Mário Soares (1924–2017)

Mário Soares, a figure widely hailed as the founding father of Portuguese democracy and a member of the Journal of Democracy’s International Advisory Committee, died on 7 January 2017 at the age of 92. Three days of official mourning and a state funeral marked his passing. This formal tribute to his service as prime minister and later president of Portugal was also an occasion to honor and reflect on the key role that Soares had played in his country’s 1974 transition to democracy, which initiated the “third wave” of global democratization.

For decades prior to the 1970s, Portugal had lived under a right-wing military dictatorship that was nearly as old as Soares himself—it had begun in 1926, when he was not quite two-years old. A Lisbon attorney and well-known foe of the dictatorship, he suffered no fewer than twelve arrests. In 1968, the regime sent him into exile on the Atlantic island of São Tomé (at that time still a Portuguese colony) off the west coast of Africa. In 1970, he was allowed to leave São Tomé for Paris. A few years after that, at a semi-clandestine meeting in West Germany, Soares and his wife Maria Barroso founded the Socialist Party of Portugal. He served as its first general secretary.

On 25 April 1974, a nearly bloodless military coup ended autocratic rule in Portugal, and, as Samuel P. Huntington later put it, “implausibly and unwittingly” began “the third wave of democratization in the modern world.” In the early phase of what would come to be called the Carnation Revolution, Soares became foreign minister in a coalition government that included the Portuguese Communist Party, an unreconstructed Soviet-aligned organization.

But Soares’s freedom struggle had not ceased. During the period of uncertainty after the dictatorship’s end, hard-line Communist elements in the Lisbon government began tightening their authoritarian grip on military, political, and civil institutions. Mário Soares resigned from that government in 1975, and then led a spontaneous coalition that managed to thwart the Communists’ power play, with the decisive moment coming in the form of a failed pro-Communist coup in Lisbon on November 25. Immediately after defeating that antidemocratic coup, Soares stood tall against attempts to outlaw the Communist Party, reasserting his vision of Portugal as a country firmly committed to liberal-democratic principles.

In 1976, Soares became Portugal’s first elected prime minister and guided the process of joining the European Economic Community (the precursor to the European Union), which admitted Portugal as a full member in 1985. In 1986, after starting with just 8 percent support in opinion polls, Soares won election as the first civilian president in the history of Portugal’s young democracy. Five years later, he was reelected with an overwhelming 70 percent of the vote.

During the January 10 state funeral, a speech that Soares had made during his 1986 presidential campaign was replayed as his coffin was borne to its final resting place. Once again, Soares’s summoning words rang out:

After the 25th of April [1974], some of those who had fought against the dictatorship started opening new prisons. They and their predecessors had mainly a blind lack of respect for their fellow citizens. They and their predecessors believed themselves to be the sole owners of the truth. They conceived of themselves as being predestined to save the Portuguese.

There is a certainty that I have always had: that truth does not belong to anybody in exclusivity and that nothing can replace toleration. This is one of my great principles.

I have always been on the side of those who were and are oppressed, those who felt and feel excluded from their own country. In Lisbon, in exile on São Tomé, as well as at Fonte Luminosa [the site of a landmark anticommunist rally in Lisbon on 19 July 1975], I have always fought for the Portuguese to be allowed to live with one another under liberty, for all to be allowed to feel that we all are an integral part of Portugal.

While Mário...