Portrait of a model ally: The Portuguese Communist Party and the International Communist Movement, 1968–1983

Abstract

Throughout much of its history the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) has shared the peripheral situation that most observers have assigned to Portugal itself. Before the military coup of 25 April 1974 little was ever written about this small party, acting within an almost forgotten dictatorship that only interested a few specialists. In the 18 months that followed the overthrow of the Caetano government, the period of the Portuguese revolution, it suddenly came to the fore. Until then most Western European communist parties had paid it little attention, and had restricted themselves to ritual references to the PCP’s ‘heroic struggle against fascism’. It had gained a reputation as a hard-line, ultra-orthodox spokesman for the Soviet view of proletarian internationalism and as such, carried negligible weight with the three most important communist parties of Southern Europe, which were beginning to seriously question their relationship with the party of the Soviet Union after the crushing of the ‘Prague spring’ in 1968. Nobody can question the accuracy of an image of which the PCP itself so proudly boasts. This image has not changed, but since 1974 the PCP has gained the status within the international communist movement that had eluded it previously. With a claimed membership of over 200 000’ in a country of some 10 million inhabitants, a share of the vote that fluctuates between 16 and 20 percent and the effective control of Portugal’s largest labor federation, the PCP has become Western Europe’s second largest communist party in terms of its relative size. Unlike the French, Finnish or Spanish parties it has not yet suffered any serious erosion of its electoral support. This situation alone would enhance this party’s position in a movement which sets great store by numerical success, but the international role of the PCP owes much of its increased importance to changes which have occurred in the international communist movement in recent years, and to the Portuguese revolution.