Portugal mourns ‘father of democracy’ Mário Soares

LISBON, Portugal — Portugal was in mourning Saturday for Mário Soares, widely regarded as the father of the country’s democracy, who died aged 92.

Soares served as president from 1986 to 1996 and was twice prime minister.

The former Socialist Party leader played a crucial role in stabilizing the country after the 1974 revolution that overthrew four decades of dictatorship. He guided Portugal towards a Western democratic model and oversaw negotiations leading to membership of the European Union in 1986.

“We have lost today someone who has so many times been the face and the voice of our freedom, for which he fought all his life,” said the country’s current prime minister and fellow Socialist António Costa, according to AFP.

António Guterres, the new United Nations Secretary-General, who served as Portuguese prime minister while Soares was president, said Soares was “one of the rare political leaders who had real stature in both Europe and the world.”

Soares was rushed to Lisbon’s Red Cross hospital in the early hours of December 13, after what medics described as a “generalized deterioration of his health.” Jose Barata, a spokesperson for the hospital, confirmed Soares died Saturday, Bloomberg reported. The government decreed three days of mourning.

“He was a fighter for freedom” and Portugal must henceforth fight for “the immortality of his heritage,” said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s center-right president, who had visited Soares in hospital.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker also paid tribute to “my friend” Soares, describing him as “a symbol and a driver of resistance to the dictatorship and of the fight for democratic transition in his country.” His statement added: “The life of Mário Soares was inextricably linked with Portugal’s recent history as well as with key moments of the European project.”

Soares was a tenacious opponent of the authoritarian regime established by António de Oliveira Salazar, who ruled the country from 1932.

He founded the Socialist Party while in exile in West Germany and returned to a hero’s welcome after the “Carnation Revolution” that toppled the dictatorship on April 25, 1974.

Over the chaotic months that followed, Portugal flirted with far-left rule and many feared it would slide out of the Western orbit.  Soares’ election as prime minister in 1976 allowed him to strengthen parliamentary democracy, bolstered by close relations with the French Socialists and Germany’s Social Democrats.

Together with General António Ramalho Eanes, a moderate army officer elected president in 1976, Soares was credited with keeping Portugal on a Western trajectory.

Ironically given his recent strong stance against austerity, Soares was forced out of power in 1978 amid a wave of opposition to the tough budget measures he introduced as part of an International Monetary Fund program to shore up state finances left shaky by the post-revolutionary turmoil. Yet, he remained a crucial figure in Portuguese politics, holding posts in several coalition governments.

When he returned to the premiership in 1983, he built support for Portuguese membership of the European Economic Community, overcoming opposition both at home and elsewhere in Europe. He signed the membership treaty in the cloister of Lisbon’s Jerónimos Monastery on June 12, 1985.

Leader of the Socialist Party from 1973 until his election as president in 1986, Soares was a leading light in the European Socialist movement. As president, he was a popular older-statesman, winning re-election with 71 percent of the vote in 1991. He was affectionately known as “papa chubby cheeks.”

Later, he served as an influential Member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. In his eighties, he made an unsuccessful attempt to return to frontline Portuguese politics. He ran for president in 2006, but received just 14 percent of the vote, with his age and political infighting within the Socialist Party counting against him.

In his later years, Soares become a fierce critic of the austerity policies imposed in response to the eurozone financial crisis. He railed against the “troika” of European and IMF officials overseeing the economy after Portugal’s 2011 bailout, and the center-right government that ruled the country until December 2015.

“The austerity imposed by the troika and the ideology of the current government will take us nowhere, or to be more precise, will make things worse and worse,” he wrote in the Publico newspaper in a 2012 opinion piece that marked the anniversary of the 1974 revolution. “The Portuguese are a great people, they won’t wait before reacting, peacefully I hope.”

He welcomed the election of the radical Syriza government in Greece, but frequently cited U.S. President Barack Obama and Pope Francis as world figures he most admired.

As a youthful dissident, left-wing activist and lawyer representing prominent opposition figures, Soares was arrested several times by the dictatorship and was briefly banished in the 1960s to Portugal’s African island colony of São Tomé. Eventually he left for exile in Italy, France and West Germany, where he established close personal ties with European socialist leaders.

On his return, Soares joined Álvaro Cunhal, the historical leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, to address tumultuous revolutionary crowds at a May 1, 1974 rally in Lisbon, but the pair quickly quarreled over the country’s direction.

With support from the United States and Western Europe, Soares prevailed, keeping Portugal in NATO and the Western bloc.

“It wasn’t easy to install in Portugal a pluralist, civil and multi-party democracy, that’s open to the world … but we did it with our own hands, without more revolutions or civil war,” he wrote in 2012. “Portugal became a first world country. Everything changed: The mentality of the Portuguese people, our material wellbeing, the development of culture and education, our relations with Europe and the world.”

Soares became an outspoken supporter of dissidents resisting Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. He was the first Western leader to visit Prague during the “velvet revolution” that overthrew the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and struck up a lasting friendship with Czech leader Václav Havel.

His role in granting rapid independence to Portugal’s colonies made Soares widely respected in Africa, but earned the lasting enmity of many of the hundreds-of-thousands of Portuguese settlers who fled from Angola and the other territories.

Maria Barroso, his wife of 60 years, died in 2014 at the age of 90. They are survived by a daughter Isabel Soares, a psychologist, and a son João Soares, a Socialist politician who served as mayor of Lisbon from 1995 to 2002.