I write this text looking at a family relic. Every year on this date I pick it up. It’s a diary from 1974, where my mother wrote down, in the fine print, her commitments and the consequences of her relationship with my father. On April 25th, the handwritten words loom large in red: “Revolution Day, Great Day of “. A dream was fulfilled. At 19 years old, my mother understood very well how important that military coup that ended almost 50 years of , the longest of , was for her and for the country, to which the population joined with nails in hand and ardor for freedom.
My Brazilian friends often tell me that they envy the Portuguese revolution. While the democratic transition in Portugal happened with armored cars and combat boots, in Brazil it was done smoothly, with little woolen feet. The end of implied a slow, gradual and agreed opening, an accommodative softness that avoided shocks, radical ruptures and also deep cleanings. The Brazilians finished as if it were just a warning to end the party. Like the weird vibe you get on a dance floor when you change the tempo to ask out, but the music keeps playing without sending anyone home.
The Portuguese revolution had its excesses, it is a fact, until the consolidation of democracy was achieved, which only arrived with the 1976 Constitution. As always happens, mistakes and abuses were committed. There are those who quote the line that “a revolution is not an invitation to dinner”, but I don’t like Mao Tse-tung. I prefer to think that, despite everything, there were certainly far fewer injustices committed than the suffering inflicted on various peoples (including those in the colonies) for five decades.
For the overwhelming majority of Portuguese people, there is a before and after this “whole and clean initial day”, as the poet Sophia de Melo Breyner called it, which we celebrated last Saturday with parades and flowers. But more important than achieving freedom is what we do with it.
Portugal and Brazil have both advanced enormously in these post-dictatorship years. Today, they are incomparably more developed nations: they have reduced enormous poverty and inequalities, reduced infant mortality and illiteracy, universalized health and care. Even so, both André Ventura, leader of Chega (of the ultra-right), and the former president frequently praise the times of dictatorships. In both cases, it takes a lot of dishonesty to look at the remarkable path taken and say that everything went wrong.
The problem is that people legitimately always want more. They want everything they are entitled to. After dictatorships, we were promised equality, prosperity, security: a good life. But, in both countries, this good life only came to a few. It is precisely this resentment with a promised and unachieved future that fuels populism. He is the political fuel of today. Until moderate and democratic political parties find a way to complete these unfinished transitions and deliver what remains to be done, populists will always have fertile ground to flourish with heady promises.
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