Prime Minister’s ‘Right’ Stuff a Hit in Portugal : Cavaco Silva Leads Nation Away From the Left; Mood of Optimism Prevails

In the first tumultuous years after the Portuguese revolution of April 25, 1974, no thoughtful analyst could imagine that Portugal would be run in little more than a decade by a conservative majority party in the hands of an economics professor determined to shake off much of the old rhetoric and trappings of the revolution.

In those days, democracy was symbolized by a red carnation blossoming from the barrel of a gun, and Portugal basked in so much leftist revolutionary fervor that the most right-wing party called itself a movement of “the center” and some American officials feared that communism was surely on its way.

Portugal, run by 48-year-old Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, has a far different kind of mood now. There have been other conservative prime ministers among the 16 Portuguese governments of the last 13 years. But all ruled only with minority support or with coalitions. Cavaco Silva himself, who became prime minister in 1985, controlled only a little more than one-third of the seats of the Assembly of the Republic for his first 21 months in power.

In the parliamentary elections last July 19, however, the voters of Portugal, for the first time since the revolution, gave an absolute majority to a single party, evidently ensuring four years of stable government. Cavaco Silva’s Social Democratic Party, a right-of-center party unlike others with the same name elsewhere in Europe, took 51% of the votes and 148 of the 250 seats in the Assembly of the Republic.

The victory set off a wave of optimism in Portugal. Many Portuguese felt that their vote had made it clear that Portugal, now a member of the European Common Market, was a stable, democratic country, just like others in Western Europe.

Speaking carefully, softly and precisely in English in the sitting room of his elegant residence on the grounds of the Parliament building on a recent morning, Cavaco Silva, who earned his doctorate in economics at the University of York in England a year before the revolution, said that he is determined to rid the Portuguese constitution of “the biased language” and “some foolish ideas that the people have rejected in these elections.”

The prime minister was referring mainly to the constitutional clauses that proclaim that the nationalization of industries and seizures of plantations in the wake of the revolution were “the irreversible gains of the working class.” This prevents the government from selling any of its nationalized companies back to private hands or breaking up the inefficient Communist farm collectives in the south.

Cavaco Silva said that the constitution had simply not kept pace with the change of thinking in the country. What still remains of the 1974 revolution against more than four decades of fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the prime minister said, is “mainly the idea of democracy and freedom.”

But, he went on, the Portuguese, by joining the European Common Market two years ago, had rejected “the model that emerged after the revolution.” They had rejected, he said, “socialism, collectivism . . . some type of Third World influence on our democracy” and had chosen instead “the pluralistic society and a market-oriented economy.”

During the years of unstable government, Cavaco Silva said, the people had felt “a lot of disappointment with the results of democracy” but had still praised democracy and shown good sense in the way they voted.

“The roots of democracy . . . are as strong in Portugal as in any other country in Europe which has lived in democracy for centuries,” the prime minister said.

Changing the constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Assembly of the Republic. There is so little nostalgia for the old revolutionary rhetoric these days that Cavaco Silva hopes to put together the two-thirds vote with the help of the Socialist Party. The Socialists, once the largest party in Portugal, now have 60 parliamentary seats.

Most analysts believe that the Socialists accept the need for the constitutional changes and will support them in 1988. But Cavaco Silva said he is not wholly sure that this will happen.

“I’m a bit concerned because of the internal situation of that party,” he said. “There are too many disagreements inside the party. . . .

“I’m not very optimistic,” he went on, “but I’m not very pessimistic, either. We have to wait and see what is going to happen in the congress of the Socialist Party next February.”

But Cavaco Silva insisted that the changes are absolutely necessary for the modernization and economic well-being of Portugal. “If it is not possible to make these fundamental changes,” he said, “it’s no use to make small repairs in the window.”

Portugal is still one of the poorest countries in Western Europe and faces difficult economic problems. Its farmers produce only a third of what other European farmers produce per acre. Its budget deficit is still dangerously high. But, after years of austerity, the Portuguese are feeling the onset of better times.

The growth rate in 1987 was probably between 4.5% and 5%, among the best in Europe. Wages rose during 1987, and the inflation rate dropped. Foreign investment almost tripled in the first nine months of 1987. Many who hoarded their money abroad after the revolution have brought it back. There are new cars in the streets for the first time in years, and some Lisbon residents have started to renovate their antique homes.

Cavaco Silva’s unprecedented victory in the last elections powered unprecedented optimism.

“We were not used to such results in an election,” said Cavaco Silva. “ . . . On the next day, there was an explosion of prices in the stock exchange, and some people began thinking that all the problems of Portugal will be solved the next day and their own problems will be solved in the next day. There was some kind of euphoria in the country.”

The government began worrying about inflated prices on the stock exchanges for the shares of flimsy companies, and Cavaco Silva, using an old Portuguese proverb, told the nation over television that they should be careful “not to buy a cat for a rabbit at the butcher.”

He made the remark, however, just a few days before the October stock market crash in New York, and critics have therefore blamed him for exacerbating the resulting market plunge in Portugal. Stocks dropped 40% in two months on the exchanges in Lisbon and Oporto.

Cavaco Silva insists that, for the most part, he is not disturbed by the decline in stock prices and that “the degree of confidence (in Portugal as a whole) remains very high but at more normal levels.”

In the first decade after the revolution, the politician who represented Portugal to the rest of the world was former Prime Minister Mario Soares, now 63, the convivial, easygoing Socialist politician who is now president, a relatively weak office in Portugal. Despite their political differences, Soares and Cavaco Silva seem to get along well, but two men could hardly be more different in personality.

Cavaco Silva appears somewhat shy and cold yet somehow determined and aggressive in public, and he has often been described by politicians and businessmen as arrogant--and as withering in his dressing down of subordinates, even members of the Cabinet.

The prime minister, who struggled for his education as the son of a gas station attendant in class-conscious Portugal, acknowledges that he is a demanding leader.

“When they say I am arrogant,” he said, “it is just because I’m very firm to do things. If I’m convinced, after studying carefully a problem, that this should be done for the country, I will insist, and it’s difficult for me to give up. I think there is a confusion between arrogance and having strong convictions.”

Cavaco Silva insists that he is not an ordinary politician, for he entered politics only when a conservative government appointed him as minister of finance in 1980, after he had worked as a professor of economics and the director of research for the Bank of Portugal.

“I was a professor of economics, and by accident I came to the political life. I was not educated to be a politician. . . . I do not like the cocktail life. . . . Where you normally meet the politicians, normally I am not there.”