"After a bitter three-year civil war initiated in 1936 by a group of army officers and supported by the parties of the National Front, General Francisco Franco established himself as dictator, the beneficiary not only of German and Italian intervention but also of the debilitating 'civil war within the civil war' between the various factions of the Left. The transition in Portugal was similar, though smoother. There, the army seized power in 1926; six years later the finance minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar became premier, promulgating an authoritarian constitution which established him as dictator the following year."