António de Oliveira Salazar

António de Oliveira Salazar taught political economy at the University of Coimbra before entering government as finance minister after the 1926 coup, stabilizing Portugal's currency and producing the first of many budget surpluses within a year. By 1932 he was President of the Council of Ministers, reframing the military's Ditadura Nacional as the corporatist Estado Novo - a regime opposed to communism, socialism, liberalism, and capitalism alike, rooted in conservative nationalism and the motto "God, Fatherland and Family." He kept the military out of politics, the Church at arm's length through the 1940 Concordat, and created the National Union as what he called a "non-party." Portugal joined NATO, EFTA, and the UN under his rule, and he kept the country neutral in World War II while aiding the Allies, but the regime relied on censorship and the PIDE secret police to crush opposition; Humberto Delgado, who challenged him in 1958, was ultimately assassinated by PIDE in 1965. The Portuguese Colonial War began in 1961, the same year India annexed Goa. Salazar fell into a coma in 1968 and was dismissed; the Estado Novo he built collapsed in the Carnation Revolution