Portugal: Squeezing Out the Moderates

With brisk dispatch, Portugal's leftist-dominated Revolutionary Council moved last week to consolidate its powers. In the aftermath of the previous week's right-wing coup attempt, the all-military 24-member council appeared on television for the first time before being sworn in at ceremonies in the president's office at Belem Palace.

Even before the swearing-in, the council had decreed the nationalization of Portugal's banks and insurance companies, which control more than half of the country's industries. Last week Premier Vasco dos Santos Gonc,alves, who together with President Francisco da Costa Gomes remains at the head of the provisional coalition government, asked for the resignations of his 15-member Cabinet, banned three political parties that were accused of inciting violence and postponed elections for a constituent assembly until April 25.

Gonc,alves immediately went into secret session with leaders of the parties represented in the previous government--the Popular Democrats, Socialists and Communists. He also talked with representatives of the small Democratic Movement Party, an avantgarde Marxist group that is closely linked to the Communists, about their bid for a post in the new Cabinet.

At week's end the new coalition had still not been announced. Government ministers said that the new Cabinet, like the outgoing one, would be predominantly military with perhaps a larger representation of Communists, who formerly held two posts. One rumored change was that Mario Soares, the Socialist leader, might lose his post as Foreign Minister, although Conc,alves was believed likely to keep him in the Cabinet in some position.

Equally unclear was the precise ideological makeup of the Revolutionary Council. The 200-man Armed Forces Movement (M.F.A.), which has guided government policy since last April's revolution, created the council as a supreme political authority in an all-night session following the coup attempt. Many moderates, who had previously defeated similar attempts to create such a council, were in hiding or frightened away from the emergency meeting. "The council reflects radical thinking in the M.F.A.," said a European diplomat. "More than that we cannot say with assurance." Late last week the council increased its membership to 28 with the addition of four new members, including three prominent moderates. They are expected to provide a braking influence on the radicals.

Rival Rallies. Even before that, the council moved swiftly against what Costa Gomes described as "those few persons who cannot distinguish between being free and being liberated, confusing democracy with the absence of authority and legality." Two radical leftist parties, the tiny Alliance of Workers and Farmers and the student-dominated Movement for the Reorganization of the Proletariat Party (M.R.P.P.), were banned. Both were accused of staging violent street demonstrations and disrupting rival political rallies, but some observers thought that they were being eliminated at the behest of Portugal's Moscow-oriented Communists. "The Communist game is to play Mr. Clean," said one foreign diplomat. "The Maoists would only have been in the way, fueling fears both here and abroad that dangerous leftist loonies were on the loose."

Also banned was the small, conservative Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Major Sanches Osorio, a former Information Minister, was allegedly implicated in the March 11 coup. The council did not move, as some had feared, against the much larger conservative party, the Center Social Democratic Party (C.D.S.), which had presented joint slates in many areas with the Christian Democrats. But, while the government authorized the C.D.S. to field new candidates, there was some question whether it would.

As for postponing the election, which was originally scheduled for April 12, the government said that it was doing so for technical reasons. One problem was getting ballots printed up with the new list of eleven instead of 14 eligible parties. Another snag was the election commission's realization that several parties had picked the hammer and sickle as their symbol. That would have made it difficult for the estimated 2 million illiterates among Portugal's 6 million voters to make their choice. Those parties will now be asked to find new symbols. The official three-week campaign is scheduled to get under way next week.

Some foreign observers were openly skeptical as to whether the elections would mean much under the rules established by the Revolutionary Council. Before the coup and the subsequent crackdown, there were estimates (admittedly rough) that the middle-of-the-road Popular Democrats and the Center Social Democrats would win 60% of the vote and the Socialists another 25%. But the Communists could conceivably enlarge their estimated 12% of the vote should other leftist groups swing their support to them. Says Francisco Pinto Balsem`ao, editor of the weekly magazine Expresso and a founder of the Popular Democrats: "The Communists have already imposed their view of socialism on the country through the Revolutionary Council and through nationalization. I'm a nonCommunist, not an antiCommunist. But I'm more inclined to be an anti-Communist as each day passes."

Meanwhile, observers were still trying to piece together the events that led up to the abortive right-wing coup. The attempt was so inept that some people in Lisbon speculated that the left may have deliberately stirred up violence in hopes of provoking a premature right-wing effort to seize power so that it could be easily crushed. In an ironic twist, former President Antonio de Spinola, the alleged leader of the plot, wound up in exile in Brazil along with former Dictator Marcello Caetano, whose regime he helped topple last year. In an interview in Sao Paulo with TIME'S Barry Hillenbrand, Spinola said that he stood on a fellow officer's statement that the coup had been a pre-emptive strike intended to head off an alleged Communist plot to assassinate 500 military officers and 1,000 civilians. He also claimed that he had made plans to leave Portugal even before the ill-fated attack on the Lisbon barracks. Said he: "When a person goes to the cinema and does not like the movie, he gets up and leaves. I did not like the show."

Chaotic Takeover. Some accounts from Portugal suggested that Spinola's role was not so passive. Apparently convinced that he could save his country from the chaos and Communist takeover he feared, Spinola reportedly plotted over open telephone lines with ultra-rightists to overthrow the government. Moderate officers, who might conceivably have joined the rebellion, were frightened off by the involvement of members of the old regime and feared that a rightist uprising would end up in a Chilean-style massacre of leftists and plunge the country into civil war.

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