Paulo Portas

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Paulo de Sacadura Cabral Portas (born 12 September 1962), commonly known just by Paulo Portas, pron. IPA: ['paulu 'pɔɾtɐʃ], is a Portuguese politician, a member of the Portuguese Parliament and former Portuguese minister of State, National Defense and Sea Affairs.

Born into a bourgeois family in Lisbon, with roots in Vila Viçosa on the paternal side and agricultural aristocracy of the side of his mother, Portas grew up in a political family. His father, Nuno Portas, was a progressive, left-wing Roman Catholic. His mother, Helena Sacadura Cabral, was a conservative. Ms. Sacadura Cabral seemed to have greater influence on young Paulo. When his parents separated, Paulo stayed with his mother, while his brother Miguel Portas (a member of Bloco de Esquerda – Left Bloc) grew up with his father. His great-uncle was Artur de Sacadura Cabral.

He was a militant member of the Democratic Popular Party (PPD, which is today's Social Democratic Party). He was a staunch follower of Francisco Sá Carneiro.

Portas studied law and journalism in University. He became relatively known at a very early age for an article he wrote called "Três Traições" ("Three Treasons"), which attacked three prominent politicians: António dos Santos Ramalho Eanes, Diogo Freitas do Amaral, and Mário Soares. In the article, written while a teenager, but published in a weekly newspaper, he criticised the policy of decolonisation after the fall of Estado Novo in 1974 . In 1975, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe became independent. East Timor was invaded by Indonesia during the process and only became fully independent in 2002.

Before becoming a politician, Portas was a journalist. In the late 80's, he co-founded, with Miguel Esteves Cardoso, the weekly newspaper O Independente, which became famous for denouncing political scandals during the governments of Aníbal Cavaco Silva (1985-1995). This position earned him the qualification as one of the most hated men in the country. Many social-democrat politicians never forgave him his attitude during this period and never accepted his alliance with José Manuel Durão Barroso in 2002.

In 1995 he first became an MP with the People's Party, and would eventually break with then-leader, Manuel Monteiro, three years later, to become the party leader himself. In the Parliament (1995-2002), he is known to be found of a very peculiar style of speech, using humour bordering paternalism and unashamed self-infatuation, which he crystallised as his trademark, to contradict the views of the Government, then led by the socialist António Guterres.

In 1998 Portas became the leader of the People's Party, which was in two coalition governments with the Social Democratic Party, from April 2002 to March 2005.

In the 2002 legislative elections, the People's Party won 14 of 230 seats in the Portuguese Parliament, with 8.8 percent of the vote. Portas was appointed Minister of State and National Defence in the first coalition government.

In 2004, while Defence minister, he sent war ships to prevent the entrance in Portuguese waters of a Dutch ship owned by the pro-choice organization Women on Waves. This ship was intended to pick up women and take them to international waters to be informed on how to perform abortions. Under Portuguese law, abortion was only allowed under very strict circumstances. One of the main critics of this decision was his own brother, Miguel Portas, a MP of the European Parliament. His decision was praised by both the Catholic Church and the pro-life groups in Portugal.

In June 2004, Prime Minister Durão Barroso resigned to became President of the European Commission, and was replaced by Pedro Santana Lopes, Portas becoming Minister of State, National Defence and Sea Affairs. It is not clear how Portas viewed the self-austing of Barroso and the rise of the unelected new Prime Minister, Santana Lopes.

Santana Lopes' and Paulo Portas' joint government had a short existence from the very start, and after the dissolution of Parliament by president Jorge Sampaio, the coalition suffered a crushing defeat in the early elections that followed in early 2005, with the PP losing 60,000 votes and two of its fourteen seats in Parliament; Portas announced on election night that he would resign from the party's leadership. His young right-wing supports cried in front of TV cameras before a leader still able to arouse the emotions of his zealot supporters. This exit from the stage would reveal temporary at best, as it is widely acknowledged that he never did stop interfering with the new leader through the destabilising conduct of his personal allies in the party,

Portas intervened weekly in a night talk show, called "O estado da Arte" (The state of the Art), where he analyses and elaborates on current mediatic issues. He also served as the chosen supporter of John II of Portugal in the Portuguese version of BBC's 100 greatest Britons: Grandes Portugueses. He would go back to the leadership of his party following a months of indirect undermining of the extant leadership. He seems to be enjoying again the petty limelight yielded by his stature as leader of well-known but small and shrinking right-wing party, which lost its seat at the largest municipality of the country in the summer of 2007. While retaining his sound-byte capabilities untainted. Paulo Portas seemed to have lost his formal appeal as a political non-commodity. He is still associated with the Barroso government (with its luggage of active support of the Iraq invasion, its ineffective management of the budget deficit, its patchy economic policies, and its use of military vessels to frighten pacifist European women activists) and with the Santana Lopes government (its recklessness, its penchant for cronyism, its aimless economic strategy, and its lack of sobriety in administration of state affairs). He became the kind of soggy political figure living for politics for the sake of politics (not policy) that was heavily ridiculed by his former newspaper Independent, which eventually went out of business having fulfilled its mission of catapulting the then young Portas to the local media star-system.