• 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

  • Unexpected Discovery Hints We Might Be Inside A Black Hole
  • Why Are People Talking About This “Square Structure” Captured On Mars?
  • The World Has Five Oceans, Not Four – Discover The Latest One
  • Just 80 Percent Of People Can Perceive This Optical Illusion And No One Knows Why
  • Something Other Than Geological Processes Or Humans Created These Caves
  • Can Black Holes Lead To Other Places In The Universe?
  • The Devastating Communication Problem Facing Light-Speed Travel
  • The Great British Pet Massacre: One Of The Saddest Tragedies Of 1939
  • Would A Vacuum-Filled Balloon Float?
  • Queen Ant Produces Babies Of 2 Different Species, For The First Time Ever We Have A Complete Map Of Brain Activity, And Much More This Week
  • Yes, Your Attention Span Might Have Shortened, But That Might Not Be A Terrible Thing
  • This May Be The First Known Portrait Of A Viking – And It’s A Sexually Rampant “Beard Fondler”
  • The Largest Snake In Captivity Is A Humongous 7.7-Meter Reticulated Python Called Medusa
  • Poo Power: How Animal Dung Could Unlock New Antibiotic Treatments
  • Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Tail Found Inside 99-Million-Year-Old Amber Was Mistaken For A Plant
  • Why Aren’t Full Photos Of The Milky Way Real? A NASA Analyst Explains The Obvious
  • Freaky Ratfish Have Teeth Growing Out Of Their Foreheads, And They Use Them For Love
  • The Largest Turtle Ever Known To Have Lived Was An Absolute Unit
  • “It Literally Leapt Out Of The Rock At Us”: How Violent Storms Led To The Extraordinary Preservation Of Baby Pterosaurs
  • This Is The Reason Why Earth’s Core Exists, And It’s More Interesting Than You Might Think
  • 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