Prime Minister António Costa addresses the media upon his arrival at the Altis hotel, from where the election night continues.


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Prime Minister António Costa addresses the media upon his arrival at the Altis hotel, from where the election night continues.

As a veteran chess player, having been in politics for 39 years, he has repeated the same moves over and over again, so don’t expect any surprises. The doctor, as they call him, he is a man of instincts and not of orthodoxies as he has been demonstrating since he entered the Lisbon Assembly in 1982, which is why not everyone agrees with his methods, but they work. This Sunday he became the longest-serving prime minister in the democratic history of Portugal since the Carnation Revolution. There must be a reason. Costa, 60, is a pragmatic socialist who came to power thanks to the radical left, but who has always had the ambition to rule alone. Looks like you can do it on the third. If not alone, at least with much less opposition, always thanks to the vote of environmentalists, which it may need. of Indian origin, this 60-year-old lawyer, with a round, dark face, with white hair and thin glasses, had to go back to jeopardize his mandate for a break in the budget with his former allies, to whom he even said that “they had to apologize to the left” for having broken that geringonça agreement. During the campaign he suffered from exhaustion, like his rivals, of exchanging large rallies for many small visits due to Covid. Of one of those acts his collaborators had to put him in the car almost on wings. “I’m full of energy,” he said the next day. However, it was thanks to the unprecedented pact sealed with the radical left and the communists that the former mayor of Lisbon came to power in 2015… after a vote that, however, he lost. The alliance turned out to be stronger than expected, at least for a while, and this lover of cooking, cinema and fado, with a reputation for having a volcanic bad mood, completed his first four years. The bad mood was shown after the fires of 2017. A man approached him and accused him of having gone on vacation while 64 deaths were recorded. They had to stop Dr. Costa from attacking that man. Taking advantage of a favorable situation to disrupt the austerity measures implemented by the right in exchange for an international rescue plan granted in 2011, Costa has continued, at the same time, cleaning up the public accounts to show the first budget surplus in Portugal. recent history. In fact, with him at the helm, Portugal paid the European bailout after the terrifying crisis of 2008 long before the deadlines were met. He then won the legislative elections in October 2019 without an absolute majority. But he did not want to renew his alliance with his supporters on the radical left, who ended up letting him go after the collapse of the negotiations on the 2022 budget. Now, will have to manage European aid almost alone, making a few more notches in his belt.