ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
formed by the government co-existed with a senate with corporatist representation;
however, it lasted only briefly.
Even although corporatism was present in the dominant ‘political families’ of the military
dictatorship, from the integralist monarchists to the republicans, the many constitutional
projects discussed and presented to Salazar, alongside the institutionalization of social
corporatism with the 1933 National Labour Statute (ENT – Estatuto Nacional do Trabalho),
expressing tensions between the integral corporatism of some, particularly the traditionalist
monarchists, and the conservative liberalism of the republicans, or between President
Carmona who was elected in 1928, and Salazar. The single party, the National Union, was
created in 1930 from above and based on the unification of conservative elites from the
various parties that supported the dictatorship, was not a focus for any tension in the
institutionalization of Salazar’s New State.
The introduction of social corporatism by Salazar’s New State (1933-1974) in Portugal
deserves particular attention since corporatism was written into the 1933 constitution and
given a central role in determining institutional structures, ideology, relations with ‘organized
interests’, and the state’s economic policy, as well as its long duration. The foundation stone
of social corporatism was contained in the 1933 ETN. As a declaration of corporatist
principals, ETN owed a great deal to Italian Fascism’s labour charter, although, as in the case
of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, tempered by the ideals of Social Catholicism. With the
ETN, approved unions were the first sector to be affected, and subsequent legislation foresaw
a long series of intermediate bodies that would lead to the constitution of the
corporations. Social corporatism was strongly institutionalized in the Portuguese case, with
agencies to encompass virtually all social groups and professions, but until the 1950s, when
the corporations were finally created, a sizeable part of the representation of the organic
elements of the nation was chosen by the corporatist council, made up by Salazar and
ministers connected with the sector.
The founder of the Portuguese corporatist system, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, was a former
Integralist, a radical-right Action Française-inspired elitist movement, who united young
radical-right-wingers, fascists and social-Catholic civil servants within his department. The
promulgation of the ENT provoked tensions with a native fascist movement, Rolão Preto’s
National-Syndicalists (MNS – Movimento Nacional-Sindicalista) because it ‘stole [their]
thunder’. For NS, corporatism was a key objective and the cornerstone of its plans to
reorganize the state. Although Salazar’s programme diverged from theirs, the ETN was
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