ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Portugal profiles of longstanding democracies and of the European Union, and provides essential detail on history, electoral system, political parties and cleavages, and governments. Portugal has been a geographically cohesive polity since the eleventh century. Dr. Marcello Caetano tried to rule as a liberal authoritarian, but social tensions grew rapidly, in part over the cost of maintaining Portugal’s empire in Africa. It should be noted at the start that when many of the democratic political parties were founded in Portugal, they described themselves as left-of-centre or socialist in order to distance themselves from the country’s pre-1975 political history regardless of whether or not this was a true representation of the party’s ideology. All partisan governments have been led by the social democratic party or the Portuguese socialist party, who have been mutually exclusive in government except for one “grand coalition” from 1983 to 1985.
