Jorge Sampaio
Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio listen [ ʒɔɾʒɨ fɨɾnɐðu bɾɐku dɨ sɐpaju ]? / I ( born September 18, 1939 in Lisbon ) is a Portuguese politician and was until 2006 the Portuguese President. He was from April 2007 to March 2013 Secretary General of the Alliance of Civilizations.
Life
Jorge Sampaio studied law at the University of Lisbon. In his student days he appeared in opposition to the Salazar dictatorship. He was a member of several opposition academic circles and entered on lists of the MDP / CDE ( communists ) in the parliamentary elections.
As a lawyer he defended political prisoners during the dictatorship. Four years after the Carnation Revolution in 1978, he joined the Socialist Party and in 1989 became Mayor of Lisbon. This office he conducted very successfully. He took necessary for the World Exposition 1998 decisions to the restructuring of certain parts of the city of Lisbon and the Tagus construction of the new bridge, which realized his successor. He was elected with a clear majority, succeeding his party colleague Mário Soares was elected president of Portugal in 1996. He confessed to be a devout Catholic, which did not hurt its popularity. The extremely popular Sampaio spoke during his tenure as President of the Socialist Prime Minister Antonio Guterres public conscience. The war policy of the Conservative Prime Minister, José Manuel Barroso, who demonstratively a meeting held in conjunction with the U.S. President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar at the Azores immediately before the start of the Third Gulf War, to Sampaio opposed and publicly condemned the invasion of Iraq as illegal. He set the end of 2004 the conservative Prime Minister Pedro Santana Lopes of " disability " from and called new elections, from which the Socialist José Sócrates emerged as the winner.
Sampaio is married to Maria José Ritta.