From the founding of the party on the premises of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES) to its rise to become the leading party in Portugal, the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) was actively accompanied its comrades in the SPD. The friendship between Mário Soares and Willy Brandt is emblematic of this cooperation.

When Mário Soares first made contact with the SPD in September 1966, no one could have expected that the most important international partner for the democratisation of Portugal had been found. For, at first, the liaison between German social democracy and the socialist opposition in the Estado Novo did not appear to be very promising. Willy Brandt – who had been in government as Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister since 1966 – did not consider it feasible to change the course of the bilateral relations with the “New State”, despite the knowledge of a burgeoning socialist opposition inside Portugal. Instead, the SPD relied on backchannel diplomacy. While pursuit of the official foreign policy course continued until the fall of the Estado Novo, the party-affiliated FES was to establish contact with the group around Soares in order to support the Portuguese comrades of Socialist Action (ASP). A case in point was the re-founding of the newspaper República in 1970. The evident culmination of this approach was the founding of the Socialist Party (PS) on 19th April 1973 at a closed meeting in Bad Münstereifel near Bonn.

The Carnation Revolution ushered in the most intensive phase of cooperation between the SPD and the PS. The partnership can be divided into two main lines. Firstly, the evident structural weaknesses of the PS in Portugal had to be remedied. To this end, the FES provided direct financial support for the development of its political infrastructure and the establishment of party offices. The FES also transferred important know-how to the political cadre of the PS and thus contributed to sharpening the party’s political profile, which was to be formulated in demarcation to the Communist Party (PCP). Secondly, the SPD party leadership – first and foremost Willy Brandt – demonstrated solidarity with its Portuguese comrades. Through official visits to Portugal and the chairmanship of the “Committee for Friendship and Solidarity with Democracy and Socialism in Portugal”, Brandt signalled the strong support that the Portuguese Socialists enjoyed from their European sister parties.

The April elections of 1975 and 1976 saw the PS emerge as the strongest party in Portugal on both occasions with over 30% of the vote. In the light of this electoral success and the gradual democratic consolidation in Portugal, the SPD and FES continued their joint efforts. Their initial aim was to end the PCP’s monopoly over the trade unions. For this purpose, a think-tank was set up in 1977, the José Fontana Foundation, which was generously subsidised by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) via the FES. In 1979, the PS finally gained hegemony over the trade unions in a close alliance with the Social Democratic Party (PSD). The BMZ also provided start-up funding of 2 million DM – naturally through the mediation of the FES – for the PS’s most important municipal policy project, the Centre for Municipal Studies and Regional Action (CEMAR). In a centrally governed country like Portugal, political infrastructures had to be built up, especially in the isolated rural periphery.