Álvaro Cunhal

Álvaro Cunhal (1982)

Álvaro Barreirinhas Cunhal (usually simply called Álvaro Cunhal , [ˈaɫvɐɾu kuˈɲaɫ] , born November 10, 1913 in Coimbra , † June 13, 2005 in Lisbon ) was a Portuguese politician and was chairman of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) from 1961 to 1992 . He was an important Portuguese politician during the time of the Estado Novo (mostly in exile) and the Third Republic .

Cunhal began studying law at the University of Lisbon in 1931 and joined the banned Communist Party that same year. He took his final law exam under police surveillance. After doing his doctorate and practicing as a lawyer , he headed the Federation of Young Communists in 1935 . In 1936 he was sent to the Spanish Civil War and imprisoned immediately when he returned to Portugal in 1937. As a result, he took part in building up communist cadre groups and was repeatedly imprisoned. From 1939 he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of Portugal. After years of illegality, he was arrested again in 1949 and remained in prison for eleven years, eight of them in solitary confinement, until he and ten other inmates managed to escape spectacularly from the Peniche fortress north of Lisbon on the coast in 1960 . He remained in exile until the end of the dictatorship in 1974 , for a long time in the Soviet Union , most recently in Prague .

He returned to Portugal on April 30, 1974, five days after the overthrow of the dictatorship. During the Carnation Revolution , the Communist Party tried to gain influence under Cunhal, which tended to contribute to the factioning of the movement. In free elections, the party won between 10 and 20 percent of the vote in the following years, with significantly higher percentages in rural Alentejo with a high proportion of farm workers and day laborers. From May 1974 to 1975, Cunhal was a minister with no portfolio of his own , but high influence. After a sobering election result for the Communists in the April 1975 elections, he and his party left the government. Commenting on his party's performance, he said that elections are not the most characteristic expression of power and influence. Nevertheless, he was a member of the Lisbon Parliament from 1975 to 1992. In 1992 he also handed over the office of General Secretary to his successor Carlos Carvalhas .

Cunhal remained connected to the traditional Moscow line , he fended off the changes of the other communist parties ( Eurocommunism ) as well as the ideas of perestroika under Gorbachev . Under his leadership, the party was also reluctant to adapt to the social change in the country. That is why Cunhal was considered by many to be the last Stalinist in Europe.

In the old age of over ninety and without any notable influence, Cunhal was finally respected as a worthy old man by political opponents, also because of his artistic inclinations. Cunhal had worked in the course of his life as a novelist (under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago ), as an essayist, draftsman and sculptor. His novel Cinco Dias, Cinco Noites (English: "Five days, five nights", transl .: Michael Kegler , TFM 1999) was made into a film by the director José Fonseca e Costa in 1996 , and the television station Sociedade Independente de Comunicação (SIC) produced one TV multi-part based on his novel Até Amanhã, Camaradas (German: “See you tomorrow, comrades”, transl .: Eberhard Gärtner , Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin , 1979), realized in 2005 by director Joaquim Leitão .

In the 2007 election of the “Greatest Portuguese of All Time” ( Os Grandes Portugueses ) organized by the public television broadcaster RTP , Cunhal came in second just behind Salazar .

literature

• Literature by and about Álvaro Cunhal in the catalog of the German National Library

Web links

Commons : Álvaro Cunhal  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Portuguese page with Windows Media Audio sound documents

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Final do programa “Os grandes Portugueses”: O nosso agradecimento a todos os que participaram. Rádio e Televisão de Portugal , March 25, 2007, archived from the original on January 30, 2012 ; Retrieved July 14, 2018 (Portuguese).