The poster for this year’s official celebrations of the Portuguese Revolution features a large question mark against a red background. It’s a fitting symbol for an event open to many interpretations. Does Portugal again stand at a crossroads? Or has the revolutionary legacy been co-opted once and for all? Does the poster highlight the revolution’s unfinished business, or put into question the wider gains it made?

The Portuguese Revolution of 1974–5, also known as the Carnation Revolution, was the hottest topic of the post-1968 left. At the time, thousands of international revolutionaries travelled to Portugal to get a glimpse of what popular power and real democracy could look like. In their eyes, the revolutionary process in Portugal posed an alternative to both Western capitalism and the Soviet model. Like much of the Left associated with 1968 and after, the memory of these tumultuous years has largely faded into oblivion abroad.

Yet in Portugal, the revolution remains a reference point by actors on both sides of the battle over austerity. While former Maoist student leader and current President of the European Commission Manuel Barrosso is a prominent supporter of the “refoundation of the Portuguese state,” which seeks to tear up the last vestiges of the revolution, a new generation of activists associated with groups such as Que Se Lixe a Troika (Screw the Troika), or, a precarious workers’ organization, continue to sing Zeca Afonso’s song Grandola Vila Morena on picket lines and at rallies.