The data from the “secret” survey of April 25 have already been made public, in collaboration with the Portuguese Embassy in Madrid, given the historical nature of the document.
In October 1974, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco commissioned a survey to find out the opinion of the Spanish on the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, which it described as “restricted use” and which ended up being kept secret until 2023.
The “report of an opinion poll in Madrid and Barcelona on the political situation in Portugal”, with the heading “RESERVED USE” on the cover, came to light this year, when the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) of Spain decided to make public all the documents that he had under his guardianship that were reserved and, in some cases, ignored, because “the boxes in which they were kept for a long time had never been opened,” explains the president of the organization, José Félix Tezanos, to Lusa.
The decision to release these documents arose in connection with the 60-year history of the CIS, which is the successor to the Institute of Public Opinion founded in 1963.
The survey on the Carnation Revolution (April 25, 1974) was carried out in Madrid and Barcelona, on October 8 and 9, 1974, one week after the resignation of General António de Spínola from the Presidency of the Republic.
The five-question survey asked 1,102 people if they knew in which country a revolution had taken place in April, if they felt sympathy or antipathy for the events in Portugal, if they thought the change would benefit or harm the country and if the opinions regarding to the Portuguese revolution had changed after the resignation of Spinola.
In general, it is men, young people, people with a higher educational level and belonging to the upper social strata, as well as Barcelonans, who are better informed and also feel more sympathy and optimism in relation to politics. changes that are operating in Portugal”, reads the conclusions of the survey report.
In Spain, which was still under a dictatorship, with censorship and limitations on freedom of the press, 48% said they knew there had been a political change in Portugal. Among these, the majority sympathized with the revolution. “There was an element of concern”, explains José Félix Tezanos, who adds: “It was known that Spanish society was evolving, that a part of Spanish society, some media, looked at Portugal sympathetically”.
The survey was carried out after Spinola’s resignation, probably because at that time concern was growing, “with the possible drift of the revolution”, which was initially seen as “democratic, Europeanist and, at a given moment, concern about the becoming would have another, more radical evolution”, suggests José Félix Tezanos.
However, he adds, “Spanish public opinion, in Madrid and Barcelona, the big cities,” continued, in October 1974, five months after the revolution, viewing “this libertarian movement with sympathy, even envy.”
“I think that at that time there was a healthy envy,” says José Félix Tezanos, born in Santander in 1946 and who has good memories of that time, when many Spaniards, like him, traveled to Portugal to see “the freedom movement ”. in the field, that was happening there.
The report ended up not being published and, like others that were made at that time, only members of the Government of General Franco had access to the document.
The “very clear” conclusion of the survey, according to Tezanos, may have worried the Spanish rulers, but it is likely that, in 1974, when Franco was already at the end of his life, and after decades of dictatorship, he was not. This is the case for everyone, because the Spanish regime at that time already had the so-called reformists in its midst, who ended up being among the protagonists of the Spanish transition to democracy.
“What we see is young people, of intermediate ages, with higher education, in the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, the most dynamic part of Spanish society,” sympathizers of the Portuguese revolution, which ended peacefully with a dictatorship, and possibly the reformists of the regime, “did not see it with concern,” he says.
“Actually, I think this influenced the way of looking at the democratic transition later on. [espanhola]which was highly encouraged by people who came from the regime”, he argues.
José Félix Tezanos recalls, in this sense, the “curious fact” that “from that moment” in Spain constitutionalists are asked to study whether it would be possible, “based on the laws of the regime, to evolve towards a democracy”. . .
“Several studies confirmed that this was the case” and, in 1978, Spain had a new Constitution that restored democracy in the country, also in this case, peacefully.
The data from the “secret” survey of April 25 have now been made public, in collaboration with the Portuguese Embassy in Madrid, given the historical nature of the document, as a contribution to the Joint Cultural Program between Portugal and Spain, agreed in the framework of the 50th anniversary celebrations on April 25 (which will take place in 2024).
Source: Observadora
