|
Portugal Portuguese Communist Party
The main party on the revolutionary left in Portugal
was the
Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista
Português--PCP).
The PCP had a long history of defiance to the Salazar
dictatorship, and many of the party's leaders had spent
long
years in jail or in exile. Party members who remained in
Portugal
worked underground where they formed associations and
organized
the labor union Intersindical. The party was strongly
Stalinist
and Moscow-oriented.
Returning from exile in 1974, the PCP's leaders, many
of whom
were reputed to be capable and formidable politicians,
tried to
seize power by means of a coup, allying themselves with
revolutionary elements in the Armed Forces Movement
(Movimento
das Forças Armadas--MFA). The party came close to seizing
power
in 1975 but failed because moderate elements within the
armed
forces and the political parties to the right of it were
committed to Western democracy. Extensive financial aid
from
Western countries to these parties also contributed to the
PCP's
ultimate defeat.
The PCP, along with its far-left allies, got 17 percent
of
the vote in the first democratic election in Portugal in
1975,
and for several elections after that it held its position
at
approximately 12 to 19 percent of the vote. But during the
1980s,
as Portugal moved away from the radical politics of the
mid-1970s
and began to prosper economically, the PCP's popularity
declined
to less than 10 percent of the vote. The party remained
strong in
the trade unions, but younger members of the party
challenged the
old leadership and questioned the party's hard-line
Stalinist
positions. Some of these young challengers were expelled
from the
party. The collapse of the communism in Europe, the aging
of the
party's leadership (the party had been headed by Álvaro
Cunhal
since 1941) and of its membership, and the party's poor
showing
in elections indicated that the party would either have to
transform itself fundamentally or fade away as a political
force.
Data as of January 1993
|
