José Eduardo dos Santos

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José Eduardo dos Santos (2007)
Dos Santos (5th from left), in October 1981 with Wolfgang Rauchfuß (4th from left) and East Berlin city commander Karl-Heinz Drews (2nd from right) at the Brandenburg Gate

José Eduardo dos Santos (born August 28, 1942 in Sambizanga , Luanda ) is an Angolan politician. He is chairman of the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) party. From 1979 to 2017 he was President of the Republic of Angola and at the same time - with the exception of two periods when prime ministers were appointed - head of government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces . He did not run for the 2017 election . He and his family are said to have enriched themselves on a large scale over the decades, between 2007 and 2010, according to the Financial Times, $ 32 billion disappeared from Angola's state budget.

Life

As a student, José Eduardo dos Santos joined the freedom movement at the time and later the unity party MPLA in 1958 . In 1961 he moved to France and later to the Republic of the Congo . From Brazzaville he worked for the MPLA and became vice president of their youth organization. From 1963 he studied in the Soviet Union at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in Baku and graduated as a petroleum engineer. According to other sources, he graduated in 1969 and then took a course in military communication.

Dos Santos was married three times and has six children from the three women. He married Tatiana Kukanowa in Baku, with whom he has the oldest child, Isabel dos Santos . He also has an illegitimate child, José Filomeno dos Santos .

As a politician

From 1970 José Eduardo dos Santos was back in Brazzaville and returned to Angola in 1974 during the decolonization conflict. After independence, he was Foreign Minister of Angola from 1975 to 1976 and 1984 to 1985 . In 1975 he was also elected to the Politburo of his party, which established a one-party regime based on the socialist model. He later became Minister of Planning and Deputy Prime Minister. On September 20, 1979, he succeeded Agostinho Neto as President and Party Chairman.

When Angola turned into a multi-party democracy in 1991, José Eduardo dos Santos ran in the first parliamentary and presidential elections in 1992 as the MPLA's top candidate. While his party achieved an absolute majority of the votes in the National Assembly , he only achieved 49% in the presidential elections, so a second ballot against UNITA's chairman , Jonas Savimbi , was necessary under the constitution. However, UNITA did not recognize the election results and resumed the civil war that had raged since 1975. José Eduardo dos Santos then continued to exercise the presidency without having been validly elected.

In 2001 he announced that he would step down in the next presidential election, provided that there was peace by then. In 2002 Jonas Savimbi was killed in battle and the civil war ended immediately afterwards. In December 2003 dos Santos was re-elected as chairman of the MPLA. He ran as the top candidate of his party in the parliamentary elections on September 5, 2008, in which the MPLA could unite 81.64 percent of the vote. At the beginning of 2010 a new constitution was passed by parliament, according to which the chairman of the strongest party based on the election results automatically becomes president. In the 2012 election , the MPLA again received a majority; as dos Santos headed the list of candidates for this party, he was automatically elected president. After 33 years in office, he found himself in a situation for the first time in which he had been validly elected as president according to a current constitution. In December 2016, he announced that he would not run for the 2017 election. Dos Santos continues to lead the party after his resignation. João Lourenço was sworn in as his successor on September 26, 2017.

For years, the extremely wealthy José Eduardo dos Santos has been accused of authoritarian behavior, corruption and neopatrimonialism . The assets of his daughter Isabel dos Santos , Angola's largest private investor and, according to Forbes Magazine, Africa's first dollar billionaire, were frozen in 2020 at the behest of an Angolan court in the course of a corruption investigation.

See also

Web links

Commons : José Eduardo dos Santos  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Fortune of the richest woman in Africa frozen
  2. Constantin Katsakioris: Students from Portuguese Africa in the Soviet Union, 1960-74: Anti-colonialism, Education, and the Socialist Alliance . In: Journal of Contemporary History . April 3, 2020, ISSN  0022-0094 , p. 002200941989373 , doi : 10.1177 / 0022009419893739 ( sagepub.com ).
  3. BIOGRAPHY OF HIS EXCELLENCY MR. CLOSELY. JOSE EDUARDO DOS SANTOS, PRESIDENT OF THE REPULIC OF ANGOLA ( Memento from June 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Roger East, Richard J. Thomas, Richard Thomas: Profiles of People in Power: The World's Government Leaders. Psychology Press, 2003, ISBN 185743126X , p. 12. Excerpts from books.google.de
  5. ^ See Franz-Wilhelm Heimer , Der Entkolonisierungskonflikt in Angola , Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1979
  6. ^ The parliamentary elections in Angola 2008 (PDF; 108 kB) Dr. Dr. Anton Bösl, Konrad Adenauer Foundation
  7. Long-term President dos Santos retains power in Angola. In: Zeit Online. 2nd September 2012.
  8. David Signer: The "eternal" President wants to go. After almost four decades in power, Angola's president surprisingly announces his resignation. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 7, 2016, p. 9.
  9. a b Long-term President Eduardo dos Santos takes the second row. Neues Deutschland from August 23, 2017, accessed on August 24, 2017
  10. Fabian Urech: She was considered the inviolable “princess” of Angola - now her assets have been frozen | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( nzz.ch [accessed January 12, 2020]).