EuroVista

...The Portuguese are a grand people and this is a glorious day for them...

...President Giscard d'Estaing will do less than Francois Mitterand might have done to iron out the inequalities of French society, but he is in pawn neither to the Communists nor to the Gaullists...

...The former include sons and daughters of the latter...

...Birdsong As if resentful of the space I am devoting to Portugal, the chauvinistic French nightingales outside my window are raising a tremendous chorus...

...The great majority of European correspondents felt grateful to the Portuguese: They had given Europe a tonic...

...He had tears in his eyes...

...They have been helped by the prestige the dictatorship gave them by singling them out as its main enemy...

...A patrician liberal, the new President has promised to give the press more freedom and to end wiretapping-"if it exists...

...Returning to my hotel afterward, I met the foreign editor of a distinguished Norwegian newspaper...

...he said...

...and they certainly don't get married or hold receptions...

...Paradoxically, the thought of a British withdrawal causes more queasi-ness in Liam Cosgrave's Cabinet in Dublin than in Whitehall...

...It said they are "not unlike thousands of middle-class young people who combine the hippie mode with a comfortable way of life...

...He needn't have worried...

...Will the EEC and the U.S., preoccupied with their internal problems, appreciate this And act upon it in time...

...One can only hope that the Vatican will take the hint and initiate the same kind of withdrawal from politics in Italy that it has by now almost completed in France and Spain, to the satisfaction of most Catholics...

...There are reports that the British Intelligence Service and the Special Branch of the police founded nearly a century ago to combat Irish republicanism may be indulging in IRA-style operations, and may have been infiltrated by sympathizers of the main Irish factions...

...The Italians, for their part, have inflicted a heartening defeat on the conservative-clerical-neofascist alliance that had sought to reverse their Parliament's cautious divorce law...

...The most pro-American Europeans are hippies and multimillionaires...

...Overnight, the Portuguese people stripped off their cocoon of stolidity and melancholy, revealing themselves to be animated, gay and eight feet tall...

...After 500 years of "troubles" across the Celtic Sea, too many Englishmen put Irish politics in the same category as the bad weather that always seems to come from the neighboring island...

...The regime's only real friends, however, were a few wealthy families, the bishops (with one honorable exception, the Bishop of Oporto) and the secret police...

...Like me, he was hot and tired, and wearing the red carnation that had become the symbol of Portuguese freedom...

...I am reliving the liberation of Oslo...

...It's wonderful what spring and a democratic revolution can achieve...

...Please don't be cynical today...

...But I walked in Lisbon's beautiful, spontaneous May Day procession from beginning to end, chatting with families and neighborhood groups who were carrying red-and-green Portuguese flags and simple banners, made from sheets and curtains, proclaiming Viva a democracia or Viva o socialismo...

...They had a lot to be gloomy about, for they were governed by a corrupt dictatorship that had remained in power so long nearly half a century everyone thought it immovable...

...Doubt The Paris Herald Tribune reprinted the other day a New York Times piece by Lacey Fosburgh about Emily and William Harris of the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army...

...Hang out a few flags for them in your papers...

...This piece had a traumatic effect on European hippies I showed it to...

...Runaway inflation and depression will provoke disillusionment with democracy and promote Left-wing extremism...

...Until then the Portuguese, the Continent's forgotten people, tended to be rather stolid, melancholy, even gloomy...

...France's lively, engrossing election demonstrated that party politics and presidential contests do not have to resemble Punch-and-Judy shows...

...Excuse me, gentlemen...

...Portugal is Western Europe's poorest nation and the hardest-hit by inflation...

...In Spain, General Francisco Franco's regime helps the Communists in the same way...

...They used to have a water bed and a color TV set, and "were married in chic hippie fashion, dancing all night long at their reception...

...The Communists' only serious rivals are the Democratic Socialists, whose chief assets, as they try to build up a party organization...

...I am not normally an aficionado of May Day parades...

...Since then Giscard has further tarnished his whiter-than-white image by authorizing more nuclear tests in the Pacific...

...The red carnations have withered...

...It is surprisingly easy to infiltrate the British secret service, according to two young men I know who did so for kicks...

...are the popularity of their general secretary...

...It's not every day that a dictatorship is overthrown...

...The Communists are observing the Kremlin's current directive detente and cooperation with the democratic Left but they are working hard to gain control of Portugal's newly democratized labor unions and establish themselves as an electoral force...

...That qualifier was unwise, for his Interior Minister promptly went to 2, avenue de Tourville, Paris, headquarters of the official wiretapping service, thus demonstrating that the government was well aware that it did exist...

...They have neither water beds nor TV...

...Still, a growing minority is getting worried about British Army casualties and the heavy burden Ulster is imposing on Britain's sick economy (over $1 billion a year, according to the Sunday Times...

...Gloom Unhappily, the Anglo-Irish scene remains dismal...

...Democracy received a boost in West Germany, too, from the resignation of Willy Brandt...

...Two months have passed...

...Gaul-lism, almost comically irrelevant to the nation's real problems, will henceforth be of interest mainly to students of folklore...

...Public transport and bread supplies have been disrupted by strikes...

...Both the "Provos" and the Protestant extremists believe that if they can keep up the pressure for another year or two the Labor party's rank-and-file will demand a British withdrawal from Ulster...

...My guess is that Portugal's political future will be decided by its economic progress, which means, in the short term, by the help and understanding it receives from the European Economic Community and the United States...

...I dislike stage-managed politics...

...When one of his senior aides was revealed to be a Communist spy he knew he had to resign...

...I know you are busy, but I also know that newsmen are apt to be cynical...

...Nonetheless, the despondency and cynicism I reported earlier this year are fast evaporating in most parts of continental Western Europe...

...Inside the hotel, while exchanging impressions with half a dozen colleagues, we were approached by a charming, educated Englishman who has lived many years in Lisbon...

...This is one of the happiest days of my life," he said...

...For that matter, they pay closer attention to TV weather reports than to the violence and devastation "the box" relays from Ireland...

...Problems are piling up...

...Moody, easily depressed, Brandt proved a disappointing Chancellor, but he is a sensible man...

...Yet, until now, they were under the illusion that they were living in the authentic hippie style patented in the USA...

...Mario Soares, now foreign minister, and the feeling of most Portuguese democrats that it would be silly, to say the least, to substitute a Communist dictatorship for the Fascist one they have just emerged from...

...The Communists and Democratic Socialists, both represented in the government, are doing their best to persuade strikers to moderate their demands...

...So I must add that France, Italy and Germany, too, have added their touch of color to this European spring...

...they scorn electric lighting, toilets and piped water...

...Suddenly, at the end of April, the dictatorship collapsed like a burst balloon, punctured bloodlessly by Army officers politicized by 13 years of colonial war...

...The revolution was, of course, Portugal's one of the nicest, most civilized Europe has ever been treated to And you no doubt have seen something of the gaiety and color of it on television...

...After hearing my translation of the Fosburgh article, my European hippie friends feel like Communists who have learned that Soviet officials keep bank accounts in Switzerland...

...If democracy is to survive (sadly, Brandt himself does not rate its chances high), not only must its leaders be men of integrity, the public must have no doubts about their integrity...

...Maoist and Trotskyist mischief-makers are urging workers to strike for unrealistic pay increases, demanding "arms for the people," inciting troops to desert, and trying to provoke a clash with the "bourgeois" officers who overthrew the dictatorship...

...Despite controls, some capital is being smuggled out of the country...