The Daily Alaska Empire

PORTUGAL NOW NERVOUS OVER OCT. ELECTIONS

"Electoral Alliance"
Playing Prominent Part
in Politics

By GEORGE HALADJIAN

LISBON. Sept. 20.- A nervous Portuguese government and populace is watching the approach of October ward elections.

If the program for restoring constitutional government is carried out, this voting will be but a harbinger of full municipal voting and then the big campaign for places in the reconstituted chamber of deputies and senate.

Political exiles who fled to Paris when General Oscar Carmona took over the presidency in May, 1926, have been keeping the administration on tenterhooks.

Last May the government restrained revolts in the Azores, the island of Madeira and Portuguese East Africa. In August a score were killed in an outbreak right here in Lisbon.

Situation Aggravated

The situation has been such that the administration had the "jitters" in mid-September when a telephone line which connected the capital with an army division at Braga went out of commission. Lisbon was turned into an armed camp for a full night. Then it was learned that a motor truck had smashed down a telephone pole and the local troops went back to barracks.

Portuguese politics have created the usual quota of strange bed-fellows. The heterogeneous groups which opposed the dictatorship have composed their differences and formed what is known as the "Electoral Alliance" in an effort to defeat the government.

General Norton de Matos, a former premier and governor-general of Angola, and Admiral Mendes Cabecadas, who was for a short time President of the Republic, are the most influential members of the coalition.

The followers of the admiral are especially numerous in the navy. A number of prominent army officers also offered their support to the "Electoral Alliance."

Order Issued
The government, as a consequence, ordered that no names of new adherents to the opposition could be published.

The alliance has raised a campaign fund and organized propaganda all over the country. They are making capital of the unemployment problem, and their electoral slogan "For prosperity vote for the Socialist-Republican candidate" is based on the idea that a change of government is the only cure for present economic ills.

While the acute depression has had an adverse effect on the work of the dictatorship, the government points with pride to five years of successful administration. In this period the national currency has been stabilized, new roads have been constructed, the government-owned railroads which were operated at a loss have been leased, the troublesome tobacco monopoly question has been settled, the crime wave has been curbed and the navy reorganized.