The Weimar Constitution and Portuguese authoritarian constitutionalism

Abstract

Might the 1919 Weimar Constitution, structured according to democratic formulas, have served as the inspiration for an authoritarian form of constitutionalism? The response, as paradoxical as the question, emerges as affirmative. The case of the authoritarian State Political Constitution in Portugal, drafted between 1930 and 1933, confirms this hypothesis. The document contains various principles and assumptions that draw their source from the innovations in the Weimar constitutional text produced in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century, specifically those establishing references to the family, moral and economic corporations, the development of economic matters and the election of the president of the Republic by direct suffrage.

         This article analyses how that German Constitution was received in Portugal and explores the grounds for the incorporation of its constitutional contents, associated with a modern democratic government, by a constituent power dedicated to establishing a new non-democratic state order. This correspondingly observes how, within this framework, there are three core questions: the first, that involves grasping just how the Weimar Republic, and in particular its 1920s Constitution, got perceived by politicians and jurists in Portugal; the second discusses which political and social problems the constituent legislator sought to address in 1933 in keeping with the consideration that this holds the key to understanding important aspects of the importing and adapting of Weimar constitutional facets by the political and juridical elites of the Estado Novo. Finally, the third question approaches the meaning of that which was termed the “constitutional movement” of the Portuguese 20^th century and thus discussing whether or not the 1933 Constitution introduced characteristics of political organisation in particular and the state in general that were then imposed through the discourse prevailing over this period and that still shape and influence the current democratic regime.

Fecha de envío / Submission date: 19/04/2019

Fecha de aceptación / Acceptance date: 4/05/2019