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Elections in authoritarian regimes are not meant to manage horizontal solidarity but rather to install a group of representatives that will allow the leadership to institutionalize a relative and limited form of pluralism. On the occasion of the 1969 elections in Portugal, the inclusion, in the electoral lists of the official single party ( União Nacional), of individuals who had previously distinguished themselves by taking critical stances with respect to the regime fit into the plans of the then head of government, Marcelo Caetano. The goal of this paper is to analyze the politics that surrounded and then followed from the appearance of this group, which is still known as the Liberal Wing ( Ala Liberal) and embodied at the time what we might think of as a democratic semi-opposition. Yet the consequences of this process are not apparent, whether at the level of the policies that are publicly defended by the government or of legislative texts adopted into law. Rather, the effects were indirect, and many were unexpected, in particular the consolidation of a political clan that was favorable to democratization and whose networks stretched into the state and its institutions as well as out into civil society.