Mário Soares, the war horse of Portuguese politics, dies at 92

Mário Soares has died at the venerable age of 92. The war horse of Portuguese politics was the first freely elected prime minister after the 1974 revolution ended the darkness of the Salazar years.

Soares died at the Red Cross Hospital in Lisbon today, January 7th, 2017 where he has been treated since December 13th last year.

Portugal’s current Prime Minister, on a visit to India, commented that “the loss of Soares is the loss of someone who is irreplaceable in our recent history, we owe him a lot.”

The government has declared three days of mourning from Monday and plans a full State funeral.

His only son, João Soares, posted the news on social media: "My Dad, Mario Soares, died today 7th of January 2017, at 15.28 hours. At the hospital of the Portuguese Red Cross, in Lisbon. Where he was since 13 December of last year. My sister Isabel and I were by your side. As always since birth. Your funeral, organised by the presidency of the Republic and the presidency of the Assenbly, will take place from Monday 9th of January."

Soares fought relentlessly against the Salazar regime and was arrested a dozen times, able to return from exile in France only after the April 1974 Carnation Revolution when he made a triumphant return to Lisbon, greeted by thousands of cheering supporters. He set about restoring democracy to a country whose last civilian head of state had been forced out in 1926.

He was appointed foreign minister in the provisional 1974 government and was given the unenviable task of negotiating with Portugal’s overseas colonies as they obtained independence.

Soares co-founded the Socialist Party and helped counter the Communist Party’s attempt to gain a stronger foothold after the revolution. In 1976, the Socialist Party won the first free elections after the revolution and Soares became prime minister.

In 1983, he was elected premier again and helped negotiate Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community, serving as the President of the Republic of Portugal between 1986 and 1996.

Soares remained a critical voice even after he left party politics. Disparaging of the country’s austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the European Union after the 2011 bailout, his opinion was the financial terms were close to usury.

Mário Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares was born in Lisbon on December 7th, 1924. He was the son of João Soares, a defrocked priest who suffered prison and exile, and Elisa Nobre Baptista. His father founded a school and was a former minister who endured imprisonment and exile under Salazar’s regime.

Soares obtained a degree in history and philosophy and a law degree at the University of Lisbon before founding the Socialist Party.

In 1949, Soares married the actress Maria Barroso. He was in prison at the time. She died in 2015 and her death profoundly affected Soares who was seen less and less in public. Their son, João Soares, is a former minister of culture and Lisbon mayor, their daughter Isabel Soares is a psychologist and school director.

A self-defined agnostic, Soares believed in "humanity and its improvement", and described himself as being driven by "a great desire to live and by immense curiosity."

Politicians, including PM Antonio Costa and President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had visited Soares in hospital in recent weeks and news of his death brought emotional tributes from all political sides.

"President Mario Soares was born and graduated to be a fighter, to have a cause to fight - freedom," said President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa adding that Portugal must henceforth fight for "the immortality of his heritage."

It is a sad day for all Portuguese," said the head of the centre-right PSD Pedro Passos Coelho.

And that sorrow could be seen on the streets of Lisbon Saturday.

"His death saddens me - even in his old age, he was someone who said what he thought," said bookseller Paula Cabecadas. "For me he was like a dinosaur: this huge figure from the past who will be hard to match in the future," said 22-year-old student Miguel Pinto.

Excerpt from the Washington Post:

During his years in France, Mr. Soares helped organize Portugal’s Socialist Party, with a center-left approach not unlike those of parties led by Willy Brandt in West Germany, Olof Palme in Sweden and Mr. Soares’s close friend François Mitterrand in France.

He called himself a socialist, but Mr. Soares was no Marxist. He opposed totalitarian tendencies by hard-liners of any stripe.

“The preaching of Communist doctrine was no revelation, nor did it delude me,” he said.

Some of his fiercest political enemies were members of Portugal’s Stalinist-leaning Communist Party. In 1975, Mr. Soares demanded the resignation of the country’s prime minister, Vasco Goncalves, concerned that his strong ties to the Communist Party could plunge Portugal back into an authoritarian state.

The following year, Mr. Soares ran for the office of prime minister himself. He campaigned with his daughter serving as his driver and bodyguard.

“What we believe in is socialism in liberty,” he said, “neither dictatorship of the left nor dictatorship of the right.”

After winning a plurality of the vote, Mr. Soares moved to strengthen ties with the United States and Western Europe and thwarted yet another attempted Communist military coup.

“If the coup had succeeded,” he told the New York Times, “I would have been dead or in jail or back in exile, so I’m glad it didn’t.”

He was in office for just 500 days. His government lost a vote of confidence in the parliament, in part because Mr. Soares refused to compromise with the Communists.

Portugal struggled through economic and political chaos during the next few years, until Mr. Soares returned to office as prime minister in 1983. He was succeeded two years later by the popular centrist Aníbal Cavaco Silva, as Portugal began to attain newfound stability.

In 1986, Mr. Soares was elected the country’s first civilian president in 60 years. He was instrumental in engineering Portugal’s entry into what is now the European Union and took a larger role on the international stage.

He was called on to help settle conflicts in the Middle East and across Latin America. He was, among other things, a friend of both Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 1991, Mr. Soares was reelected to a second five-year term as Portugal’s president, a largely ceremonial position. He later served in the European Parliament and in 2006 failed in a third bid for Portuguese president.

By then, however, his country had undergone an economic revival, and the democratic ideals he had advocated since his youth were firmly in place.

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