National Union União Nacional | |
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Other name | Ação Nacional Popular (1970–74)[2] |
Leaders | António de Oliveira Salazar Marcello Caetano[3] |
Founded | 30 July 1930 |
Dissolved | 25 April 1974 |
Headquarters | Lisbon, Portugal |
Membership | 20,000 (1933 est.)[4] |
Ideology | Integral nationalism[5][6] Corporate statism[7][8] Authoritarian conservatism[9] Clerical fascism[10] National Catholicism[11] Lusotropicalism[12][13] Lusitanian integralism[14] Pluricontinentalism[15] |
Political position | Far-right[16][17] |
Religion | Roman Catholicism |
Colours | Blue White Green (1970–74) |
Party flag | |
Corporatism |
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History of Portugal |
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Timeline |
Portugal portal |
The National Union (Portuguese: União Nacional) was the sole legal party of the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, founded in July 1930 and dominated by António de Oliveira Salazar during most of its existence.
Unlike in most single-party regimes, the National Union was more of a political arm of the government rather than holding actual power over it. The National Union membership was mostly drawn from local notables: landowners, professionals and businessmen, Catholics, monarchists or conservative republicans. The National Union was never a militant or very active organization.[17]
Once Salazar assumed the premiership, the National Union became the only party legally allowed to function under the Estado Novo.[17] Salazar announced that the National Union would be the antithesis of a political party.[18] The NU became an ancillary body, not a source of political power.[18] At no stage did it appear that Salazar wished it to fulfill the central role the Fascist Party had acquired in Mussolini's Italy; in fact, it was meant to be a platform of conservatism, not a revolutionary vanguard.[19]
The National Union's ideology was corporatism, and it took as many inspirations from Catholic encyclicals such as Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno as well as from Mussolini's corporate state.[20] Compared to other ruling Fascist parties, the National Union played a much smaller role in its regime. The National Union was set up to control and restrain public opinion rather than to mobilize it, and ministers, diplomats and civil servants were never compelled to join the party.[21]
Scholarly opinion varies on whether the Estado Novo and the National Union should be considered fascist or not. Salazar himself criticized the "exaltation of youth, the cult of force through direct action, the principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, [and] the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader" as fundamental differences between fascism and the Catholic corporatism of the Estado Novo. Scholars such as Stanley G. Payne, Thomas Gerard Gallagher, Juan José Linz, António Costa Pinto, Roger Griffin, Robert Paxton and Howard J. Wiarda, prefer to consider the Portuguese Estado Novo as conservative authoritarian rather than fascist. On the other hand, Portuguese scholars like Fernando Rosas, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Manuel de Lucena, Manuel Loff and Raquel Varela think that the Estado Novo should be considered fascist.[22]
[...] fascist Italy [...] developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples were Estado Novo in Portugal (1932-1968) and Brazil (1937-1945), the Austrian Standestaat (1933-1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
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