Antonio Costa, who is the new president of the European Council

The passion for puzzles will come in handy for Antonio Costa, former Portuguese Prime Minister and new President of the European Council, who will now have to rely on his best qualities, such as pragmatism and great negotiating skills, to be able to bring together the sensitivities of the heads of state and government of the Old Continent. Born in 1961, a socialist, Antonio Costa began his political career at a very young age, enrolling at just 14 in the Juventude Socialista, the youth section of the Socialist Party, when Portugal had just experienced the Carnation Revolution and the return to democracy, after the dictatorship of the Estado Novo that lasted over 40 years.

The origins and beginnings

Costa is the son of a militant communist writer born in Mozambique to Catholic parents from Goa, an ancient Portuguese colony in India, and of Maria Antonia Palla, one of Portugal’s first female journalists. City councilor of Lisbon in 1983, in 1993 he was a candidate for the municipal elections of Loures, a town in the hinterland of the Portuguese capital. Costa lost the elections by a few dozen votes, but a choice remained famous that shows the pragmatic character that has always accompanied him in politics: he organized a race between a donkey and a Ferrari along one of the main access roads to the city to demonstrate the connection problems with Lisbon. The result is that the donkey won. However, the defeat did not affect his political career: in 1995 he joined the government of Antonio Guterres, now secretary general of the UN, as undersecretary for relations with parliament. In 2004 he became an MEP and vice-president of the European Parliament, returning to his homeland the following year to become Minister of the Interior in the Socrates government. In 2007 he was elected mayor of Lisbon, where he remained in office for eight years, relaunching the city.

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The relaunch of Portugal

He became prime minister after the 2015 elections, inheriting a country that had been saved from bankruptcy thanks to an 83 billion euro loan from the EU, IMF and ECB and placed under post-program surveillance because it had not yet repaid its debt. He avoided a clash with Europe and decided to continue on the path of investments, reintroducing some of the social protections previously abolished, raising salaries and pensions, but never deviating from the rigor imposed by the Troika. The economy benefited: Lisbon’s public debt to GDP during his years in government fell from 131.2% in 2015 to 99.1% in 2023 and average annual GDP growth stood at +1.2%. In November 2023, however, Costa resigned, after an investigation had hit some members of his government for alleged irregularities in concessions relating to lithium mines and projects linked to green hydrogen. An investigation that however shows some errors, even sensational ones, starting from the confusion that the investigators made between Prime Minister Costa and his namesake minister, the head of the Ministry of Economy António Costa Silva. He however confirmed his resignation, declaring himself equally “unrelated to the facts”. And yet, his consensus in the country remains practically intact: in the recent European elections the Socialists won 32.08% of the votes, resulting in the first party in the country ahead of the Democratic Alliance of Prime Minister Luis Montenegro.