Bernardino Machado elected president of Portugal

On 6 August 1915 the Congress of Portugal, that is, the two chambers of parliament sitting together, elected a new president of the republic. The choice fell on the 64-year-old Bernardino Machado, a professor from Coimbra, former foreign minister and prime minister in 1914. The election did not go smoothly. According to the minutes of the sitting, kept in the archive of the Portuguese parliament, three ballots were needed. In the first, votes went to seven candidates and 15 ballot papers were blank. Machado received 71 votes and General António Xavier Correia Barreto 44. In the second, with five candidates, Machado collected 75 votes and Correia Barreto 45. As neither obtained the required majority, only the two of them faced each other in the third ballot. Machado won by 134 votes to 18, with 27 ballot papers declared invalid.

The radicals’ candidate

Machado was elected for a full four-year term. He was to replace Teófilo Braga, whom Congress had elected at the end of May only to complete the term of the outgoing Manuel de Arriaga. Machado’s candidacy was backed by Afonso Costa and the radical wing of the Democratic Party, which since the June elections had held a clear majority in both chambers. His main rival was also a republican, General Correia Barreto, minister of war in the provisional government after the revolution of 1910. The sitting was at first chaired by Correia Barreto himself, and after the second ballot he was replaced by Vítor Hugo de Azevedo Coutinho, prime minister at the turn of 1914 and 1915.

For Machado this was a second attempt. On 24 August 1911, in the election of the republic’s first president, he had lost to Arriaga by 86 votes to 121. The moderate republicans had not then wanted a candidate backed by the radicals. This time the parliamentary majority belonged to the Democrats.

A professor from Rio de Janeiro

The new president was born on 28 March 1851 in Rio de Janeiro. His family moved to Portugal in 1860 and settled in Joane near Vila Nova de Famalicão, and he took Portuguese citizenship in 1872. He studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Coimbra, where he later taught, holding the chair of anthropology from 1883. Under the monarchy he was minister of public works in 1893 and dealt with the protection of working women and children. In 1903 he joined the Portuguese Republican Party, and in 1906–1909 he sat on its leadership. He was also one of the leading figures of Portuguese Freemasonry. After the revolution of 1910 he directed foreign policy in the provisional government, from 1912 he was minister to Brazil, and in 1914 he headed a government that fell in December. With his wife Elzira Dantas Machado, an activist of the women’s movement, he had more than a dozen children (the Presidency Museum gives seventeen, other sources 18 or 19).

A supporter of the war

From the beginning of the war Machado advocated loyalty to the alliance with England, even if it meant sending soldiers to the front. His election therefore strengthened the camp in favour of Portugal entering the war on the side of the Entente. He took the oath two months later, on 5 October 1915, the fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the republic, at a ceremonial sitting of Congress. A few weeks later the government of José de Castro resigned, and Costa formed a new cabinet. In March 1916 Germany declared war on Portugal, and the president later visited Portuguese soldiers in France. He did not complete his term: in December 1917 he was overthrown by the coup of Sidónio Pais and Machado had to leave the country.