• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Jorge Sampaio, who showed teeth in Portuguese presidential powers, dies at 81

September 10, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 10, 2021

LISBON (Reuters) – Former Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio, who made national history in 2005 with an extraordinary use of his powers to dissolve parliament and oust an unstable majority government, died on Friday at the age of 81.

The cause of death was not disclosed, though Sampaio had been hospitalized since Aug. 27 with breathing difficulties.

After an uneventful first term in 1996-2001, the affable Socialist former lawyer won another five-year mandate that turned out to be more turbulent and showed the might of presidential powers in what is usually a ceremonial office.

With the budget deficit rising and Portugal teetering on the verge of recession, the Socialists lost a snap parliamentary election in 2002 to a centre-right coalition of the Social Democrats and the People’s Party.

In 2004, Sampaio’s refusal to hold an early election after Jose Manuel Durao Barroso resigned as prime minister to lead the European Commission triggered fierce protests from left-leaning parties including the Socialists.

In an attempt to ensure political stability, he named another Social Democrat, Pedro Santana Lopes, as premier, only to conclude four months later that the new cabinet was not achieving the desired results and lacked overall credibility.

He used his presidential powers, often dubbed the Atomic Bomb in Portugal, to break up parliament and call new elections for February 2005, which brought the Socialists back to the helm under Prime Minister Jose Socrates.

In his biography, Sampaio told the author, Jose Pedro Castanheira, that he was “fed up with Santana Lopes as prime minister as he was leaving the country adrift.”

He was the only president to have ever used that power while a government with a parliamentary majority ruled Portugal.

Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio was born into a liberal middle-class family in Lisbon. As a child, he lived with his parents in the United States, where his father studied public health and later in England. He spoke fluent English.

He studied law at Lisbon University and in the 1960s the red-haired, bespectacled lawyer gained prominence defending political prisoners of the fascist regime of Antonio Salazar.

Sampaio first became politically active in the clandestine left-wing opposition. After the 1974 revolution that brought democracy to Portugal, he founded the Socialist Left Movement but soon abandoned the project and in 1978 joined the Socialist Party, becoming its Secretary General in 1989.

He served as mayor of Lisbon in 1990-1995, abandoning the second term to run for president in the January 1996 election, which he won in the first round with almost 54% of the vote.

As president, he oversaw the transfer of former Portuguese territory Macao to China in 1999.

A fervent supporter of the Sporting soccer team, Sampaio had two children with his second wife Maria Jose Rita.

(Reporting by Patricia Rua, Catarina Demony and Andrei Khalip, editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source Link Jorge Sampaio, who showed teeth in Portuguese presidential powers, dies at 81

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Fire in N.Macedonian COVID-19 hospital kills at least 10
  2. Japan Airlines looking to raise $2.7 billion – sources
  3. Australia says 3,500 people have arrived from Afghanistan
  4. China Evergrande shares, bonds dive further on default worries

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • RFK Jr’s New Vaccine Advisors Just Recommended Fall Flu Vaccines – But There’s A Catch
  • Controversial World-First Project To Create Human DNA From Scratch Takes First Steps
  • Humans Weren’t The First Species To Travel Around The Moon. They Lost This Race To An Unexpected Animal
  • When You Hack A Shark, You’re Exploiting A Glitch Billions Of Years In The Making
  • Wellness Whales, A New Blood Type, And A DJ Set From Space
  • Hate Flying Ants? We Used To Have Ones The Size Of Hummingbirds
  • ‘Tis The Season To See Titan Cast A Shadow On Saturn – Especially If You Are In America
  • World’s Bravest Vets Put Full Metal Dental Crown On A Bear For The First Time
  • “Spider Rain”: The Bizarre Phenomenon That’ll Send Arachnophobes Into A Spin
  • Scientists Gave Mice A Human “Language Gene” And Something Curious Unfolded
  • Surveillance Of People Is More “Pervasive And Normalised” Than Previously Thought, Endangering Our Privacy
  • US Sees 90 Percent Drop In Heart Attack Deaths Over Last 50 Years
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version