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The content you requested does not exist or is not available anymore.</s>Mario Soares, Portugal's former president and PM, dies at 92

LISBON, Portugal - Mario Soares, a former prime minister and president of Portugal who helped steer his country toward democracy after a 1974 military coup and grew into a global statesman, has died. He was 92.

 

Portugal's Socialist Party, which Soares once led, said he died Saturday. It did not give further details, but Soares had been hospitalized since Dec. 13.

 

Soares, a moderate Socialist, returned from 12 years of political exile after the so-called Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal's four-decade dictatorship.

 

He was elected prime minister and thwarted Communist Party attempts to bring Portugal under Soviet Union influence during the Cold War. Soares eventually helped guide his country from dictatorship to a place in the European Union.

 

In 1986, he became Portugal's first civilian president in 60 years and served two five-year terms.</s>Mario Soares, Portugal's former president and PM, dies at 92

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Mario Soares, a former prime minister and president of Portugal who helped steer his country toward democracy after a 1974 military coup and grew into a global statesman through his work with the Socialist International movement, has died. He was 92.

Lisbon's Red Cross Hospital said in a statement he died there on Saturday afternoon with his son and his daughter at his bedside. The hospital did not provide a cause of death, but Soares had been a patient since Dec. 13. .

Portugal's Socialist Party, which Soares once led, also confirmed his death.

Soares, a moderate Socialist, returned from 12 years of political exile after the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal's four-decade dictatorship in 1974. As a lawyer, he had used peaceful means to fight the country's regime, which eventually banished him.

Soares was elected Portugal's first post-coup prime minister in 1976 and thwarted Portuguese Communist Party attempts to bring the NATO member under Soviet influence during the Cold War. He helped guide his country from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and a place in the European Union.

Soares' role as an international statesman was solidified through his work with the International Socialist movement. As a vice president from 1976, he led diplomatic missions that sought to help resolve conflicts in the Middle East and Latin and Central America.

Soares was visiting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1995. Both Arafat and Rabin were longtime friends of Soares.

In 1986, Soares became Portugal's first civilian president in 60 years. His broad popularity brought him two consecutive five-year terms.

During terms as prime minister and foreign minister, Soares helped rehabilitate Portugal on the international stage after decades of isolation under the dictatorship established by Antonio Salazar in the 1930s. Soares' insistence on using the ballot box instead of weapons to end the dictatorship won him respect around the world.

Soares belonged to a generation of influential European Socialist leaders that also included his close friend Francois Mitterrand of France, Germany's Willy Brandt, Olof Palme in Sweden, and Felipe Gonzalez in Spain.

The 1974 coup shot Lisbon to the center of Cold War attentions as Portugal lurched to the political left after the dictatorship's fall.

Days after the Carnation Revolution — so named because people stuck red carnations in soldiers' rifle barrels — Soares returned home by train from Paris to a rapturous welcome from crowds that flocked to meet him at Lisbon's Santa Apolonia train station.

The Communist Party's influence surged following the coup, prompting fears in the West that Portugal — a founding member of the Atlantic military alliance — would come under the Soviet Union's influence and encourage other radical leftist movements in western Europe.

Soares said that at an October 1974 meeting in Washington, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told him he thought Portugal was doomed to communist rule. But Frank Carlucci, the new U.S. ambassador to Lisbon and later head of the CIA, argued that moderate democratic forces, especially Soares' Socialists, would prevail. The 1976 election proved Carlucci right.

Soares, an affable figure and eloquent campaigner who led the Socialist Party, won the country's first entirely free elections and became prime minister.

Portugal had western Europe's last colonial empire, and Soares was instrumental in quickly granting independence to Portugal's five colonies in Africa. Protracted wars had sapped the Portuguese economy and soured its relations with other western nations that had turned away from colonial rule years earlier.

Soares later was criticized for cutting the colonies loose so abruptly. All of them — Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe — became single-party Marxist states supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba after their independence. Angola and Mozambique drifted into civil wars as proxies in the Cold War struggle for influence in Africa.

Soares held posts in a string of governments that lasted less than a year in the post-revolution political chaos. Banks were nationalized, spooking wealthy financiers who fled the country, and poor farmers seized the land they had long worked at large private estates.

Born in Lisbon in 1924, Soares started out as a radical student organizer and became a renowned defense lawyer.

He was a relentless opponent of Salazar's regime, which along with Franco's roughly contemporary rule in neighboring Spain, shut off the Iberian peninsula to outside influences. Salazar's secret police, known by its acronym PIDE, jailed Soares 12 times and exiled him twice, once to the island of Sao Tome off west Africa.

After democracy, Soares served four times as the country's foreign minister and three times as prime minister.

As prime minister in 1986 he ushered Portugal into the European Economic Community — later the European Union. That turned out to be a watershed year which placed the country on a fast-track modernization program.

Soares capped his political career that year by becoming head of state. He rapidly set about keeping his campaign pledge to serve as "President of all the Portuguese" after years of division and unrest which brought eight governments between 1978 and 1985.

He was a fierce critic of the economic liberalism embraced by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British leader Margaret Thatcher which was alien to his Socialist convictions about the benefits of welfare capitalism.

As president, Soares established a professional, if cool, relationship with center-right Social Democratic Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who admired Thatcher. Though an unlikely team, Soares and Cavaco Silva together oversaw the shedding of many left-inspired economic structures, such as the nationalization of banks, adopted after the coup.

Opponents claimed Soares had abandoned his Socialist ideals, but Soares insisted his "cohabitation" with Cavaco Silva contributed to the country's new-found stability. He won a thumping re-election victory to serve a second five-year term in 1991.

Soares then retired from politics to set up a cultural foundation. At the request of the United Nations, he became head of the Independent World Commission of the Oceans. He also led a U.N. fact-finding mission on human rights to Algeria in 1998.

He returned to politics in 1999, winning a seat in the European parliament as the main candidate of the Socialist Party but then failing to be elected head of the assembly.

He also ran again for Portugal's presidency in 2006, at the age of 82. Younger voters had little grasp of his historic achievements and he finished third.

He is survived by two children and five grandchildren.</s>Mario Soares, Portugal’s former president and the founder of the country’s Socialist party, has died. He was 92.

Portugal has declared three days of national mourning starting Monday. His funeral will be held Tuesday.

In 1976, he became Portugal’s first post-coup prime minister and helped guide his country from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and a place in the European Union.

In 1986, Soares became the country’s first civilian president in 60 years.

Soares was “one of the rare political leaders who had real stature in both Europe and the world,” said new U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who is also a former Portuguese prime minister.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Soares was “a great European” and the “decisive figure for Portuguese democracy.”

French President Francois Hollande said Portugal’s democracy has lost “one of its heroes; Europe, one of its great leaders; and France, a faithful friend.”

European Parliament head Martin Schulz said Soares was “an inspiration” who “advanced freedom, equality and dignity.”</s>Portugal’s former president and prime minister, Mário Soares, a central figure in the country’s return to democracy in the 1970s after decades of rightwing dictatorship, has died aged 92.

He was hospitalised on 13 December and had been in a coma before doctors confirmed his death on Saturday.

Once popularly known as King Soares for his regal manner, the founder of the Portuguese Socialist party was prime minister three times and later spent a decade as the country’s president.

“Today Portugal lost its father of liberty and democracy, the person and face the Portuguese identify most with the regime that was born on 25 April, 1974,” the Socialist party said in a statement.

The government decreed three days of mourning.

Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” took place on 25 April 1974 and was the day when the dictatorship that had been headed by strongman António de Oliveira Salazar was overthrown

Soares, who was born on 7 December 1924, headed the country’s first democratically elected government in 1976.

“My sincere condolences to all Portuguese on the death of Mário Soares,” the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, tweeted.

Soares left office in 1996 after the maximum tenure as president permitted under the constitution with his popularity at a peak. For years he remained one of the country’s most influential politicians. He sat on the presidential advisory council and still took part in its meetings in early 2015.

One of his last important public appearances was in late 2014, when he visited jailed former Socialist prime minister José Sócrates, calling him a victim of a slander campaign. Sócrates, who denies any wrongdoing, is still being investigated on suspicion of corruption and tax evasion.

After flirting briefly with communism at university and then embracing Portugal’s democratic movement as a socialist, Soares was jailed 12 times and then exiled for his political activities during the dictatorship of Salazar.

During his career as a lawyer he often defended the government’s political foes. With the collapse of the dictatorship, he returned to Portugal to a triumphant reception.

One of his two children, João, has followed his father into politics and served as mayor of Lisbon. He briefly served as culture minister in the current Socialist administration, but had to resign in April after threatening to slap critics who had called him incompetent and rude.</s>Mario Soares, widely seen as the father of Portugal's modern-day democracy, was a towering figure in the country's political scene who spearheaded its entry into the European Union.

Soares, the founder of Portugal's Socialist party who died on Saturday at the age of 92, spent decades in politics, serving as foreign minister, prime minister and president as well as a European lawmaker.

Known for his flourishing speeches and close contact with the public, Soares was an avid reader with a fondness for the good life who was mockingly dubbed "chubby cheeks" by the rightwing opposition.

Reassuringly portly, he was both a charmer and a humanist known for being "emotional, spontaneous and warm."

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

"I am a poor man who has been fortunate to have taken stands and to have been right," he told the "i" daily in February 2015, rejecting the idea he was an "immortal" figure.

In mid-December, just a week after his 92nd birthday, Soares was taken ill and transferred to the Red Cross hospital in the capital Lisbon where he was placed in intensive care.

On Christmas Eve, his condition deteriorated, with the hospital saying he was in a deep coma and listing him as "critical".

Born in Lisbon on December 7, 1924, Mario Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares was raised in a family opposed to the dictatorship of Antonio Oliveira Salazar.

His father Joao Soares, a defrocked priest, struggled against the regime for decades, suffering long periods of imprisonment and exile.

Soares took up the cause as a student leader at Lisbon's Classical University.

After repeated interruptions to his studies due to being arrested, he earned degrees in philosophy and law in 1957, and then set up a practice which defended opposition activists.

He was arrested again by the regime's political police in 1968 and banished to the archipelago of Sao Tome and Principe off the coast of west Africa, a Portuguese colony at the time, then exiled in 1970.

Soares settled in France where he taught at several universities and it was while in exile in 1973 that he and a group of friends founded the Socialist Party at a meeting in Germany, with him becoming its first secretary general.

When an army-led revolution toppled Portugal's dictatorship on April 25, 1974, Soares took the first train to Lisbon, where he was mobbed by thousands of waiting admirers and marched through the Portuguese capital's streets.

He served as foreign minister in the military-controlled provisional government that took power after the revolution and oversaw the granting of independence to Portugal's African colonies.

A moderate military faction backed by Soares headed off a Communist-backed coup attempt in 1975 and called elections the following year which he won, making him the first constitutionally elected prime minister after the revolution.

He served as premier until 1978, and then again from 1983 to 1985, imposing reforms and austerity required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for financial aid.

His biggest achievement as premier was negotiating Portugal's entry in 1986 into the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.

Soares was elected Portugal's president, a largely ceremonial and advisory post, later that year. He was comfortably re-elected to another five-year term in 1991 with over 70 percent of the vote.

He served as a lawmaker in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2004 before running for a third term as president in 2006 at the age of 80.

He suffered a crushing defeat, coming in third place with just over 14 percent of the vote behind former conservative prime minister Anibal Cavaco Silva and fellow Socialist Manuel Alegre.

Soares retired from public life for several months after the election but then reappeared regularly in the media to comment on current affairs.

He emerged as a fierce critic of the steep spending cuts Portugal was forced to implement under a 78-billion-euro bailout deal reached in 2011 with the EU and IMF to avert bankruptcy.

Soares accused big European nations at the time of being guided by "savage capitalism".

He married one of Portugal's leading actresses, Maria Barroso, in 1949 in Aljube prison in Lisbon in what was seen as an act of defiance against the Salazar regime.

His public appearances became less frequent after she died in July 2015.

A visibly weak Soares attended a ceremony in his honour staged by Portugal's Socialist government in July but did not speak.

The couple had two children, Isabel and a son, Joao, a former mayor of Lisbon.</s>Portugal’s former President Mario Soares, widely seen as the father of the country’s democracy, died Saturday at age 92, two weeks after being admitted to a hospital.

The founder of Portugal’s Socialist Party, Soares spent decades in politics and spearheaded the country’s entry into the European Union. He was president from 1986 to 1996 after serving as foreign minister and prime minister, and later became a European lawmaker.

Portugal declared three days of national mourning from Monday and his state funeral will be held Tuesday, the presidential office told AFP.

“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 Antonio Costa.

Soares had been admitted to a hospital in Lisbon on Dec. 13, and although his condition initially showed signs of some improvement, he later fell into a deep coma from which he never recovered.

The hospital did not reveal the precise cause of Soares’ death, but relatives say he never fully overcame a spate of illnesses in 2013. His health further deteriorated after his wife’s death in July 2015.

The new United Nations secretary-general, ex-Portuguese premier Antonio Guterres, hailed Soares as “one of the rare political leaders who had real stature in both Europe and the world.”

Former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff said that Soares was “adored by the people and respected by his adversaries.”

Born in Lisbon on December 7, 1924, Mario Alberto Nobre Lopes Soares was raised in a family opposed to the dictatorship of Antonio Oliveira Salazar.

His father Joao Soares, a defrocked priest, struggled against the regime for decades, suffering long periods of imprisonment and exile.

Reassuringly portly, Mario Soares was both a charmer and a humanist known for being spontaneous and warm.

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

“I am a poor man who has been fortunate to have taken stands and to have been right,” he told the “i” newspaper in February 2015.

His biggest achievement as premier was negotiating Portugal’s entry in 1986 into the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union.

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

“He was a fighter for freedom,” said conservative leader Rebelo de Sousa, adding that Portugal must fight for “the immortality of his legacy.”

“It is a sad day for all Portuguese,” added the head of the centre-right opposition Pedro Passos Coelho.

There was also sorrow on the streets of Lisbon on Saturday.

“His death saddens me. Even in his old age, he was someone who said what he thought,” said Paula Cabecadas, a 60-year-old bookseller.

“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.

On the international stage, Soares was also seen as a political giant, “a great European” and the “decisive figure for Portuguese democracy,” said Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

Soares was “the symbol and the artisan of resistance to the dictatorship and the transition of his country to democracy,” said European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker.

French President Francois Hollande said Portugal’s democracy had lost “one of its heroes; Europe, one of its great leaders; and France, a faithful friend.”

European Parliament head Martin Schulz described Soares as “more than historical figure: he’s an inspiration. He advanced freedom, equality and dignity.”

While Soares retired from public life for several months after a crushing presidential election defeat in 2006, he appeared regularly in the media to comment on current affairs.

He emerged as a fierce critic of the steep spending cuts Portugal was forced to implement under a €78 billion bailout deal reached in 2011 with the EU and IMF to avert bankruptcy.

Soares accused big European nations at the time of being guided by “savage capitalism.”

He made a final public appearance in July, when he attended a ceremony held in his honor by the ruling Socialist-led government.

Visibly frail, he did not make a speech.</s>Portugal's Socialist Party says that former President Mario Soares, who steered the country to democracy, has died at 92, according to AP.

After a "general worsening of his health", Soares was admitted to a Lisbon hospital last month, said doctors. He spent ten days in intensive care, and returned on Christmas Eve, where he remained. Soares died on Saturday (7 January), according to Jose Barata, a spokesman for the Red Cross Hospital in Lisbon.

In Soares' fight against Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship, he was arrested many times and was exiled in France. He was imprisoned for almost three years and married Maria de Jesus Barroso in 1949, while in jail.

He was prime minister between 1976-1978, in the aftermath of the "Carnation Revolution" that ended many years of right-wing dictatorship. The 25 April coup of 1974 ended the longest dictatorship in Europe.

The Carnation Revolution was named after flower sellers handed out seasonal blooms to the soldiers.

"It was the most original revolution of the 20th century," said veteran Socialist politician Jose Magalhaes.

A strong critic of the junta that ruled Portugal for the next two years, in 1976 Soares became the first post-war democratically elected prime minister.

A socialist, he returned as prime minister in the early 1980s as a reformer and served as president between 1986-1996.

"Mario Soares challenged all the big proposals and power situations of his time," Rui Ramos, a Portuguese historian, said according to Bloomberg. "That was the historical role of this man of letters and lawyer from downtown Lisbon."

His funeral will last three days, according to Publico, and the first two days, Soares will lie in the Jeronimos Monastery and then to Lisbon City Hall. The 92-year-old was agnostic, so no Catholic mass is planned for him.

However, an official ceremony is planned and will be attended by the President of the Republic.</s>LISBON, Portugal — Mario Soares, a former prime minister and president of Portugal who helped steer his country toward democracy after a 1974 military coup and grew into a global statesman through his work with the Socialist International movement, has died. He was 92.

Lisbon’s Red Cross Hospital said in a statement he died there on Saturday afternoon with his son and his daughter at his bedside. The hospital did not provide a cause of death, but Soares had been a patient since Dec. 13 and in a coma for the past two weeks.

Soares, a moderate Socialist, returned from 12 years of political exile after the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal’s four-decade dictatorship in 1974. As a lawyer, he had used peaceful means to fight the country’s regime, which eventually banished him.

Soares was elected Portugal’s first post-coup prime minister in 1976 and thwarted Portuguese Communist Party attempts to bring the NATO member under Soviet influence during the Cold War. He helped guide his country from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and a place in the European Union.

Soares’ role as an international statesman was solidified through his work with the International Socialist movement. As a vice president from 1976, he led diplomatic missions that sought to help resolve conflicts in the Middle East and Latin and Central America.

Soares was visiting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the Gaza Strip when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1995. Both Arafat and Rabin were longtime friends of Soares.

In 1986, Soares became Portugal’s first civilian president in 60 years. His broad popularity brought him two consecutive five-year terms.

During terms as prime minister and foreign minister, Soares helped rehabilitate Portugal on the international stage after decades of isolation under the dictatorship established by Antonio Salazar in the 1930s.

Soares was a fierce critic of the economic liberalism embraced by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British leader Margaret Thatcher which was alien to his Socialist convictions about the benefits of welfare capitalism.

As president, Soares established a professional, if cool, relationship with center-right Social Democratic Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who admired Thatcher. Though an unlikely team, Soares and Cavaco Silva together oversaw the shedding of many left-inspired economic structures, such as the nationalization of banks, adopted after the coup.

After winning a thumping re-election victory to serve a second five-year term in 1991, Soares retired from politics to set up a cultural foundation. At the request of the United Nations, he became head of the Independent World Commission of the Oceans. He also led a UN fact-finding mission on human rights to Algeria in 1998.

He returned to politics in 1999, winning a seat in the European parliament as the main candidate of the Socialist Party but then failing to be elected head of the assembly.

He also ran again for Portugal’s presidency in 2006, at the age of 82. Younger voters had little grasp of his historic achievements and he finished third.</s>LISBON, Portugal — Mario Soares, a former prime minister and president of Portugal who helped steer his country toward democracy after a 1974 military coup and grew into a global statesman through his work with the Socialist International movement, has died. He was 92.

Lisbon's Red Cross Hospital said in a statement he died there on Saturday afternoon with his son and his daughter at his bedside. The hospital did not provide a cause of death, but Soares had been a patient since Dec. 13. .

Soares, a moderate Socialist, returned from 12 years of political exile after the almost bloodless Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal's four-decade dictatorship in 1974. As a lawyer, he had used peaceful means to fight the country's regime, which eventually banished him.

Soares was elected Portugal's first post-coup prime minister in 1976 and thwarted Portuguese Communist Party attempts to bring the NATO member under Soviet influence during the Cold War. He helped guide his country from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy and a place in the European Union.

Soares' role as an international statesman was solidified through his work with the International Socialist movement. As a from 1976, he led diplomatic missions that sought to help resolve conflicts in the Middle East and Latin and Central America.

During terms as prime minister and foreign minister, Soares helped rehabilitate Portugal on the international stage after decades of isolation under the dictatorship established by Antonio Salazar in the 1930s. Soares' insistence on using the ballot box instead of weapons to end the dictatorship won him respect around the world.

Days after the Carnation Revolution — so named because people stuck red carnations in soldiers' rifle barrels — Soares returned home by train from Paris to a rapturous welcome from crowds that flocked to meet him at Lisbon's Santa Apolonia train station.

The Communist Party's influence surged following the coup, prompting fears in the West that Portugal — a founding member of the Atlantic military alliance — would come under the Soviet Union's influence and encourage other radical leftist movements in western Europe.

Soares said that at an October 1974 meeting in Washington, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told him he thought Portugal was doomed to communist rule. But Frank Carlucci, the new U.S. ambassador to Lisbon and later head of the CIA, argued that moderate democratic forces, especially Soares' Socialists, would prevail. The 1976 election proved Carlucci right.

Portugal had western Europe's last colonial empire, and Soares was instrumental in quickly granting independence to Portugal's five colonies in Africa. Protracted wars had sapped the Portuguese economy and soured its relations with other western nations that had turned away from colonial rule years earlier.

Soares later was criticized for cutting the colonies loose so abruptly. All of them — Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe — became single-party Marxist states supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba after their independence. Angola and Mozambique drifted into civil wars as proxies in the Cold War struggle for influence in Africa.

Soares held posts in a string of governments that lasted less than a year in the post-revolution political chaos. Banks were nationalized, spooking wealthy financiers who fled the country, and poor farmers seized the land they had long worked at large private estates.

He was a relentless opponent of Salazar's regime, which along with Franco's roughly contemporary rule in Spain, shut off the Iberian peninsula to outside influences. Salazar's secret police, known by its acronym PIDE, jailed Soares 12 times and exiled him twice, once to the island of Sao Tome off west Africa.

As prime minister in 1986 he ushered Portugal into the European Economic Community — later the European Union. That turned out to be a watershed year which placed the country on a fast-track modernization program.

Soares capped his political career that year by becoming head of state. He rapidly set about keeping his campaign pledge to serve as "President of all the Portuguese" after years of division and unrest which brought eight governments between 1978 and 1985.

As president, Soares established a professional, if cool, relationship with -right Social Democratic Prime Minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who admired Thatcher. Though an unlikely team, Soares and Cavaco Silva together oversaw the shedding of many left-inspired economic structures, such as the nationalization of banks, adopted after the coup.
Former President and Prime Minister of Portugal Mário Soares dies at the age of 92.