Why Portugal’s coup worked

Fifty years ago today, on 25 April 1974, Europe was stunned by an almost bloodless military coup that removed the continent’s most durable dictatorship: Portugal’s authoritarian ‘New State’ that had held the country in an iron grip since 1926.

Military coups have an evil reputation in Europe. We associate them with ham-fisted juntas, arbitrary arrests, torture, and reactionary politics: the sort of regimes that ruled Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, and left those countries drenched in blood.

Though military coups were a fairly common way of changing governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia, in the 20th century they had become a rarity in Europe. At the time of the Portuguese coup, the colonels in Greece and Portugal’s Spanish neighbour – ruled by the aged General Franco – were the only countries still run by regimes installed by coups. So unfamiliar were European coups that some shied away from using the ‘c’ word: instead, it was baptised ‘the carnation revolution’ after the flowers that the coup-making soldiers stuck in the muzzles of their rifles, and which became the symbol of their coup.