Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo

Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo (1986)

Maria de Lourdes Ruivo da Silva Matos Pintasilgo pronunciation ^{? / i} (born January 18, 1930 in Abrantes , † July 10, 2004 in Lisbon ) was a Portuguese politician and from 1979 to 1980 the first and so far only female head of government in Portugal.

Life

Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo graduated from the Technical University of Lisbon as an industrial chemical engineer. Already during her student days she worked in Catholic student organizations. As a left-wing Catholic, she was close to the Portuguese Socialist Party , but did not initially join the party even after it was legalized again after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Portugal.

After the Carnation Revolution, she joined the government of Vasco Gonçalves as Minister of Social Affairs and then represented her country as the Permanent Representative of Portugal to UNESCO .

When Portugal returned to a constitutional system of government after the end of the Carnation Revolution, Mário Soares first became Prime Minister, as his Socialist Party became the strongest faction in the first free parliamentary elections after the revolution. However, the socialists did not have their own majority in parliament, a minority government in Soares failed, as did a coalition of socialists with the CDS led by Soares . From August 28, 1978, President Eanes appointed politically independent governments, which, however, also failed after a short time due to a lack of support in parliament . When the second independent government under Carlos Mota Pinto had to resign, Eanes de Lourdes finally appointed Pintasilgo as the new head of government on August 1, 1979. The de Lourdes Pintasilgo government was conceived as a transitional government from the start, as the parties had already agreed to hold early elections when they took office. These elections were held on December 2, 1979 and were won by a party alliance led by the conservative Social Democrats . On January 3, 1980, de Lourdes Pintasilgo handed over the office of Prime Minister to the election winner, the Social Democrat Francisco Sá Carneiro .

In the presidential elections of 1986 (in which Mário Soares was elected president) she ran as an independent candidate, but achieved only fourth place with 7% of the vote. She then joined the Socialist Party, for which she sat in the European Parliament from 1987 to 1989 .

Web links

• Entry on Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo in the database of Members of the European Parliament

predecessor	Office	successor
Carlos Mota Pinto	Prime Minister of Portugal 1979–1980	Francisco Sá Carneiro