António de Oliveira Salazar António de Oliveira Salazar António de Oliveira Salazar (; ; 28 April 1889 – 27 July 1970) was a Portuguese statesman who served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He was responsible for the "Estado Novo" ("New State"), the corporatist authoritarian government that ruled Portugal until 1974. A trained economist, Salazar entered public life with the support of President Óscar Carmona after the Portuguese "coup d'état" of 28 May 1926, initially as finance minister and later as prime minister. Opposed to democracy, communism, socialism, anarchism and liberalism, the ideology of Portugal was conservative and nationalist in nature.
Dictator Dictator A dictator is a political leader who possesses absolute power. A state which is ruled by a dictator is called a dictatorship. The word originated as the title of a magistrate in the Roman Republic appointed by the Senate to rule the republic in times of emergency (see Roman dictator and "justitium"). Like the term "tyrant" (which was originally a respectable Ancient Greek title), and to a lesser degree "autocrat", "dictator" came to be used almost exclusively as a non-titular term for oppressive, even abusive rule, yet it had rare modern titular use. In modern usage, the term "dictator"