The new President of the European Council is Antonio Luis Santos da Costaborn in 1961, Cancer star sign, was the 118th Prime Minister of Portugal. He was born in Lisbon, in the parish of Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, the son of a militant communist writer born in Mozambique to Catholic parents from Goa, an ancient Portuguese colony in India, and Maria Antonia Palla, one of the first female journalists in Portugal. He joined the Juventude Socialista, the youth organization of the Partido Socialista, at the age of 14. After graduating in Law and becoming a lawyer, he became a city councilor in Lisbon in 1983.
In 1993 the Socialist Party nominated him for the municipal elections of Loures, a town in the hinterland of Lisbon. Costa lost by a few dozen votes, but a race that she organized, along one of the main access roads to the city, between a donkey and a Ferrari, to demonstrate the problems of connection with the capital, remained famous. The race was won by the donkey. He was co-opted into the national leadership of the PS by Vitor Constancio and directed the electoral campaign for the 1996 presidential elections of Jorge Sampaio, president of the Republic for the following decade. 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. From 2007 to 2015 he was mayor of Lisbon, a city of half a million inhabitants (over 3 million in the conurbation). He became prime minister of Portugal in 2015, 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 the debt.
Unlike Alexis Tsipras’s Greece, which called a referendum, Costa chose to avoid a head-on clash with the Troika, working internally to improve the economic situation, with a policy of small steps, gradually overcoming austerity policies and improving the living conditions of citizens. Despite Brussels asking to sanction Portugal, because it was deviating from the established path, he stood firm. In the end, he was right: in the last decade, which includes the 2020 crash due to the Covid pandemic, his country has recorded an average annual GDP growth of 1.2% in real terms and in 2023 the public debt fell below 100% of GDP. Costa resigned this year, 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 full of errors, some sensational, starting with the confusion that investigators made between Prime Minister Costa and his namesake minister.
Today Costa is indicated as the next president of the European Council: he is the first politician from Southern Europe to hold this role. He arrives at the EU summit with the explicit support of his successor, Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, of the PSD (PPE group), who has great respect for ‘o doutor Costa’, despite having fought him for years in Parliament.
