Is Everybody Happy?

Shy and scholarly, shunning the limelight, Portugal's Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, 68, defies the accepted definition of dictators; yet he is now the dean of them. His technique is paternal, sometimes even benevolent. He controls police and press, brooks opposition for only 40 days before elections every four years. Yet, even when there is opportunity, few of Portugal's 8,500.000 fill the air above their lovely Latin land with cries for liberty. With a sedulously fostered reputation for financial wizardry, former Economics Professor Salazar has kept Portugal's budget balanced, but at the expense of workers, who are among the worst-paid, worst-fed and most illiterate in Western Europe. Yet, showing a strange political unconcern, the voters have made no serious move to replace him.

Last week the Portuguese, technically, had a chance to protest against Salazar. Traditionally, the opposition fades away before Election Day. But in 1953, for the first time in a reign which began in 1928, 28 candidates ran against his National Union; all lost. This year, muzzled and muffled, all the opposition melted by Election Day except four lawyers, a merchant and an agronomist in the defiant northern district of Braga. The opposition complained that it was denied equal access to press, radio and the voters' rolls, that its supporters were blocked from voting. Salazar airily dismissed all his opponents as "Communists," and warned of the tense international situation. In an election eve broadcast, Salazar asked: "Are there many people who feel unhappy? So do I, and in spite of that I will vote."

Unhappy or not, the Portuguese voted all 120 hand-picked candidates of Salazar's National Union into the rubber-stamp National Assembly. In Braga the opposition got, the government said, only 5,170 votes to 55,240 for Salazar's men. Its 40 days of "freedom" over, the opposition went back underground, and Salazar, who considers democracy a "hopeless system," went back to work on his plan to fashion Portugal, a loyal member of NATO, into a truly corporative state, unhampered by any elective bodies at all.

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