The PREC lasted eighteen months and yielded fifty years of commemorative literature. These proportions, in themselves, are worth noting. It is as if an eighteen-second sneeze demanded half a century of clinical analysis of mucus composition. Portugal has a bovine patience when it comes to understanding its own chaos. There are even those who like to portray the PREC as the Big Bang of our disorder, the moment when all the china was broken and we, poor things, have never been able to glue the pieces back together. It is a convenient story and, like almost everything that is convenient in Portugal, a false one.
There was a time, before we got lost amid voting stations and parish notices, when we firmly believed that the future had just been invented in Lisbon.
It was six days of complete suspension, a sort of Holy Saturday that refused to give way to Sunday. Between that Thursday of carnations and the Wednesday of 1 May, Portugal was the only country in the world where time did not move forward, but merely hovered.
People walked the streets with expressions like they had just won the lottery but hadn’t yet worked up the courage to check the numbers. No one talked about politics; they talked about freedom, as if it were a brand of detergent finally hitting the shelves and promising to wash away all the stains of the past. The country smelled of cold gunpowder and fresh hope.
But the calendars started rolling again, and we discovered that a democracy, after all, was far more work than a revolution. Our innocence crumbled when we realised freedom wasn’t a state of perpetual grace, but a poorly managed condominium where everyone wanted to be the manager, but no one wanted to pay the fees.
In fact, between April 1974 and November 1975, the country didn’t live through a revolution; it experienced a domestic dispute elevated to the status of an epic. It was the sudden realisation that authority in Portugal was made of plasterboard. The workers’ committees that were purging directors weren’t following the ‘course of history’, that abstraction intellectuals use to avoid talking about people. They were settling scores. They were purging the engineer who had denied them a day off in 1969 or the foreman who had too refined an accent for the harshness of the times.
For a brief moment, the purge took over from football as the national sport: a blend of social justice and the unspeakable joy of watching the neighbour from upstairs lugging boxes out to his car. It was the moment when Portuguese pettiness donned military fatigues and finally felt important.
People say that PREC destroyed our institutions. That’s a mistake. You cannot destroy what was never built in the first place. Our institutional framework is, and always has been, a framework of people, not rules. In Portugal, the house never had a lock; it always had a doorman. This is the crucial distinguishing feature that defines us as a people—and as a tragedy.
A lock is impersonal. It’s cold. If you have the key, you get in; if you don’t, you’re left out. A lock doesn’t care who your grandfather was, where you went to school, or whether you’re a ‘nice bloke’. The lock is the basic element of modernity and accountability. But we Portuguese detest the cold impersonality of machines. We prefer the doorman. The doorman is human. You can talk to the doorman. You can tip the doorman, ask for a favour, or explain that “we’ve got a bit of a problem here that could be sorted out in a jiffy”.
Salazar’s dictatorship was not a system of reinforced locks; it was a regime of sour-faced doormen deciding whom to let in according to family tree or a bishop’s recommendation. Marcello Caetano tried to be a doorman who read Le Monde, but the outfit was already too loose on him.
The 25 April did not install a lock at the door of the Republic. It merely changed the doormen and declared that, from now on, admission was free and the party was for everyone – provided your hands weren’t too clean or your surname too high-sounding. We were introduced to the idea that the door didn’t need a lock because the very notion of property was an offence. Deep down, the only thing that changed was the criteria for exclusion: instead of barring the “nobody“, one bars the “snob“.
For the next fifty years, the centrist parties – the PS and what is now known as the PSD, with the CDS serving as their coat rack – turned themselves into the Union of Doormen. They do not rule the country; they manage access. They created a class of professional ‘fixers’. You don’t lock the door, nor do you open it fully; you keep it slightly ajar. The Union, in essence, is an elite of gatekeepers, for whom politics is the art of knowing who is allowed through the side door.
The ‘System’, currently such a hot topic, is not some conspiracy of top-hatted cigar-smoking men. It is simply the logic of the doorman elevated to the status of an operating system. It is the deep-seated conviction that rules are for suckers and that real life get’s sorted out in the lobby, between a hug and a little chat. And this is where Chega comes in, not as an invasive force, but simply as the first chap to notice that the door was only ajar and all the doormen were out for a nap.
Our political elite’s tragic mistake is responding to cries of “the system is rotten” with technical explanations about how institutions work. Anyone who does this is falling into the trap. Anyone who replies with “the rule of law operates in accordance with such-and-such law” is only confirming, in the eyes of the man in the street, that they belong to the union. Like the doorman explaining to the man whose house is on fire that building regulations forbid the use of buckets after office hours.
Chega is no return to the past. The past never went away because we never put it behind us. Chega is the price we pay for fifty years of vagueness, of ‘drifting’, and of a total refusal in taking seriously this idea that a country needs locks, not ‘blokes who sort things out’. The door remains open. It always has. What has changed wasn’t the architecture of the house; it was simply the loudness of those who want in without asking permission.
To suggest that Chega voters are nostalgic for Salazar is a glaring error which only serves to dismiss critical thinking. It is a convenient cliché. What drives these people is not the past; it is the practical present. The Portuguese are not ideologues. They are observant bystanders. With a patience bordering on saintliness, they have watched democratic institutions transform into mutual aid societies for those who no longer needed aid. They have realised that the Republic has become a condo where the fees are for paying for other people’s gardens. Their conclusion is not a delusion; it is simple arithmetic. If the State is of no use to me, to whom is it of use?
Once these calculations have been made, neither did Chega need to set a trap, nor is its electoral success a regime problem. It is a plumbing problem. When there isn’t enough water to go around, the first person promising to break the pipes sounds like a liberator. And stating the obvious is the cheapest – and therefore the most effective – way to seize power in a country that has grown accustomed to living on euphemisms.
We remain, in fact, a people of vagueness. The Portuguese ‘vagar’ is not a contemplative virtue; it is a way of avoiding the responsibility of making a decision. We prefer to say we are ‘going somewhere’ rather than setting a destination, because a destination implies the possibility of error, whereas a ‘somewhere’ is always a statistical success. This is the algorithm behind our scenographic democracy: it looks sturdy in the snapshots of Brussels congresses, but crumbles if someone kicks it hard enough.
Meanwhile, reality is a kind of rudeness we weren’t prepared for. With the house already overcrowded and the roof leaking, we carry on celebrating the dawn when we decided that locks were a bourgeois nuisance.
It’s the sad end of a party, reeking of stale beer and cigarette smoke, where the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the previous doorman is always the one to blame.
It would be funny if it didn’t make you feel like leaving. But where could we go, when we carry the doorman within us? So we shrug our shoulders and stay put. Defeated. In the Republic of cronyism.