José Manuel Durão Barroso
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| José Manuel Barroso | |
| Image:Jose Manuel Barroso.jpg <small/> | |
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| In office April 6, 2002 – June 29, 2004 | |
| Preceded by | António Guterres |
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| Succeeded by | Pedro Santana Lopes |
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| Incumbent | |
| In office since 23 November, 2004 | |
| Preceded by | Romano Prodi |
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| Born | March 23, 1956 Lisbon, Portugal |
| Political party | Partido Social Democrata |
| Spouse | Margarida Sousa Uva (3 sons) |
| Profession | university professor and politician |
José Manuel Durão Barroso, GCC (pronounced: IPA, [ʒu'zɛ mɐnu'ɛɫ du'ɾɐ̃ũ bɐ'ʁozu] listen ) (born in Lisbon, March 23, 1956) is a Portuguese politician and the 11th President of the European Commission. He served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 6 April 2002 until 29 June 2004, when he resigned to become President-designate of the European Commission. The appointment was formally endorsed by the European Parliament on July 22, and he was due to take over officially from Romano Prodi on 1 November 2004. However, this process was delayed until 23 November due to problems regarding parliamentary approval of the Barroso Commission.
José Manuel Barroso is married to Margarida Sousa Uva, with whom he has three sons: Luís, Guilherme and Francisco. He speaks fluently English and French in addition to his mother tongue. <ref>The Guardian - What a larger Europe needs is small countries able to think big</ref>
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[edit] Academic career
He graduated in law from the University of Lisbon and has an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from the University of Geneva (Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève) in Switzerland. His academic career continued as an Assistant Professor in the Law School of the University of Lisbon and at Georgetown University and Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington DC, where he did research for a Ph.D. He is a 1998 graduate of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. Back in Lisbon, Barroso became Director of the Department for International Relations in the Lusíada University.
[edit] Political career
[edit] Portugal
Barroso's political activity began in his college days, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. He was one of the leaders of the underground Maoist MRPP (Reorganising Movement of the Proletariat Party, later PCTP/MRPP-Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat). In an interview to the newspaper Expresso, he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Communist Party. In December 1980, Barroso joined the right-of-centre PPD (Democratic Popular Party, later PPD/PSD-Social Democratic Party), where he remains to the present day.
In 1985, on the PSD Government of Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, Barroso was named Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1987 he became a member of the same Government as he was elevated to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (answering to the Minister of Foreign Affairs), a post he was to hold for the next five years. In this capacity he was the driving force behind the Bicesse Accords of 1990, which led to a temporary armistice in Angola's civil war between the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi. He also supported independence for East Timor, the former Portuguese colony, then a province of Indonesia by force. In 1992, Barroso was promoted to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and served in this capacity until the defeat of the PSD in the 1995 general election.
In opposition, Barroso was elected in 1995 as a representative for Lisbon in the Assembly of the Republic where he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1999 he was elected president of his political party, PSD, and thus became Leader of the Opposition. Parliamentary elections in 2002 gave the PSD enough seats to form a coalition government with the right-wing Portuguese People's Party, and Barroso subsequently became Prime Minister of Portugal on 6 April 2002. As Prime Minister, and facing a growing budget deficit, he made a number of difficult decisions and adopted strict reforms. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which most Portuguese opposed, and reduced public expenditure, which made him unpopular among leftists and public servants. On July 5 2004, having become President-designate of the European Commission, Barroso arranged with Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio the terms of the cessation of his job as Prime Minister of Portugal. According to Barroso, he left office to prepare for the European Commission job, safe in the knowledge that he was acting in Portugal's "best national interest" and that he was confident in the stability of its "democratic institutions".
[edit] Barroso's successor in Portuguese Government
José Manuel Barroso resigned to become President of the European Commission, and made clear that he had resigned as Prime Minister of Portugal in the belief that he would be succeeded by Pedro Santana Lopes, his second in the PSD party. But Santana Lopes nomination, then the Lisbon Mayor, with a reputation for being a populist leader but with little government or international experience, plus his eurosceptic leanings, provoked heated opposition in his own party and from rival parties. His opponents on the left were concerned that Paulo Portas, Minister of Defence and leader of the right wing Popular Party (CDS/PP), the junior coalition partner, could gain greater influence. CDS-PP had in the past espoused significantly more conservative policies on immigration and Europe than the Social Democrats. Pressure for a more eurosceptic approach caused tensions within the coalition and proved potentially embarrassing for José Manuel Barroso as Commission President. President Jorge Sampaio warned that he would use his constitutional powers to intervene if Santana Lopes failed to uphold Barroso's commitment to fiscal rigour or seeks to make substantial changes in the previous government's policies on Europe, defence, justice and foreign affairs. These warnings were to be effected when Santana Lopes' Government was dismissed by the President on December 11 2004.
[edit] European Union
In June 2004, following his being proposed as a consensus candidate, the European Council appointed José Manuel Durão Barroso President-designate of the European Commission. The European Parliament endorsed him in the position by 413 votes to 251, with 44 blank ballots and three spoilt ones. Usually known as Durão Barroso in his homeland, in his first press conference as President he was asked how to pronounce his name, to which he replied "call me José Manuel Barroso or just José Barroso".
Among Barroso's goals as President of the European Commission is to revive public confidence in the Commission, which is widely regarded as having lost its sense of direction since the departure of Jacques Delors, who presided over it from 1985 to 1995 and who is widely regarded as its most dynamic and successful president ever.
Before his appointment, Barroso was expected to be a cautious reformer, and is considered likely to champion the interests of Europe's smaller states (which may be explained by the fact that his parents were from the municipality of Valpaços in Northern Portugal, at a time the poorest region of the EU). He has said that he opposes capping EU spending, from which many EU Member States benefit greatly.
While he was president of the European Commission, there were the following important issues in the EU :
- Bolkestein directive, is an initiative of the European Commission aimed at creating a single market for services within the European Union.
- Lisbon Agenda
- Galileo positioning system
- Budget controversy (see also: UK rebate).
- Doha Development Agenda negotiations (esp. the negotiations about agricultural protectionism).
[edit] References
<references/>
[edit] External links
| Presidents of the European Commission
<td style="vertical-align: middle; width: 1px" rowspan="2"> Image:European flag.svg </td> |
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| Walter Hallstein, Jean Rey, Franco Maria Malfatti, Sicco Mansholt, François-Xavier Ortoli, Roy Jenkins, Gaston Thorn, Jacques Delors, Jacques Santer, Manuel Marín (interim), Romano Prodi, Durão Barroso |
| | Image:European flag.svg |
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|
Joaquín Almunia | José Manuel Barroso | Jacques Barrot | Joe Borg | Stavros Dimas | Benita Ferrero-Waldner | Ján Figeľ | Franco Frattini | Mariann Fischer Boel | Dalia Grybauskaitė | Danuta Hübner | Siim Kallas | László Kovács | Neelie Kroes | Markos Kyprianou | Peter Mandelson | Charlie McCreevy | Louis Michel | Andris Piebalgs | Janez Potočnik | Viviane Reding | Olli Rehn | Vladimír Špidla | Günter Verheugen | Margot Wallström | |
| Prime Ministers of Portugal since the Carnation Revolution (1974)
<td style="vertical-align: middle; width: 1px" rowspan="2"> Image:Coat of arms of Portugal.png </td> |
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| National Salvation Junta - Palma Carlos - Vasco Gonçalves - Pinheiro de Azevedo - Almeida Costa - Mário Soares - Nobre da Costa - Mota Pinto - Maria de Lurdes Pintasilgo - Sá Carneiro - Freitas do Amaral - Pinto Balsemão - Mário Soares - Cavaco Silva - António Guterres - Durão Barroso - Santana Lopes - José Sócrates |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Durão Barroso, José Manuel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Barroso, José; Durão Barroso, José; Durão Barroso; Barroso, José Manuel |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Former Prime Minister of Portugal, President of the European Commission |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 23, 1956 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lisbon, Portugal |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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