Pedro Santana Lopes
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| Prime Minister of Portugal | |
| Order: | 118th (64th of the Republic, 16th since the Carnation Revolution) |
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| Term of Office | 29 June 2004 - 12 March 2005 |
| Predecessor: | José Manuel Durão Barroso |
| Successor: | José Sócrates |
| Date of Birth | June 29, 1956 |
| Place of Birth: | Lisbon |
| Political Party: | Social Democratic |
Pedro Miguel de Santana Lopes (pron. IPA ['pedɾu sɐ̃'tɐnɐ 'lɔpɨʃ]), born June 29, 1956, a Portuguese lawyer and politician, was Prime Minister of Portugal from 2004 to 2005. He is currently a Member of the Portuguese Parliament.
Santana Lopes is divorced, with five children of three ex-wives.
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[edit] Biography
Santana Lopes was born in Lisbon and graduated in Law from the University of Lisbon, where he was leader of the Student Union. He joined the Portuguese Social Democratic Party (PSD) in 1976, and has remained a member ever since.
In 1979, he became a legal advisor to Prime Minister Francisco Sá Carneiro, and has presented himself as a follower of his for all his political life.
In 1986, he became Assistant State Secretary to Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, an office he left the next year to lead to PSD list to the European Parliament, where he remained for two years of his five-year-term.
In 1991, Cavaco Silva called him to Government and appointed him Secretary of State for Culture. Leaving office, he successively ran for, and won, president of Sporting Clube de Portugal, mayor of Figueira da Foz (the only time that he completed a term in office), and mayor of Lisbon. During this period he also earned a living as a sports and political commentator and founded a weekly newspaper, Semanário. In 1998, he announced his withdrawal from politics, following a comical sketch in private TV station which presented him and his private life in a very unfavourable light.
After three unsuccessful attempts to become leader of his party, Santana Lopes rose to vice-president under José Manuel Barroso, who had once called him "a mix of [astrologer] Zandinga and [sports commentator] Gabriel Alves." When Barroso resigned in July 2004 to take up the Presidency of the European Commission, Santana Lopes became the PSD leader. As his party was the major partner in the coalition government at the time, he also moved to Prime Minister, suspending his term as mayor of Lisbon.
[edit] Prime Minister
The leadership of Santana Lopes was made difficult by a number of inherited economic and political problems. When his party first took power, the country’s economy was in a poor state, with a rising government-spending deficit, partially because of policies focused on public expenditure by the previous governments (led by Aníbal Cavaco Silva (PSD) and António Guterres of the Socialist Party) and the early 2000s recession. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, "Portugal became the first country to breach the EU's 'excessive deficit' rule with a budget deficit of 4.4% of GDP in 2001, well above the 3% of GDP ceiling set by the EU's Stability and Growth Pact."[1] The situation inherited by Santana Lopes was a little better, as the previous government led by Barroso had been able to comply with European Union directives regarding the deficit by selling State assets.
Santana Lopes himself failed to gain a reputation as a competent Prime Minister. His unusual rise to power, as Barroso's successor rather than by election, contributed to these difficulties. Although his appointment was in fact constitutional, he was not a Member of Parliament but only a municipal leader, as the Mayor of Lisbon, and many columnists thus saw him as an illegitimate Prime Minister, a view shared by a large section of the public.
The short career of Santana Lopes as Prime Minister began with some members of government being shuffled between departments on the same afternoon as the government was being inaugurated. His Minister of Defence Paulo Portas looked surprised during the ceremony when he was announced as the Minister for National Defense and Sea Affairs. Portas' look of surprise when the name of his office was announced was broadcast live on television.
Santana Lopes' period in office was also marked by chaos in the allocation of teachers to schools (more than a month after classes officially started, and resulting from alleged incompetence of the IT provider (designated during the previous Government); the problem was swiftly solved by another small provider), and by claims of pressure exerted on the press, including arranging for the replacement of the information director of the public television channel RTP, and pressing private television channel TVI to tone down the criticism of him by a political commentator, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a former leader of his own party, who consequently left the channel.
The Government of Santana Lopes got a death sentence on November 30, 2004 when President Jorge Sampaio announced that he was calling an early Parliament election for February 2005, from which a new Government would be formed, after Henrique Chaves, a Santana Lopes loyalist, resigned after four days as minister for sport, claiming that Santana Lopes lacked "loyalty and truth".
Santana Lopes announced the resignation of the government on December 11 so that his Government would assume just a caretaker role until the election. He went on to lead his party to its worst result in parliamentary elections in Portugal; the election of February 20, 2005 was won by the Socialist Party led by José Sócrates, with whom Santana Lopes had debated every Sunday for one year on the public television station, RTP. Santana Lopes did not follow his coalition partner Paulo Portas and did not resign on election night, instead leaving the party leadership two days later.
Two days after the inauguration of the new government, he returned to complete his term as mayor of Lisbon. However, when his party failed to endorse him as a candidate for the 2005 municipal elections, he resigned his office one month before the vote, to assume his seat in the Parliament, which he immediately suspended to return to practice private law. The mayor seat was occupied by the vice-mayor, António Carmona Rodrigues, who was confirmed in the post by popular ballot when he won the 2005 municipal elections.
[edit] Gaffes
Santana Lopes is known for his Quaylesque gaffes, which include:
- claiming that the non-existent Chopin violin concertos were his favourite piece of classical music;
- having his secretary send a postcard to Brazilian author Machado de Assis (died 1908);
- calling a press conference to announce a threat on his life when in fact he had received a teaser mailing for a book titled Cuidado com os rapazes ("Watch out for the boys");
- announcing that he would leave the political field in protest for his private life being parodied in a TV show, if the President didn't intervene (he didn't);
- seeming to have missed a formal reception to the Mozambican Minister of Foreign Affairs in order to attend a fashion show;
- postponing the inauguration of some of his vice-ministers in order to attend a wedding;
- appearing lost in the middle of his inauguration speech, with long and embarrassing silences, confusing pages and looking nervous (he said in an interview to newspaper Expresso that it was hot that day, people had already fainted in the audience and he himself wasn't feeling too well, so he tried to cut the speech short).
[edit] Bibliography
- Co-author with José Manuel Durão Barroso: Sistema de Governo e Sistema Partidário, Livraria Bertrand, 1980.
- Os Sistemas de Governos Mistos e o actual Sistema Português, Difel Editorial, 2001.
- Percepções e Realidade, Alêtheia Editores, 2006.
