CASTLE OF ALMOUROL
Brief Ministries.
When it is remembered that Portugal has had some twenty governments during the life of a single government in England, it will be readily understood what disastrous confusion, what expense and waste, result, not to speak of personal ambitions kept continually at fever heat, on the watch and intriguing for some official post, and the large army of ex-officials disinclined or unable to find other employment. The list of Governments in the seven years 1908-15 is—save omissions—as follows: (1) João Franco, (2) Amaral, (3) Henriques, (4) Telles, (5) Lima, (6) Beirão, (7) Teixeira de Sousa, (8) Provisional Government, (9) João Chagas, (10) Vasconcellos, (11), Duarte Leite, (12) Costa, (13) Machado, (14) Azevedo, (15) Pimenta de Castro, (16) Revolutionary Government (João Chagas), (17) José de Castro, (18) José de Castro with new ministry. The first regular Republican Parliament (1911-14) saw the rise and fall of seven governments, and the rise and fall of each of them made as little commotion in the country (apart from the habitual discussions of the cafés and political clubs in the towns) as a pebble thrown into the Atlantic.
Making the Elections.
How can this be so, it may be asked, with the deputies of the nation sitting in Parliament? The answer is that elections in Portugal are a peculiar practice. The phrase “The Government makes the elections” obtains in Portugal as in Spain, and of itself speaks volumes. The Government is first appointed by some personal intrigue in Lisbon, with or without reference, or with a purely formal reference to the strength of the various parties in Parliament. It then proceeds to remodel the political framework throughout the country by appointing civil governors, mayors, etc., of its own political views. Then, when it is well seated in the saddle, it holds the elections. It is an unknown thing for a majority to be returned other than of the supporters of the Government. This would be discouraging to the electors (and also it would be impossible) if they took any interest in the results, but the results are always a foregone conclusion except in matters of detail. Senhor Affonso Costa after he had as Premier obtained thirty-four out of thirty-seven seats in a partial election, remarked in a speech to his party, the Democrats: “The country will give us more next time.” That is, the Democrat Government which had made the election was scarcely content to have obtained all except two or three seats, but better luck next time: one must not ask too much. “For the first time,” said Senhor Bernardino Machado after the Revolution, “there is going to be in this country an election without the intervention of the Government.” “The whole country must be fully convinced that it is not the Government that makes the Constituent Assembly” (from a speech delivered in December, 1910). Of course the thing was impossible, the country had not been brought up to use its own discretion at an election. At a meeting of the Provisional Government and the Directory of the Republican Party held in the very month in which these words were spoken and attended by Senhor Bernardino Machado who had spoken them, it was resolved to “bring to bear all the forces of the party without exception in their official organisation in order thus to prevent the adversaries of the Republic from introducing themselves disguisedly into the politics of the nation to disturb it.” Openly, of course, no Royalist would dare to present himself after such an invitation or warning. Yet the question has sometimes been put with a spider-and-fly blandness of hypocrisy: “Why do the Royalists not present themselves for election instead of conspiring?” although, with organised groups employed for “the defence of the Republic,” the Royalists who did so would have been more likely to see the inside of the Penitenciaria than of the House of Parliament. Sincere Republicans admit that the first Republican Parliament was artificially fabricated in Lisbon, and it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise: generations must pass before a really representative assembly can exist in Portugal. Meanwhile, fit, non nascitur. A candid member of the majority in the Chamber of Deputies addressed the little shrivelled minority in 1911 with the words: “Vocês, se vieram á Camara, foi porque nós quizemos” (“You are only here on sufferance”). In 1907 Senhor João Chagas was exclaiming against the fictions, lies, fraud, mockery of the elections: “In Portugal the Government makes the elections.... In our country it is not the people that elects its representatives: it is the Civil Governors and the Mayors.”
Centralisation.
His words are still applicable, and recent years have fastened even more closely upon the country that political centralisation originally derived from Napoleon’s system, and which gives excellent results only so long as an administrative genius is at the head of affairs. The country is more and more a motionless and paralysed victim in the strait-waistcoat of an administration which is little but politics, and the cost of which exceeds, relatively, even that of France. The Revolution brought the charge of even greater interference of politics, otherwise the political system has remained much as before. Leges non animam mutant. The new electoral law has been described even by Republicans as being drawn up on the lines of the old.
Rotativism.