Remembering the man who ‘saved Port in the 70s’

With the death of Portugal’s ex-President Mario Soares on Saturday 7th January we have lost the man who effectively saved Port in the 1970s, writes Paul Symington, who is the chairman of Symington Family Estates.

Former President of Portugal Mário Soares died on 7 January aged 92

When Portugal’s right wing dictatorship was overthrown in April 1974, the revolution was quickly taken over by a group of far left soldiers calling themselves the MFA; ‘Movimento das Forças Armadas’, in close collaboration with the Portuguese Communist Party. Portugal was then taken on a fast trajectory to becoming a ‘people’s popular republic’ on the Albania and Romania model. Wholesale nationalisations swept the country, including most of the large cork forests of the Alentejo. In addition the banks and all the press, as well as many factories, were confiscated without compensation. Arrests and imprisonment without due process was the norm. Many people people fled the country. One major Port company was nationalised and it was just a question of time before most other Port companies followed. A strike across the entire Port trade was called as a preliminary to this process.

Mário Soares was the leader of the Portuguese Socialist party. He had been in exile in France under the right wing dictatorship, and was on the wanted list of the dictatorship’s secret police, the PIDE. In 1975 he was strongly pressurised to join a type of popular front proclaiming a new dictatorship, that of ‘the proletariat’, together with the MFA and the Communists.

But Mario Soares decided to fight for a conventional democratic system and insisted on immediate and free elections in the face of huge opposition from many radical groups who considered the people ‘not ready to vote’. The country was on the verge of civil war with several key army units lining up to take sides. However Mario Soares prevailed and free elections were held on 25th April 1975, the first since the dictator Salazar took power in 1932. Soares won these elections and gradually life in Portugal returned to normal and the confiscations and nationalisations ceased, although it took over a decade before many past owners were compensated even partially for the losses of their land and their possessions.

The threat to Port during this period could not have been more extreme, a fact little known or recognised today outside Portugal, particularly in the wine trade, where Port is seen as a permanent and unchanged fixture. Mario Soares’s brave fight for democracy in 1974 and 1975 after decades of a stifling right wing dictatorship and to avoid a new type of dictatorship, allowed the Douro and its producers to continue their work. We owe him a lot.

My father, Michael Symington, invited Mario Soares to a dinner at the Factory House in October 1988, allowing members to pay homage to the first democratically elected President of Portugal since the 1930s.