Jorge Sampaio

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Jorge Sampaio (2003)

Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio [ ʒɔɾʒɨ fɨɾnɐðu bɾɐku dɨ sɐpaju ] listen ? / i (born September 18, 1939 in Lisbon ; †  September 10, 2021 ibid) was a Portuguese politician ( PS ) and President of Portugal from 1996 to 2006 . Before that, he was Secretary General (party leader) of the Socialist Party from 1989 to 1992 and mayor of the capital Lisbon from 1990 to 1995. After his tenure as President Sampaio was from April 2007 to March 2013 High Representative of the UN Alliance of Civilizations . Audio file / audio sample

Life

Origin, education and profession

Sampaio was a son of the doctor Arnaldo Sampaio and the English teacher Fernanda Bensaúde Branco. His grandfather Fernando Augusto Branco was a naval officer and Portuguese foreign minister during the Ditadura Nacional Óscar Carmonas from 1930 to 1932. Sampaio's younger brother is the psychiatry professor and writer Daniel Sampaio .

Jorge Sampaio studied law at the University of Lisbon , graduating in 1961 with a Licenciatura . During his last two years of study he was chairman of the student union of the law faculty and appeared in opposition to the Salazar dictatorship. He was a member of several oppositional academic circles. As a lawyer he defended political prisoners during the dictatorship.

Political career

During the political thaw after Salazar's resignation, Sampaio ran for the opposition left-wing Comissão Democrática Eleitoral in the 1969 parliamentary elections, but all seats in parliament went to the ruling União Nacional . Immediately after the Carnation Revolution on April 25, 1974, he was a founding member of the left-wing socialist Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES), which he left after a year. In the provisional government of Vasco Gonçalves , Sampaio was State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from March to August 1975 (under Minister Ernesto Melo Antunes ).

In 1978 he joined the Partido Socialista (PS) and was elected to the Assembleia da República in the parliamentary elections the following year as a member of the Lisbon constituency. He was also a member of the European Commission for Human Rights of the Council of Europe from 1979 to 1984 . In the 1980, 1985, 1987 and 1991 elections he was re-elected as a member of parliament. Since 1979 member of the national secretariat (party executive) of the PS, he was responsible for the party's international relations from 1986 to 1987, from 1987 to 1988 chairman of the PS group in parliament and in 1989 he was elected general secretary of the Socialist Party. Thus he was opposition leader against the government of Aníbal Cavaco Silva from the bourgeois PSD .

In the same year a left-wing alliance of PS, Communists and Greens as well as MDP / CDE won the city council election in Lisbon and Sampaio was elected mayor of the capital. He led this office very successfully, in the local elections in 1993 he was confirmed with a clear majority. He made the decisions necessary for the 1998 World Exhibition to renovate certain districts of Lisbon and to build the new Tejo bridge Ponte Vasco da Gama , which his successor João Soares inaugurated in 1998. Sampaio was also chairman of the Eurocities association in 1990 and chairman of the World Association of Sister Cities in 1992 . The Assembleia da República elected him to the Council of State (Conselho de Estado) in 1991 , after which he resigned from the post of General Secretary of the PS.

Term of office as president

As a candidate for the PS, Sampaio ran for the presidential election in January 1996. After the Communists and Greens as well as União Democrática Popular withdrew their candidates, Sampaio won in the first ballot with 53.9 percent of the votes against Aníbal Cavaco Silva from the PSD. On March 9, 1996, he took up the post of President of Portugal as the successor to his party friend Mário Soares . He confessed that he was not a devout Catholic , which did not damage his popularity. Sampaio spoke publicly to the conscience of the socialist head of government António Guterres (1995-2002) during his tenure as president .

In the 2001 presidential election, Sampaio was again confirmed in the first ballot with 55.6 percent of the vote. The war course of the Conservative Prime Minister José Manuel Barroso (2002-2004), who, together with the US President George W. Bush , the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, demonstratively held a meeting in the Azores immediately before the start of the Third Gulf War held, Sampaio opposed publicly and condemned the attack on Iraq without a mandate from the United Nations as illegitimate. As a result, Portugal did not belong to the “ coalition of the willing ”, which took an active part in the invasion of Iraq.

As a result of Barroso's move to the office of EU Commission President, in July 2004 the President appointed the former PSD Mayor Pedro Santana Lopes as the new Prime Minister - to the disappointment of the opposition socialists who had called for early elections. However, four months later, Sampaio dissolved parliament after Lopes' government proved unstable and unpopular due to internal party disputes. The PS emerged victorious from the early elections in February 2005 and Sampaio appointed José Sócrates as the new Prime Minister. Due to the constitutional restriction of two terms of office, Sampaio's presidency ended on March 9, 2006. Aníbal Cavaco Silva of the PSD has now been elected as his successor - ten years after his defeat.

After the presidency

After serving as President, Sampaio was the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for Tuberculosis Control from 2006 to 2012 . In addition, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed Sampaio in 2007 as the first High Representative of the Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), which is to serve as a forum for dialogue and cooperation against extremism, hatred and violence. He held this position until 2013.

Sampaio was married to Maria José Ritta for the second time . The marriage had two children.

Awards

Web links

Commons : Jorge Sampaio  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jorge Sampaio , in: Antigos Presidentes , Presidência da República Portuguesa.
  2. ↑ Briefly Noted. In: The New York Times , March 19, 2003.
  3. ↑ James Keighley: Portugal will not declare war on Iraq. In: EUobserver , March 20, 2003.
  4. ^ Ina Rottscheidt: No new elections in Portugal. DW, July 10, 2004.
  5. ^ Government crisis in Portugal - Sampaio dissolves parliament. N-TV, December 1, 2004.
  6. ^ HE Jorge Fernando Branco Sampaio (Portugal). United Nations General Assembly.
  7. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  8. ↑ Jornal da República: DECRETO PRESIDENTE 25/2009, August 30, 2009, accessed on January 31, 2020.
predecessor government office successor
Mario Soares President of Portugal
1996-2006 		Aníbal Cavaco Silva
personal data
SURNAME Sampaio, Jorge
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sampaio, Jorge Fernando Branco de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese politician, President of Portugal
BIRTH DATE September 18, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Lisbon , Portugal
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Lisbon