Mario Lino

Mário Lino, Portuguese Minister of Transport since 2005

Mário Lino Soares Correia (born May 31, 1940 in Lisbon , Portugal ), mostly just Mário Lino , is a Portuguese politician of the Socialist Party and since 2005 Minister for Public Works, Transport and Communication under the Sócrates government .

Life

He completed his engineering studies in 1965 at the Lisbon Instituto Superior Técnico of the Technical University of Lisbon . He graduated from the University of Colorado in 1972 with a degree in hydrology and water management , from which he received his doctorate.

In the late 1970s, Lino helped rebuild the destroyed infrastructure in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique . In the 1980s Lino was on the boards of the Caminho and the Avante! active as well as a member of various water infrastructure companies and state commissions for water management.

Until 1991, Mário Lino was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, PCP . Gorbachev's reforms , his resignation and the collapse of the Soviet Union sparked a camp war within the party, and the PCP's election results continued to decline. Since Mário Lino on the one hand campaigned for an urgent reform of the party and on the other hand deliberately provoked, the party leadership decided to expel. Then Mário Lino was an independent between 1994 and 1996 was a member of the Lisbon city assembly. Between 1996 and 2002 he headed the state water company Águas de Portugal .

In spring 2005 the newly elected Socialist Prime Minister José Sócrates appointed him to the new government as the new Minister for Public Works, Transport and Communications. In the same year Lino then switched to the Socialist Party .

As Minister of Transport, Lino is particularly committed to two large, but controversial infrastructure projects that are to be brought to completion or at least to the start of construction as part of his official duties. On the one hand, a new, standard-gauge high-speed railway network based on the model of the French TGV is to be built between Lisbon, Porto and Madrid. At a conference organized by the transport ministers of both countries in Santiago de Compostela with Spain, he advocated greater cooperation between the two countries. As a result, the Portuguese General Prosecutor's Office investigated the case following a complaint that several army officers accused Lino of being a supporter of Iberism and a “traitor to the fatherland”. The treason is punishable under Portuguese law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The attorney general closed the investigation shortly thereafter.

On the other hand, Lino supports the plans for the construction of a new Lisbon airport that have existed for years. He sparked a great discussion about the choice of location, in which the government under José Sócrates campaigned for the construction in the city of Ota, north of Lisbon . In contrast, opponents are demanding the construction of the airport in Alcochete in the Margem Sul do Tejo . Lino's statement that the Margem Sul do Tejo is a desert and that no airports are built in a desert made the discussion even more heated.

Mário Lino is married and has two sons.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Brief outline of the history of the PCP in the late 1980s (Portuguese)
2. ↑ Queixa na Procuradoria contra ministro Mário Lino por defender iberismo  ( page can no longer be accessed , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   , [Complaint to the Prosecutor General's Office against Minister Mário Lino for defending Iberism], Público , 9 November 2006
3. ↑ Inês Sequeira: Ministro das Obras Públicas: margem Sul é “um deserto” e not serve para o aeroporto ( Memento of the original from February 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , [Minister for Public Works: Margem Sul is a desert and is not suitable for an airport], Público , 23 May 2007

Web links

Commons : Mário Lino  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography of Mário Linos on the website of the Portuguese government (Portuguese, English)