This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Near the end of the film version of Timur Vermes’s satire Look Who’s Back (2015), a journalist who has just thrown the reborn Adolf Hitler from the roof of an office building turns around to find himself looking once more into the eyes of the dictator, revitalised again. The message is hardly subliminal, but why should it be? 

Since 1945, Europe has been enthralled with the prospect of Hitler’s return. At first, this fascination was bound up with conspiracy theories lodged in uncomfortable facts. Thriller writers feasted on the chilling truth that the suburbs of Europe were full of ex-Nazis — a prominent theme also in early Cold War spy fiction, including the work of both Ian Fleming and John Le Carré. By 1946, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious and Orson Welles’ The Stranger had already established a staple of postwar Hollywood: the cabal of elite Nazis plotting at the end of a ratline.

The return also gained a kind of supernatural layer. In Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), Hitler’s political recovery became reincarnation through human cloning. Vermes took this idea a step further: passing through pseudo-science into crypto-theology, the physically reborn Hitler, triumphing over death, becomes a literal Antichrist. Perhaps that captures something about the place of Nazism in the culture of post-Christian Europe.

In our culture, then, the thought of a “dictator who refused to die” furnishes more than a slightly awkward subtitle to Tom Gallagher’s excellent biography of a man born scarcely one week after Adolf Hitler in April 1889, António de Oliveira Salazar. This book makes no claim to be a path-breaking study of the man who was Portugal’s dictator for almost four decades. It does not promise a revolutionary interpretation of his regime, the “New State”, which came into being before the Third Reich and endured for nearly half a century. Yet neither is it content to be merely an English-language account of a regime that remains on the periphery of Anglophone consciousness, despite the heavy involvement of Britain and the United States in Portuguese history.

Instead, Gallagher gives us a highly astute analysis of a kind of authoritarianism and a mode of political leadership much more relevant to the present Western experience than that of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy or Franco’s Spanish State. Unlike those regimes, for much of the 20th century, Portugal’s trajectory seemed uncomfortably close to the “right side of history” as it was commonly defined by the liberal powers. 

Reflecting Salazar’s own instincts, its government was authoritarian, but its methods were more technocratic than military. The regime’s relations with business, church and labour followed corporatist patterns familiar across Western Europe. It was nationalist in the sense that the national interest was ceaselessly invoked to justify the government’s actions, but it was also depoliticising — opposed to “ideological conflict” and popular mobilisation. 

Occasionally, the regime murdered its opponents, but the treatment of political enemies usually recalled Devil’s Island (closed by the French in 1953) rather than Hitler’s camps. Self-exile was a more common experience for dissidents.

Portugal cut a similarly awkward figure on the international stage. It quietly supported the Allies in the Second World War and gave refuge to (a disputed number of) Jews. However, it clung to its colonial empire for longer than world opinion thought seemly — although this was not enough to stem the supply of arms from France and Germany, and the war in Angola invited comparisons with Vietnam. 

Unlike Spain, it was involved in international organisations: a founding member of NATO, the OECD and EFTA; an associate member of the EC. Rather like Ireland, small-country truculence often bowed to small-country circumstance. It was not the most respectable of Western countries, but Edward Heath feted Salazar’s successor Marcello Caetano in London in 1973. It was hardly at the forefront of global capitalism, but the economy grew by an average of more than five per cent a year during the 1950s and 60s.

Perhaps the ultimate difference lies in the fact that it is so difficult to picture Hitler retreating to the countryside, like Salazar, to tend vines — a photo op far more Alastair Campbell than Joseph Goebbels. Equally great is the difficulty in imagining any European dictator ascetic enough to die no richer than the average Lisbon lawyer — few democratic leaders achieve that. 

The Salazar who emerges from Gallagher’s pages starts to look like a throw-back to the age of enlightened absolutism, a latter-day Pombal, without the Távoras. For decades his was the acceptable face of authoritarianism — courted as such by world leaders, presented as such by his own propagandists.

In Portugal, a dictator still refuses to die, and this one is far harder to parody

Underneath all of this is something deeply unsettling: because Salazar was a relatively mundane kind of tyrant, his kind of politics poses a more immediate challenge to our own than that of his fascist or communist contemporaries. Like many Portuguese of his generation, Salazar admired Britain’s political traditions. He believed, however, that the Portuguese people were not fit to govern themselves — a lesson he drew from Catholic political philosophy and from the failure of the republics that his regime replaced. 

Gallagher begins his book: “this is a portrait of a pessimist”, of a man “never wavering in his scepticism about the ability of the Portuguese, and indeed wider humanity, to be virtuous and rational in political matters”, utterly convinced “that democracy was a dangerous innovation quite likely to end in disaster, except in a few exceptional countries like Britain and Switzerland”.

The trouble is, assumptions like this did not pass away with the retirement of Salazar in 1968 or the end of the New State in 1974. No question was more central to Western European politics in the 1970s than the “dilemma of democracy” — the supposed incompatibility of popular rule with the “shock” of global capitalism, encapsulated in challenges like trade union militancy (Britain) and domestic terrorism (West Germany). 

The answer was to limit the power of the people over the government: through Hayekian neoliberalism, with its deep disdain for the individual’s political rights; or the recovery of corporatism; or the revival of European integration, with its technocratic elite supplanting the powers of national parliaments.

Neither the question, nor the answers, are inherently foolish: the dilemma of democracy continues to frame our predicament today. As the British journalist Ben Pimlott wrote during the Carnation Revolution, “It may be premature to place the 1974 Portuguese coup d’état alongside the fall of the Bastille or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as a key turning point in history. Perhaps in ten years’ time the idea will not seem so fanciful.” Gallagher agrees, but he cannot see the end of the Estado as the herald of sweeping democratisation. 

Far from breaking with Salazar’s pessimism, he writes, his “democratic successors have not shown much aptitude or enthusiasm for tackling difficult tasks in areas like health and education, or modernising the bureaucracy. There is a ready acceptance to allow the European Union to oversee Portugal’s broad development … It may well be that the EU fulfils nowadays the same role as Salazar did before 1970”. 

In the end, this book is an important comment on the rise of “authoritarian liberalism”, particularly in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, to which Gallagher devotes his postscript. There is a lot to be learned about Europe from its periphery, as the situation in Ukraine is demonstrating. In Portugal, a dictator still refuses to die, and this one is far harder to parody.