Alfredo de Sá Cardoso

Alfredo Ernesto de Sá Cardoso (born June 6, 1864 in Lisbon , † April 24, 1950 ibid) was a Portuguese military and politician. In the period of the First Republic , he was twice Prime Minister of Portugal and even Foreign Minister of Portugal .

Life

Sá Cardoso studied at the Colégio Militar and at the Army School ( Escola do Exército ) and pursued the career of a professional officer. At a young age he spent part of his military service in Angola , then a Portuguese colony .

He was a staunch Republican and member of the Republican Party during the Portuguese monarchy . He was involved in the failed republican uprisings of 1890 (January 31 in Porto - the first attempt to overthrow the monarchy in Portugal) and 1908 (January 28 in Lisbon) and the revolution of October 5, 1910, with the the monarchy in Portugal was abolished and the republic was established. In 1913 and 1914 he served as governor of Funchal .

On January 28, 1915, Joaquim Pimenta de Castro launched a coup against the republic and was appointed head of government by President de Arriaga . He dissolved parliament and ruled the country as a dictator ("dictatorship of swords" - ditatura das espadas ). The Democratic Party and a group of radical democratic officers within the army offered resistance, including Sá Cardoso. The officers managed to overthrow Pimenta de Castro by another coup on May 14, 1915. A "constitutional junta " ( junta constitucional ), of which Sá Cardoso also belonged, took power for three days before José de Castro was appointed the new prime minister.

As Sidónio Pais on December 8, 1917 against the government staged a coup and dissolved parliament, to Sá Cardoso opposed him and spent for the year 1918 in prison. After Pais was killed in an assassination attempt on December 14, 1918, the "New Republic" ( A República Nova ) he had founded collapsed, so Sá Cardoso was released again and took part in the fighting against the insurgents under the command of Captain Paiva Couceiro , who had again proclaimed the monarchy in Porto.

Sá Cardoso was elected MP four times. After the end of the dictatorship of Sidónio Pais, he became Prime Minister for the first time on June 29, 1919 and simultaneously took over the office of Interior and Foreign Minister . He resigned on January 15, 1920, Francisco José Fernandes Costa was elected as his successor, but on the same day forced to resign as well, a bizarre episode known as the "Government of the Five Minutes" ( Governo dos Cinco Mínutos ) in Portuguese History went down. Sá Cardoso therefore remained Prime Minister and only gave up his post on January 21 of the same year. In 1922 he becomes President of the Portuguese Parliament. From December 18, 1923 to July 6, 1924 he rejoined the government, as Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Álvaro de Castro . In the same year he was promoted to general .

On May 30, 1926, democracy in Portugal was ended by a coup. Sá Cardoso remained true to his republican convictions in the following years of the Salazar dictatorship and therefore had to spend the period between 1927 and 1934 in internal exile on Cape Verde and the Azores . In 1934 he was allowed to return to Portugal; he finally died in Lisbon in 1950.

predecessor	Office	successor
Joaquim Pimenta de Castro	Prime Minister of Portugal ( constitutional junta: together with: José Norton de Matos António Maria da Silva José de Freitas Ribeiro Álvaro de Castro ) 1915	José de Castro

predecessor	Office	successor
Domingos Leite Pereira	Prime Minister of Portugal 1919–1920	Domingos Leite Pereira