Carnation Revolution in Portugal

Early on April 25, 1974, Portuguese radio played the banned song 'Grandola, Vila Morena' as the final signal for a coup. Captains and lieutenants of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), led by Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, took control of Lisbon within hours. The dictator Marcelo Caetano surrendered to General Antonio de Spinola. Crowds flooded the streets, and women gave the soldiers red carnations, which they stuck in their rifle barrels and which gave the revolution its name. Only four people were killed, shot by the secret police outside its headquarters.¹²

The coup ended the Estado Novo, a right-wing authoritarian regime that Antonio Salazar had set up in the 1930s and that Caetano inherited in 1968. Portugal was the poorest country in western Europe, with censorship and a secret police, and it held on to its African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau after others had given them up in the wave of decolonization in the 1960s. Portugal fought three colonial wars from 1961, taking up a large share of the national budget, and the junior officers who ran them came to hate the regime and its pointless war.¹

After the coup, a turbulent period of about eighteen months followed, with left and right in competition. The new government quickly agreed to colonial independence: Guinea-Bissau in 1974, and Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Angola in 1975, with about half a million Portuguese settlers returning. Elections for a constituent assembly took place in April 1975, and a democratic constitution came in 1976. Portugal joined the European Community in 1986, and the 1974 revolution started a 'third wave' of democratization that soon reached Spain, Greece and later Latin America.¹