Sidónio Pais becomes president

On 27 December 1917 Sidónio Pais, leader of the coup d’état and since 11 December prime minister of Portugal, also took on the duties of president of the republic. The basis was a government decree, published the same day in an extraordinary supplement to the official gazette. It amended the constitution of 1911 and provided that, until a new president was elected, his duties would be exercised by the President of the Ministry, that is the prime minister. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 28 December.

A broken constitution

The office of president had been vacant since 11 December, when the revolutionary junta removed Bernardino Machado and sent him into exile. Under the 1911 constitution the president was elected by parliament, and both chambers, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, met for this purpose in joint session as the Congress. That was how Machado had been elected in 1915. Parliament, however, had been dissolved, and Pais had no intention of convening a new one. By a single decree he thus combined in his own hands the offices of head of government and head of state. Paradoxically, in 1911, as a deputy to the Constituent Assembly, he had himself helped to write the constitution he was now breaking. His supporters presented this as the beginning of a “New Republic”, in which a strong president was to govern above the quarrelling parties.

The New Republic

From the outset Pais built a cult of the leader around himself. He almost always appeared in uniform and liked to tour the country, and his speeches drew crowds. He won the support of conservatives, Catholics and monarchists. He amended the anticlerical law on the separation of Church and state and restored diplomatic relations with the Holy See. By a decree of 11 March 1918 he gave the vote to all adult men, and by a decree of 30 March he introduced direct presidential elections and a presidential system. On 28 April 1918 he was the only candidate and received 470,831 votes, and on 9 May he formally took office as president.

Pais’s rule did not last long. Living conditions worsened, strikes broke out, and in April 1918 the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps suffered a heavy defeat in Flanders. On 14 December 1918, almost exactly a year after the coup, Pais was fatally shot at Rossio station in Lisbon by a former sergeant, José Júlio da Costa. The poet Fernando Pessoa called him the “President-King” in a poem dedicated to him, and the name stuck to him for good. Many historians consider that the “New Republic” foreshadowed Salazar’s authoritarian Estado Novo, which ruled Portugal for the following decades.