Estado Novo

The Estado Novo, the New State, was the corporatist authoritarian regime Antonio de Oliveira Salazar built on a 1933 constitution that banned political parties and replaced parliamentary politics with an appointed Corporate Chamber representing employers, workers and the Catholic Church, grounded explicitly in Catholic social teaching rather than the secular fascism of Mussolini's Italy. The PIDE secret police enforced the regime by arresting and jailing critics without trial, and press coverage and public discussion outside a narrow circle of Salazar loyalists were forbidden. Marcelo Caetano succeeded the incapacitated Salazar in 1968 and abolished the PIDE the following year, but he preserved the corporatist system and its colonial wars in Africa largely intact; a bloodless military coup, the Carnation Revolution, overthrew Caetano's government on 25 April 1974 and ended the Estado Novo after forty one years.