The 'great' dictator

Peter Walker sees Portugal honour its repressive former leader Antonio Oliveira Salazar in a TV poll.

It is now a matter of historical consensus that Antonio Oliveira Salazar was a bad sort, ruling Portugal in an often brutal, repressive fashion for 36 years.

But that does not appear to have dampened his appeal in his native land.

The late dictator is the surprising top choice in a poll to find the greatest Portuguese national ever, winning an overwhelming 41% of the vote.

The event, closely modelled on the 2002 Great Britons survey that put Winston Churchill at the peak of the UK's national pantheon, was run by Portugal's state-owned RTP television, which asked viewers to choose people who had contributed to the greatness of the country's history.

Salazar, they said. Next came Afonso I, the 12th century founder and first king of Portugal, 16th century poet Luis Vaz de Camoes and another monarch, Dom Joao II.

The historical figure perhaps most familiar to non-Portuguese, Vasco de Gama, who discovered the sea route from Europe to India, was seventh, while Chelsea manager and self-proclaimed "special one" Jose Mourinho was 20th.

So why pick a man whose secret police, the PIDE, routinely used detentions without trial and torture and whose regime eventually imploded due to a series of unpopular colonial wars, two years after the dictator himself suffered a major stroke having fallen from a deckchair?

A similar poll in Germany saw postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer come top, although broadcaster ZDF took no chances by banning votes for Hitler or former East German leader Erich Honecher.

In contrast, the people of Romania were allowed to vote for communist tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu, but kept him down in 11th place.

More than a dozen countries have now carried out such votes, and the results range from the somewhat partisan - in the US, Ronald Reagan was reckoned a greater figure than Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, while George W Bush was deemed the greatest living American in sixth - to Nelson Mandela's completely predictable win in South Africa.

A special mention to the much smaller Welsh equivalent, which not only put Tom Jones in third, but even found space in the top 100 for Velvet Underground cellist and avante garde music stalwart John Cale.