Paulo Portas

Paulo Portas (2009)

Paulo de Sacadura Cabral Portas , mostly Paulo Portas (born September 12, 1962 in Lisbon , Portugal ) is a Portuguese politician. From 1998 to 2005 and 2007 to 2016 he was chairman of the right-wing conservative party Centro Democrático e Social - Partido Popular . He was Minister of Defense between 2002 and 2005 and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Portugal between 2011 and 2013 . He used to work as a journalist and co-founded the no longer published weekly newspaper O Independente .

From the successful parliamentary election in 2011 to November 2015, his CDS-PP party was again involved in the Portuguese government under Passos Coelho as a small coalition partner. Portas held the post of Deputy Prime Minister from July 2013 to November 2015 when the cabinet was formed.

Life

Childhood and youth

Paulo Portas was born on September 12, 1962 into a middle-class family in Lisbon. His father, Nuno Portas, a well-known architect, and his mother, Helena Sacadura Cabral, journalist and writer, separated five years later. Since then, Paulo Portas has lived with his mother, while his brother Miguel Portas , who was a member of the leadership of Bloco de Esquerda until his death in 2012 , grew up with his father. Both are great-nephews of the well-known glider pilot Artur de Sacadura Freire Cabral , who became known as Gago Coutinho's companion on the joint South Atlantic overflight in 1922.

education

He completed his training entirely at the family tradition Jesuit school Colégio São João de Brito in Lisbon. Portas then studied law and journalism at the Catholic University of Lisbon . He gained fame in 1978 through his newspaper article Três Traições, ( Eng . "Triple Treason"), in which he criticized the three prominent politicians António dos Santos Ramalho Eanes , Diogo Freitas do Amaral and Mário Soares for their policy of decolonization after the 1974 Carnation Revolution . Immediately after the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship of the Estado Novo , Portugal released its colonies of Angola , Cape Verde , Guinea-Bissau , Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe into independence.

Professional career

However, before he took an active part in Portuguese politics, Portas was instrumental as a journalist. In 1988 he founded the weekly O Independente together with Miguel Esteves Cardoso , which was known for exposing various scandals under the Aníbal Cavaco Silva government (1985-1995), but was also criticized for its polemics.

Political career

Paulo Portas (2009)

At the age of twelve, Paulo Portas joined the youth organization Juventude Social Democrata (JSD) of the Partido Popular Democrático (today Partido Social Democrata (Social Democrats), albeit conservative-liberal) and became a loyal supporter of the founder and later Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro . After his death in 1980, however, Portas was disappointed with the party leadership and decided to leave the Social Democratic Party in 1983.

In 1995, Paulo Portas became a member of the Portuguese Parliament as representative of the Portuguese People's Party Centro Democrático e Social - Partido Popular (CDS-PP) for the Aveiro constituency, for which he gave up his activities as editor of the O Independente . Three years later he was elected chairman of his party after a battle vote against Manuel Monteiro . In 1999 he was a brief member of the European Parliament. After the previous opposition Social Democrats were the strongest force in the elections to the Portuguese Parliament in 2002, but did not achieve an absolute majority, Portas' party entered into a coalition with the Social Democrats. As chairman of his party, he took over the post of defense minister and was also deputy prime minister under the Barroso government . Even after the previous Prime Minister José Manuel Barroso became EU Commission head and Pedro Santana Lopes took over the office, Portas remained Minister of Defense.

During his tenure as Minister of Defense, Portas used warships to prevent the Dutch abortion aid organization Women on Waves from entering Portuguese waters. The aid organization had planned to bring Portuguese women into international waters to enable them to have an abortion. At the time, termination of pregnancy was only permitted in exceptional cases in Portugal. While his brother Miguel Portas, a member of the European Left , criticized the decision, Paulo Portas received a lot of support from the Catholic Church and opponents of the abortion.

Paulo Portas with then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2005)

Portugal supported the US attack on Iraq in the third Gulf War in the spring of 2003 during Portas' term of office by sending Portuguese soldiers.

After President Jorge Sampaio dissolved parliament under the Pedro Santana Lopes government in 2005, new elections were required. In the vote on February 10, 2005, the CDS-PP under Paulo Portas suffered considerable losses and only two of the previous 14 seats in parliament, so that because of the election goals not achieved (election result of ten percent, remaining as the third strongest political force and avoiding an absolute Majority of socialists) resigned from office on election night. He was still active as an opposition politician in the Portuguese parliament.

During his time as an opposition politician, he hosted the political talk show on the private channel SIC O Estado da Arte . In April 2007, Paulo Portas won - again in a fighting vote - with 75 percent of the party leadership of the CDS-PP against the incumbent José Ribeiro e Castro .

In the parliamentary elections in June 2011 , the bourgeois camp recorded significant gains, so that the victorious Partido Social Democrata under Pedro Passos Coelho formed a coalition with the smaller CDS-PP, Portas was significantly involved in the coalition negotiations. On June 21, 2011, President Cavaco Silva appointed him Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Passos Coelho cabinet , which he held until July 24, 2013. Since July 24, 2013 he has been Deputy Prime Minister in the Passos Coelho cabinet. On November 24, 2015, António Costa , General Secretary of the Socialist Party, was commissioned by President Cavaco Silva to form a government . This ended the government of the coalition under Prime Minister Passos Coelho.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Rui Machete é novo ministro dos Negócios Estrangeiros , dn.pt, accessed on September 6, 2015 (Portuguese)
2. ↑ All of the following dates up to 1983 refer to the newspaper article by Teresa Oliveira: Paulo Portas: Retrato de um político aos 40 anos - A família , Paulo Portas: Portrait of a forty-year-old politician - The family, Expresso , September 14, 2002
3. ↑ Margarida Gomes and Filomena Fontes: Paulo Portas arranca vitória clara sobre Ribeiro e Castro nas directas do CDS , Paulo Portas clearly wins against Ribeiro e Castro in the CDS direct elections ( Memento of the original of August 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: Der Archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Público, April 22, 2007 
4. ↑ Sofia Rodrigues / Lusa: Rui Machete, Moreira da Silva e Pires de Lima são os novos ministros , Público, 23 July 2013
5. ↑ António Costa is Portugal's new head of government , nzz.ch, accessed on November 24, 2015

Web links

Commons : Paulo Portas  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Short biography of Paulo Portas at the Assembleia da República (Portuguese)

• Entry for Paulo Portas in the database of members of the European Parliament