Jose Socrates

Biography: A Portuguese politician who was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 12 March 2005 to 21 June 2011.

For the second half of 2007, he acted as the President-in-Office of the Council of the European Union. In addition to these posts, Jose Socrates was Portugal?s Minister for Youth and Sports and one of the organisers of the UEFA Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal, as well as being a former Environment Minister in the governments of Antonio Guterres.

On 23 March 2011, he submitted his resignation to the president after parliament rejected his government?s austerity measures in a vote, leading to the Portuguese legislative election of 2011. After losing the election, held on 5 June 2011, he resigned from Secretary-General of the Socialist Party.

Jose Socrates was born in Porto, and was registered as a newborn in Vilar de Macada, Alijo municipality in north eastern Portugal, since the locality was his family ancestral homeland. However, the young Jose Socrates lived throughout his childhood and teen years with his father, a divorced building designer, in the city of Covilha, Cova da Beira sub-region in central inland Portugal, in the Centro region. His parents are Fernando Pinto de Sousa and wife and remote relative Maria Adelaide de Carvalho Monteiro. He has two younger siblings, Antonio Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, and Ana Maria Carvalho Pinto de Sousa, died in 1988.

Jose Socrates studied in Covilha?s basic and secondary schools, until the age of 18. Then, in 1975, he went to Coimbra in order to attend a higher education institution. He earned in 1979 his 4-year bacharelato degree as a civil technical engineer from the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra. From 1987 to 1993, he attended Universidade Lusíada, a private university in Lisbon, enrolling in law, but dropped out.

In 1994/95, already a well-known politician, he briefly attended the Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa where he completed some academic disciplines in order to get a CESE diploma (a complementary diploma to his bacharelato degree because until 1999 the polytechnic institutions did not offer licenciatura degrees), but instead, under circumstances which would provoke a controversy in 2007, he earned in 1996 the licenciatura (licentiate degree) in civil engineering from the Universidade Independente, a private university in Lisbon which was shut down by Portuguese authorities in 2007/2008. He also has an MBA degree awarded in 2005 by ISCTE, a public university institute in Lisbon, that he obtained after had attended successfully the first year of a 2-year masters? degree program of ISCTE that he did not complete. He is currently studying at Sciences Po Paris, doing a master in european affairs.

Socrates became a member of the opposition in the Portuguese Parliament. After the resignation of Ferro Rodrigues as party leader in 2004, he won a bid for the post of secretary-general against Manuel Alegre and Joao Soares, winning the vote of nearly 80% of party members on 24 September 2004. After the victory of his party in the 2005 Portuguese election, Socrates was called on 24 February by president Jorge Sampaio to form a new government - the 17th Constitutional Government (after 1976). After the Portuguese legislative election of 2009, held on 27 September 2009, Jose Socrates was elected for a second term as Prime Minister of Portugal.

Socrates is divorced from Sofia Costa Pinto Fava, an engineer, by whom he has two sons, Jose Miguel Fava Pinto de Sousa (b. 1993) and Eduardo Fava Pinto de Sousa (b. 1995). She is a daughter of an architect