Constitution-making and the democratization of Portugal: An enduring legacy

Portuguese democratic transition in the 1970s produced one of the most left-wing constitutions of the Third Wave of democratization. The aim of this article is to explain the apparent puzzle of how an elected Constitutional Assembly dominated by the moderate right and left, with a Communist minority, produced a constitution closer to the principles of the latter. This had an almost immediate consequence: with the consolidation of democracy, the most committed defenders of the constitution were those who lost the political struggle during the most radical phase of Portuguese democratization, especially the Communists.