and France There were several coups over a 16-year period In reaction to labor unrest in the early 1920s, extra-parliamentary right-wing organizations arose These groups lent their support to a bloodless military coup in 1926 Two years later, in the wake of financial crisis, the military regime brought an economics professor out of the obscurity of the University of Coimbra and named him minister of finance António de Oliveira Salazar had a limited set of priorities in that office: to generate a budget surplus and to stockpile gold He proved to be quite effective at what he set out to He quickly overshadowed a succession of military prime ministers and won supporters among officers, clergy, businessmen, bankers, and landowners The New State The military regime was a little more stable than its predecessor Salazar, whose star was already rising within the regime, founded a new party in 1930, the National Union (União Nacional), to unify the regime’s supporters In 1932, as the Great Depression advanced, he was appointed prime minister, a position he would hold for the next 36 years Salazar promulgated a new constitution in 1933, establishing the New State (Estado Novo) The National Assembly, consisting of the Chamber of Deputies and the Corporatist Chamber, had severely limited powers Salazar selected nearly all candidates personally Rights and liberties proclaimed by the constitution were nullified by government regulation Various sectors of society were organized from above in corporatist fashion The political police maintained surveillance over potential opponents, many of whom fled into exile Censors erased any hint of dissent From 1936 to 1944 Salazar was also minister of war In that position he found he could shrink the size of the army and control officers’ salaries, transfers, retirements, and even marriages Officers were encouraged to marry wealthy women so that their salaries could be kept low A politicized government-run militia, the Portuguese Legion (Legião Portuguesa), partially offset the army’s influence Thus it was Salazar, not the military, who consolidated the authoritarian regime His was a conservative, corporatist police state, but it was not a true fascist state It did not seek to overthrow traditional elites or mobilize society around its goals Rather, Salazar sought to demobilize—or even freeze—society and to reject modernity Rather than exalting war, Salazar strove for a kind of neutrality In any event, Portugal (1930–present) 343 his austere policies left the armed forces with a very low level of effectiveness Spain and World War II Salazar viewed Spain’s leftist Popular Front government as a threat When General Francisco Franco rebelled against it in 1936, launching the Spanish civil war, Portugal officially followed the lead of Britain and France by promising nonintervention, but surreptitiously funneled aid to Franco Franco’s agents were allowed to operate on Portuguese territory Thousands of volunteers went to Spain to fight against the Republican cause At the end of the war, in March 1939, Salazar and Franco signed a treaty of friendship and nonaggression, known informally as the Iberian Pact Salazar declared Portugal’s neutrality in World War II on September 1, 1939, the very day Poland was invaded He also sought to keep the war as far away as possible by bolstering Spain’s neutrality In the wake of its civil war, Spain was in no condition to take an active role in World War II, but Portugal’s position highlighted the potential costs of even a passive role, as in allowing the Germans to pass through to take the British stronghold of Gibraltar The strategic situation changed for the Iberian Peninsula as the Germans became tied down in the Soviet Union and the Allies moved into North Africa and Italy It was now highly unlikely that Spain would intervene on Germany’s side Salazar allowed himself to be persuaded to join the Allied cause, albeit passively From the Allied perspective, the Azores were the key objective Situated in the mid-Atlantic, these Portuguese islands would be useful bases both for antisubmarine warfare and for refueling transatlantic flights in the buildup prior to the great invasion of France First Britain, and then the United States, acquired access to facilities there, and Portugal ceased selling tungsten to Germany while still claiming to be neutral Postwar Portugal Portugal’s shift put it on the winning side, improving its bargaining position in postwar Europe and increasing its chances of getting back East Timor and Macao, which had been occupied by the Japanese Still, the semifascist state was in an ambiguous position after the war It began to describe itself as an “organic democracy” rather than a “civilian police dictatorship,” an expression that had been used in the 1930s Portugal was not invited to the San Francisco conference, which established the United Nations, and was denied UN membership until 1955 Portugal was,