Portuguese Communist Party
포르투갈 공산당
A Portuguese communist party founded on 6 March 1921, mainly by revolutionary syndicalists. It became the Portuguese section of the Comintern in 1923 and was the best-organised underground opposition under the dictatorship of Salazar and Caetano. It became a legal party after the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and is the oldest Portuguese party with uninterrupted existence.
In depth
The Portuguese Communist Party was founded on 6 March 1921, continuing the group from the Portuguese Maximalist Federation, which revolutionary syndicalists had founded in September 1919 and which was banned at the end of 1920. Unlike virtually all other European communist parties, it was not formed from a split in a social democratic party but from anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary syndicalist groups. It established contact with the Comintern in 1922, and at its first congress in November 1923, attended by the Comintern delegate Jules Humbert-Droz, it became the Portuguese section of the Comintern, with José Carlos Rates as its first secretary-general.
The party was repressed after the military coup of May 1926; the English source says it was banned after the coup, the Portuguese source that it was outlawed at the end of the 1920s. By the summer of 1928 it was reduced to 50 members in Lisbon and 20 in Porto, and at a reorganisation conference in April 1929 Bento Gonçalves became secretary-general. The whole secretariat was arrested in November 1935, and Gonçalves died in the Tarrafal concentration camp; the party went without a secretary-general from 1942 to 1961. Members released in an amnesty in 1940 rebuilt the party and relaunched Avante! that year. According to the Portuguese source, Álvaro Cunhal and nine others escaped from Peniche prison in January 1960, and Cunhal became secretary-general in 1961.
After the Carnation Revolution of April 1974 political prisoners were freed and Cunhal returned to Lisbon on 30 April. The party supported independence for the colonies. The 36 members of the central committee elected at the seventh congress in October 1974 had together served more than 300 years in jail according to the English source, and 308 years according to the Portuguese source. The party became the first legally recognised party on 26 December 1974 according to the English source and on 12 January 1975 according to the Portuguese source. After a right-wing coup attempt failed on 11 March 1975, the banks, transport, steel mills and other key sectors were nationalised under Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves, and the party led the agrarian reform south of the Tagus, which made the south its stronghold. It won 12.52% in the 1975 Constituent Assembly election and 14.56% in the 1976 election.
The party faced one of the biggest crises in its history as the socialist bloc collapsed, but at its 13th congress in May 1990 it decided to retain its Leninist line. Carlos Carvalhas succeeded Cunhal in 1992, followed by Jerónimo de Sousa in 2004 and Paulo Raimundo in 2022. Since 1987 it has contested elections in the Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU) with the Ecologist Party "The Greens".