Mário Soares
Mário Soares was prime minister of Portugal twice, in 1976-78 and 1983-85, and its president from 1986 to 1996, the socialist lawyer whom Salazar's police had arrested twelve times and Caetano had deported to São Tomé and then to Paris, and who came home on the train from Paris three days after the revolution of 25 April 1974 to a station full of people. He was the foreign minister who negotiated the independence of Guinea, Mozambique and Angola in eighteen months. Then he was the man who in the hot summer of 1975 stood against the Communists and the radical officers who wanted a people's democracy. He filled the Lisbon streets in July and winning the constituent election in April that made Portugal a parliamentary republic instead. His first government, the first constitutional one, applied to the European Community in 1977 and took the IMF's loan in 1978. His second signed the treaty of accession in June 1985 in the cloister of the Jerónimos, which was the thing he had wanted since Paris. He was born in Lisbon in 1924, the son of a republican minister who ran a school, studied history and law, was a Communist in his youth and left the party in 1951. He defended political prisoners and founded the Socialist Party in exile at Bad Münstereifel in West Germany in April 1973 with Brandt's help. The two presidential terms were the country's first civilian presidency since 1926, won in 1986 by two points in a run-off against Freitas do Amaral after coming third in the socialist vote. In 1991 he won by seventy per cent. He presided over Cavaco Silva's majorities as the opposition's protector, using the veto and the open presidency of visits to every district. The two men, who could not bear each other, gave the country the ten years in which it became European. He ran for president again in 2006 at eighty-one and came third with fourteen per cent, which he took as the country's verdict and did not accept. He died in Lisbon in January 2017 at ninety-two after three days of national mourning.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Portuguese
- Roles: prime minister, president, politician
