The Popular Unity Party (Portuguese: Partido de Unidade Popular, PUP) was a Portuguese political organization of the extreme left, founded in December 1974 and active only during the mid-1970s. It is usually classified as Maoist in ideology.
Origins
The PUP emerged from a split within the Communist Party of Portugal (Marxist-Leninist), PCP(m-l). In March 1974 that organization divided into two factions, the larger led by Vilar and a second group associated with Carlos Janeiro (sometimes rendered "Mendes"). The latter founded the PUP as a legal political vehicle in order to contest the elections to the Constituent Assembly. It has been described both as a political party and as an electoral or political front.
Programme and activity
According to the Portuguese National Elections Commission (Comissão Nacional de Eleições), the PUP presented itself in the Portuguese party spectrum as an organization of Maoist tendency, aiming to establish a "Popular Democracy" uniting the working class, poor peasants and the exploited. It rejected parliamentary democracy and sought to create a people's republic of poor workers and peasants. The party published a newspaper, A verdade ("The Truth").
Electoral results
The PUP contested only one election, the Constituent Assembly election of 25 April 1975, in which it received 13,138 votes, or 0.23% of the total, finishing twelfth. No deputies were elected.
Dissolution and legacy
After the 1975 elections the organization reverted to its earlier designation, the Portuguese Marxist-Leninist Committee (Comité Marxista-Leninista Português, CM-LP). In 1976 the CM-LP merged with the Portuguese Marxist-Leninist Communist Organization (OCMLP) and the Organization for the Reconstruction of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (ORPC (m-l)) to form the Portuguese Communist Party (Reconstructed) (PCP(R)). Although the organization had ceased activity by the late 1970s, its formal dissolution was only decreed by the Portuguese Constitutional Court in Ruling No. 665/97, published in the Diário da República on 18 December 1997. It had been officially registered with the Supreme Court of Justice on 27 February 1975.
Note on terminology
The name "Popular Unity Party (Portugal)" should not be confused with the Popular Unity Force (Força de Unidade Popular, FUP), a separate Portuguese party founded in 1980 by Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho and dissolved in 2004, nor with Popular Unity (Unidade Popular), a Brazilian party founded in 2016. Some details, such as the precise circumstances of the party's founding and renaming, rest on sources that are not fully cited; where accounts differ, this has been noted above.
