all along that the Socialists "have friends in the M.F.A." He told Ron Hayward, the visiting general secretary of Britain's Labor Party, that "a majority in the M.F.A. would like to see a government that includes a number of representative civilian politicians and technocrats." The Socialist leader was not entirely wrong. Although a majority of the M.F.A.'s Assembly obviously opted to stick by Gonçalves, some key officers apparently protested the decision by boycotting the meeting; among them was Foreign Minister Ernesto Melo Antunes, who has emerged as a key moderate on the Revolutionary Council.
Soares had tried—belatedly, some observers thought—moving directly to confront the Communists and their supporters in the military movement with a weapon they could readily understand: mass protests. He staged rallies at Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal's second largest city, to which tens of thousands of Socialists thronged, despite attempts of Communist vigilantes to block their way. The message issued by these mass gatherings was unequivocal; at a July 19 rally, Lisbon's Dom Afonso Henriques square rang with 50,000 voices crying "Out with Vasco!" At the podium, an animated Scares warned that the Premier's policies were turning Portugal into a vast concentration camp. To an enthusiastic roar of approval, he then vowed that his Socialists would never rejoin any government headed by Gonçalves. Later Soares added that any Socialist entering a Gonçalves Cabinet would be immediately expelled from the party. "Never before have the battle lines between moderates and radicals been more clearly drawn," observed a top Western diplomat in Lisbon.
The Communists were quick to respond. New posters were plastered across Lisbon's walls depicting Gonçalves sandwiched between a soldier with a rifle and a peasant with a pitchfork. They proclaimed: STRENGTH! STRENGTH! COMRADE VASCO. WE WILL BE A WALL OF STEEL. The press, radio and television, all controlled by radical workers, fired off endless salvos supporting Gonçalves. Photographs of the unsmiling Premier sitting in the back seat of his official black Citroën appeared in nearly every newspaper; radios blared the catchy martial refrain "Onward, Comrade Vasco!"
Fierce Pride. Despite its steady movement leftward, the M.F.A. must still reckon with its country's reservoir of cautious, conservative sentiment. While the Communists have considerable support in the Lisbon area and in the poverty-stricken Alentejo region south of the Tagus River, they have little backing in "the other Portugal"—the rural area north of the Tagus and inland from the Atlantic Ocean that contains 60% of the country's 9 million people. Most of them are devoutly Roman Catholic, politically conservative and hard-working peasants who take fierce pride in the few acres of land they own and till and who are almost fanatic in their antiCommunism. "The Communists made the mistake of thinking that Lisbon is Portugal," said one carpenter in the town of Rio Maior, north of the capital. "They are trying to make us afraid. But we know the Communists."