The Carnation Revolution

Growing up in the oceanfront suburbs of Lisbon in the early 2000s, my favorite holiday was April 25, the celebration of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution. It marks the day in 1974 when a group of army officers marched into Lisbon, were received with open arms by the population, and put an end to Europe’s longest-lasting fascist dictatorship.

In the year and a half that followed the Carnation Revolution, Portugal finally abandoned its colonial project, negotiating the independence of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, and Cape Verde. The country went through an ebullient revolutionary period. What kind of country Portugal would turn into felt up for grabs and for everyone to decide.

As historian Raquel Varela writes, three million people — a striking third of the population — directly took part in workers’, residents’, and soldiers’ councils, meeting regularly to heatedly discuss both their own material conditions and the direction the country should take. The banks were nationalized and expropriated; 360 companies were taken over and managed by their workers. Housing cooperatives were constructed with the collaboration of young architects as well as local residents throughout the country, building new houses for people who had only known shanty towns.

Farm laborers who had previously lived in near serfdom now took over the land they toiled. In Ribatejo, as the documentary Terra Bela shows, landless workers found themselves side-by-side with bearded revolutionaries looking through the masters’ cupboards and giddily trying on the masters’ clothes. “Now I really look like a duke!” shouted one of them while others looked through the books on the shelves with curiosity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in a country that makes saudade — a wistful longing for things, people, and places now gone — a way of life, the revolution and the ensuing revolutionary period are recalled with intense, loving nostalgia in Portugal. There is virtually no progressive protest, whether about housing, police violence, or economic issues without “April 25 forever! Fascism never again!” erupting as a loud chant. When South Asian immigrant communities in central Lisbon were harassed by the police this December, progressive public figures showed up in the neighborhood the next day to hand out red carnations, hearkening back to those in soldiers’ shotguns in every photo of the revolution.

The lovingly nostalgic gaze toward the past that we find here is a far cry from the far right’s nostalgia, encapsulated in Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again,” with its reactionary propulsion toward trapping us in a fantasy version of the 1950s suburbs. It is equally distant from the aesthetic consumer nostalgia of watching reruns of ’90s TV in your sweatpants, letting Spotify guide you to another familiar song, and scrolling on Instagram through “take me back to (insert decade)” content — what theorist of nostalgia Grafton Tanner calls “retrobait.”

Where these more familiar kinds of nostalgia long for a past that is crisply imagined, nostalgia for the Carnation Revolution is encapsulated in the slogan “We still haven’t fulfilled April.” Nostalgic yearning is transformed into holding on to a promise still to be fulfilled.

Different Flavors of Nostalgia

Every April 25 of my childhood, my parents, my sister, and I danced around in pajamas to 1970s protest songs all morning, singing of how “the people are the ones who command.” My father, who was a teenager at the time of the revolution, recounted the same stories each year: of seeing the waves of ecstatic political prisoners coming down the hill from one of the regime’s most infamous political prisons, freshly liberated from months of torture; afternoons at the beach turning into hormonal spats between the youth wings of the Communist and the Maoist parties about the finer details of the Little Red Book and the Communist Manifesto; spending the summer of 1975 in the rural South, roughing it out in a barn with other young communists to teach surly agricultural workers how to read and write.

In the early afternoon, we pinned red carnations to our shirts and headed into central Lisbon, where we marched down the Avenida da Liberdade. We inevitably bumped into family friends we only saw once a year. Each year, people of all sorts were there, from anti-racist or queer activists to old-school labor unionists, from Communist Party members to generally apolitical families who might vote for the center right.

Trump, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and their global allies understand the pleasures of nostalgia well. The nostalgia in which the contemporary right traffics has a clear object of desire: a mythical past in which heterosexual nuclear families could live in a suburban home on a single income, where women happily stayed home taking care of their many children and waited dutifully to serve their husbands a glass of whiskey after work. It is true that, at least in the United States and many European democracies, the postwar era was one of lower inequality, higher union density, greater labor militancy, and prosperity for many. But the reactionary right channels nostalgia for the period toward precisely its most objectionable features.

Reactionary nostalgia distorts the past and refuses to acknowledge any progress since that yearned-for mythical world was stolen away; it cultivates resentment about paradise lost and anxiety about change. And as we are finding every day, reactionary nostalgia will brook no objections to making this rigid myth everyone’s reality, whether they desire it or not.

Reactionary nostalgia has a long history in Portugal. The fascist regime harnessed nostalgia for the country’s glorious era of maritime “discoveries,” when the Portuguese “gave new worlds to the world,” to manufacture consent for the war against the liberation movements in the colonies. And it is, unfortunately, still alive and well in Portugal. In this year’s elections, the far-right party Chega (Enough) won over 20 percent of the vote, more than tripling its vote share in three years to surpass the center-left party as the second major political force in the country. Its leader has explicitly compared himself to the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, who headed Portugal’s fascist regime between 1932 and 1968.

The response, at the Carnation Revolution march celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2024, was a flood of over two hundred thousand people marching down the avenue, red carnations pinned to their shirts, chanting ,”Fascism never again!” When my girlfriend and I arrived at the start of the march — my first time back since I had left the country for college at eighteen — I was overwhelmed by how many people were there. Adjusting for the size of Lisbon’s and New York’s metropolitan areas, this would be as if one and a half million people had congregated to march down Fifth Avenue.

The mood was exultant. At the top of the march, activists with a huge “April demands housing” banner clambered over the statue in the middle of the square. Pensioners carried banners demanding improvements in public health care. A young woman with a leather jacket proudly carried a sign reading “Lesbianize April.” At the end, a group of activists had climbed over a statue, proudly displaying the Palestinian flag. Pop art posters with carnations over backgrounds of different colors, spread all over the city, celebrated the many achievements of Portuguese democracy, ranging from the right to a minimum wage in 1974 to the legalization of abortion in 2007.

If reactionary nostalgia is potent in Portugal, so too is the power of a shared revolutionary past to coordinate a crowd around the value of democracy — nostalgia as a strong unifying glue for democratic values, not as a boot pressing down on our necks.

In this version of nostalgia, there is no desire to return to 1974. The focus is on what the revolution has made possible and on where we might want to go. The march is not a historical reenactment, with men in uniform, army tanks, and cheering bell-bottom-donning civilians. It is a protest, one that is renewed every year to focus on the most pressing issues of the day. Those who march down the avenue take up the values of the revolution — peace, bread, housing, health care, and education for all, as a famous Portuguese song from the ’70s lists — and embody, reshape, and redirect them in accordance with the needs of the day.

Nostalgia for the revolution can bring hundreds of thousands to the street. It can remind us of the human misery that an antidemocratic turn would bring. And last year, beyond the law-abiding confines of the official celebrations of the revolution, nostalgia offered a glimpse of something more transformative.

How Nostalgia Can Propel the Left

While I was pleasantly strolling down the Avenida da Liberdade, a group of activists from Lisbon’s anarchist scene broke into an abandoned school in the gentrifying (and touristifying) neighborhood of Santa Engrácia.

They named the squat “the Santa Engrácia Social Center.” The plan was for the abandoned building to function as what the urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “a third place,” an informal gathering space that is neither work nor home, and which he argued to be the heart of democracy. Third spaces are under threat everywhere. In Lisbon — a city being sold to anyone who can pay for a Golden Visa (a residency permit based on investing in the country, usually by buying property) — and converted into a hipster Disneyland for digital nomads, they are disappearing by the hour.

In 1974, the country also faced a housing crisis. Fifty thousand people lived in shacks in Lisbon alone. Once the revolution happened, entire families, often led by women, moved into empty housing, ranging from close-to-finished nine-story tower blocks to the palaces of the wealthy who had fled the country in terror after the revolution. Some of these occupations were activist-led and provided services that were usually unavailable to the poor: public health clinics, maternity wards, childcare centers, or canteens.

These occupations were short-lived. Once the country settled into a placid liberal democracy after the US-backed center-left party was elected to government in 1976, occupying unused buildings became illegal. Families were evicted under promises of future housing, and properties were returned to their prerevolution owners. Over time, owning one’s own home replaced abolishing private property as the guiding dream. At least it did so for everyone but a handful of nostalgic leftists pining for the postrevolutionary period.

This nostalgic yearning might seem to display one of the main sins of nostalgia: it distorts our vision of the past by ignoring its negative aspects. Realistically, 1974–75 Portugal was no utopia. Most people remained miserably poor. The political and economic situation was extremely unstable. About half a million colonial settlers returned, disoriented, jobless, and bitter after the Portuguese colonies became independent. There was plenty of right-wing agitation and violence. The period only looks like a utopia with quite a bit of tunnel vision.

But any thinking about the world is necessarily selective. We are limited beings. We can feel nostalgia for distinctive positive features of a period without believing that that period was uniformly positive and while acknowledging that there has been progress since then. Instead of working as a distorting kaleidoscope, nostalgia can serve as a pointer: here lies a taste of utopia.

If utopia were actual, however briefly and at a local scale, it is also a live possibility for the future, something concrete and achievable. If we lived like this once, we could do it again. Nostalgia can be harnessed, not into yearning for rigid class and race hierarchies and the traditional family, but to highlight that we can live according to different values; that we can, for instance, take up abandoned buildings to inhabit collectively, to sit together, play, and care for one another.

I first visited the squat a couple of days after the march, in the late afternoon. In the outdoor area, luxuriantly overgrown with greenery, twenty- and thirty-somethings with mullets and bangs huddled in groups drinking beer and chatting. Children roamed with minimal parental supervision. Women in their seventies revisited the long-locked building where some of them had gone to school many decades ago. There were people painting murals on the walls, ranging from bright fruits and rainbows to absurdism (“punks don’t cheat at card games!!” next to a naïf painting of a devil playing cards) to political slogans (“abortion for all”; “the Carnation Revolution started in Africa”). Everyone seemed busy with something: cleaning, organizing the space, carrying furniture in, taking food and cleaning products to the shared pantry. There was seemingly no order to things, yet the pantry was fully stocked, a meal was being prepared, and a party was set to happen later. It felt like all those years listening to reminiscences of the revolution, I had been waiting for this.

As I spent time at the squatted school building over the next few days, attending assemblies, cooking meals, listening to live music, and watching thematic documentaries, our revolutionary nostalgia played out in ways that have nothing to do with the idle reminiscing of watching TV reruns. When we let our nostalgia burst into collective life, we are never just yearning for a lost past. Even if the projects we engage in gaze romantically back at a past period, they cannot but respond to the desires we have now: in this case, building a city that is for its inhabitants, not mere fodder for the impersonal forces of capital or the appetites of globe-trotting Airbnb hoppers.

Back to the Future

In the United States, there is no unifying left-wing revolution to collectively yearn for. But there is no lack of periods of progressive ebullience, forceful collective action, and ferocious dreaming.

Indeed, a kind of revolutionary nostalgia is already a part of progressive practice in a corner of left-wing politics usually thought to be allergic to the past: the LGBTQ movement. Every year, noncorporate Pride unifies a diverse coalition around the collective memory of Stonewall. In remembering that “Pride was a riot,” we also look back to 1969 Greenwich Village as a promise of gender and sexual liberation yet to be fulfilled and recommit to fighting for it.

Revolutionary nostalgia was also key to 2024’s student encampments for Palestine. The encampments self-consciously echoed the mass student mobilizations against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early ’70s, both in strategy and in ethical principles. It was nostalgia that made the protests intelligible to a wide audience, sparking a wave that spread far beyond the United States.

The structure of progressive nostalgia is the same in these cases as in the Carnation Revolution: Make an active effort to produce a shared memory of a revolutionary moment; highlight the values our precursors were fighting for; and then use celebrations of that past to recommit to shared values and organize around how we can make them come alive now.

There are many experiences in US history worth being nostalgic about. We can look back to the beautiful murals commissioned by the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal and harness this energy to find inspiration in other major programs of the period. Or retell the story of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike, which united around twenty thousand workers of more than fifty-one nationalities in Massachusetts, invented new tactics, and popularized the “Bread for all, and roses too” slogan. Or celebrate the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, orienting ourselves around an agenda of racial and economic justice for all.

In Lisbon, in April 2024, the squat ended up lasting only a week, the police arriving in the early morning to force out the activists sleeping inside. Today the building is still there, locked and unused. For me, that one week congealed into a new set of nostalgic memories.

The nostalgia I feel around the date of April 25 — for a revolution I did not live through, for happy childhood days, for last year’s one-week occupation — tells me that utopias are possible. These utopias are not determinate scenarios lost in the long-gone past — that of the suburban home and dutiful wife that some want to impose — but open-ended desires for collective freedom waiting for us to jointly articulate them.

In Portugal, April remains a promise to be fulfilled. Elsewhere, other Aprils linger in the shadows, waiting to be discovered, savored, and transformed into sources of strength and unity.