Francisco Pinto Balsemão, who as prime minister helped guide Portugal’s new democracy after years of dictatorship — and who was later head of the country’s largest private media group, Impresa — died on Tuesday at his home in Cascais, Portugal. He was 88.
His death was announced by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa of Portugal, who once worked for Mr. Balsemão at Expresso, the newspaper he founded in 1973, a year before the overthrow of Portugal’s dictatorship. In his announcement, Mr. Rebelo de Sousa called Mr. Balsemão one of his country’s “most remarkable figures of the last 60 years.”
Mr. Balsemão was a champion of press freedom, a crusading journalist, a publisher and a television impresario. He was also a politician who tried, with limited success, to conciliate warring left and right factions in his country, and was a founder of a leading political party, the Social Democrats. And he was a wealthy descendant of Portuguese royalty who regularly “filled the gossip pages,” as Le Monde wrote in a 1992 profile, which called him “Citizen Kane on the Tagus,” the river running through Lisbon.
“He presided over the last governments that ensured the transition from revolution to democracy,” Antonio Costa, the prime minister at the time, said in a speech when Mr. Balsemão’s memoirs were published in 2021. In December 1982, as prime minister of Portugal, Mr. Balsemão stood in front of the White House as President Ronald Reagan saluted him “for the continued progress of democracy in Portugal.” It had been only eight years since junior officers in Portugal’s military, fed up with the country’s fruitless colonial wars and its four-decade dictatorship, overthrew it in a largely bloodless coup known as the Carnation Revolution.
“The Many Lives of Francisco Pinto Balsemão” was the headline in the Portuguese daily Diário de Noticias after his death, and he had already lived a number of those lives even before he became prime minister, in January 1981. He occupied that precarious perch until the summer of 1983, following infighting in his fragile coalition of centrist parties and its poor showing in municipal elections.
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