ABSTRACT
Salazar’s regime exerted significant influence on a number of right-wing dictatorships in the 1930s. Its hybrid ideological and institutional formation constituted a tried-and-tested ‘third-way’ template of radical authoritarian transformation between traditional dictatorship and the then-emerging radical paradigm of fascist rule. Among those who were attracted to Salazar’s Portugal was Ioannis Metaxas, leader of the 4th of August regime that put an end to an unstable parliamentary system in Greece in 1936. Metaxas personally, and many of his regime’s public intellectuals and political figures, studied the nature of the Portuguese regime precisely because of what they perceived as its flexible political hybridity. The Portuguese regime was regarded as a source of usable political solutions (e.g. institutional formation, social and political corporatism, controlled popular mobilization) for a Mediterranean dictatorship that was socially conservative, paternalistic, and respectful of traditional authority. In this chapter, I examine the various channels of interaction between the two regimes in 1936–1940 and analyze the ways in which the Portuguese experience informed some key aspects of Metaxas’s political enterprise – but only having been refracted through the special filter of the interwar Greek situation.
