Early career Starting very early in politics, he had a long career in the youth branch of the
Social Democratic Party (PSD), the
JSD, where he was a member of the National Council (1980–1982) and chairman of the Political Committee (1990–1995). He was a
Lisbon deputy to the
Assembly of the Republic in the VI and VII Legislatures (1991–1999); he also joined the Parliamentary Assembly of
NATO (1991–1995) and was vice chairman of the Parliamentary Group of
PSD (1996–1999). In 1997, he ran for mayor of
Amadora without success, but was elected municipal councillor (1997–2001). After he had been a member of the parliament from 1991 to 1999, Passos Coelho became eligible by law to a life pension; however, he declined the offer. He was awarded a
degree in economics by Lusíada University (Lisbon) when he was 37 (2001). He became a consultant with Tecnoformas (2000–2004), collaborator of LDN Consultants (2001–2004), Director of the Training Department and coordinator of the Program of Seminars URBE – Núcleos Urbanos de Pesquisa e Intervenção (2003–2004). He joined the company
Fomentinvest as a CFO (2004–2006) working with
Ângelo Correia, chairman of Fomentinvest and also a noted member of PSD. Correia, an experienced member of PSD, is a close friend of Passos Coelho, both inside their party and corporate governance careers, and is considered Passos Coelho's political mentor. Passos Coelho became a member of the Executive (in 2007), accumulating the functions of chairman of the Board of the HLCTejo (2007–2009). He was vice-president of
PSD during the leadership of
Luís Marques Mendes (2005–2006) and has also been president of the Municipal Assembly of
Vila Real Municipality since 2005; he was a presidential candidate for PSD in May 2008, where he proposed for the first time a programmatic review of the party's orientation. Defeated by
Manuela Ferreira Leite, he founded, with a group of his supporters, the
think-tank Construir Ideias (Building Ideas). On 21 January 2010, his book
Mudar ("To Change") was published, and he was again a candidate for the leadership of PSD for the direct elections in March 2010; he was elected president of PSD on 26 March 2010. By 2010, in a context of
sovereign default, he helped defeat the Socialist government under the leadership of
José Sócrates when it tried to adopt a package of austerity measures to maintain economic stability, leading to the resignation of the prime minister on 23 March 2011, and
the general election of 5 June 2011.
Prime minister of Portugal , in October 2011 , in October 2011 On 5 June 2011, following the
2011 Portuguese legislative election, Passos Coelho was elected
Prime Minister of Portugal. He achieved a historical win for his political party PSD, defeating
José Sócrates from the
Socialist Party (PS). Through a coalition with
CDS-PP, Passos Coelho and PSD were in a position to form a right-wing majority in the
Portuguese Parliament. Immediately after the election, he started conversations with Christian Democratic President
Paulo Portas to form the coalition.
Overview Passos Coelho's political program was considered by the Portuguese left (
Socialist Party (PS) and its communist political allies), which had governed the country during most of the time until the financial collapse of 2010, as strictly aligned with
economic liberalism, and included a firm intention to accomplish the
European Union/
IMF-led rescue plan for Portugal's
sovereign debt crisis. The rescue plan included widespread tax increases and reforms aimed at better efficiency and rationalised resource allocation in the
public sector, to reduce the number of unnecessary civil servants and chronic public sector's overcapacity. It also included the privatization of at least one channel of the public radio and television
RTP network, the
Caixa Geral de Depósitos' insurance operations (including
Fidelidade), and some parts of the National Service of Health. His coalition partner
Paulo Portas of CDS-PP, publicly expressed his disapproval of some of Passos Coelho's proposals. Passos Coelho entered office as a moderate social conservative, with a mixed record on abortion (he voted no in the 1998 referendum and yes in the following in 2007), while opposing euthanasia and same-sex marriage, supporting same-sex civil unions instead. It was not certain if he would try to overrule the previous
José Sócrates-led Socialist government laws that allowed abortion until 10 weeks and same-sex marriage in Portugal. During his campaign, he admitted the re-evaluation of the current abortion law approved in 2007, after a referendum, that allowed it under any circumstance until 10 weeks of pregnancy. The law was deemed unconstitutional by 6 of the 13 judges of the Portuguese Constitutional Court. Other creations of the previous cabinets led by former Prime Minister José Sócrates were criticised by Passos Coelho, including the state-sponsored
Novas Oportunidades educational qualification program for unschooled adults, which was dubbed a fraud due to alleged low standards of intellectual rigour and academic integrity. Pedro Passos Coelho and his government cabinet launched the foundations of the
Banco Português de Fomento group and established Portugal's state-owned venture capital and private equity investing arm Portugal Ventures.
XIX Constitutional Government The legislative elections of 2011, held on 5 June, would give Passos Coelho the biggest share of seats in the Assembly of the Republic, with 108 out of 230 seats. In Portugal, tradition and most interpretations of the Constitution, as it is, state that he who leads the party with the most seats is invited, by the President of the Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, to form the XIX constitutional government, so Passos Coelho had guaranteed the Prime Minister's position for himself, and the government to his party. But without an absolute majority in parliament, he couldn't guarantee stability. He needed to negotiate a coalition with another party, the closest party to PSD, ideologically, at the time, and still today, was CDS-PP, and as luck would have it, CDS-PP had 24 seats; when put together, the two parties had 132 out of 230. But Passos Coelho would only form ga overnment when he had the coalition signed, and so negotiations began in earnest. It only took 10 days, from being invited to form a government on 6 June to having a deal signed with CDS-PP on June 16, and another 5 days for all the ministers and the Prime Minister to be sworn in, on June 21. Passos Coelho's first government can be divided into two phases: 2011-2013; 2013-2015. From 2011 to 2013, he had a cabinet, almost completely different from the one he had from 2013 to 2015.
1st Cabinet Membership 2nd Cabinet Membership XX Constitutional Government The legislative elections of 2015 were held on 4 October; the two government parties (PSD and CDS-PP) ran together under the name "Portugal à Frente" (PàF) or "Portugal Ahead". The Coalition, as it was called in the media, won the elections, without an absolute majority of seats in the Assembly of the Republic, with 107 out of 230. As mentioned before, tradition and most interpretations of the Constitution state that he who leads the party with the most seats is invited by the President of the Republic to form a government, and so it was. On 22 October, Passos Coelho was appointed Prime Minister by President Aníbal Cavaco Silva. The remaining parties in parliament were the Socialists (PS), with 86 seats, the Leftists (BE) with 19 seats, the Communists, with 16 seats, the Greens, with a single seat (elected in coalition CDU with the Communists) and the environmentalists (PAN) with a single seat as well. After the election, Socialist Party leader António Costa entered negotiations with the other two major left-wing parties to form a confidence and supply agreement, and on 4 October the involved parties agreed to vote in favour of a no-confidence vote proposed by the Socialists, held on 10 November. By then, all the negotiations were completed, and Passos Coelho's Government's fate had been sealed. António Costa's deal with the far-Left became known as the "Geringonça" meaning "contraption" - in this case, also meaning an improvised construction job, as from 2015 to 2019, the parties included in the ruling government coalition did not have a majority by themselves, and indeed had to rely on the confidence and supply agreement to remain in power. The XX Constitutional government took office on 30 October 2015, leaving office 27 days later, on 26 November 2015.
Membership Following a poor performance in the October 2017 local elections, Passos Coelho announced his resignation from the party leadership, calling early elections for January 2018, where Rui Rio, former mayor of Porto, was elected to the leadership.
Major policies To accomplish the
European Union/
IMF-led rescue plan for Portugal's
sovereign debt crisis, in July and August 2011, his government announced it was going to cut on state spending and increase austerity measures, including additional tax increases, but it will also have a social emergency package to help the poorest citizens. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that a series of supplementary measures would be taken during the course of the year as a means to restrain an out-of-control budget deficit. These included sharp cuts in spending on state-run
healthcare,
education and
social security systems. His cabinet enforced reforms of the local administration to save money by avoiding unnecessary resource allocation and redundancy. This included extinguishing the 18
Civil Governments (
Governo Civil) located across the country and a large number of
parishes. According to the
Instituto Nacional de Estatística, there were 4,261 parishes in Portugal in 2006. The reform implemented according to Law 11-A/2013 of 28 January 2013, which defined the reorganisation of the civil parishes, reduced the number of parishes to 3,091. Nevertheless, due to Portugal's legal constraints avoiding planned job cuts like those made across several developed countries at the time to fight overspending and overstaffing at municipality level, the 2013 mergers eventually
increased the spending with the parishes. • Public servants: the government wanted to sharply reduce the number of
public servants and to achieve this, it created a special mechanism to cut jobs by mutual agreement. Due to the unsustainable and growing expenses with public servant salaries and privileges, the ruling party PSD said it would only hire one worker for each five that leave, a rule which revealed the extremely large number of unnecessary, redundant public servants that had been signed in across the decades. Hiring procedures for the public service were changed to guarantee an independent process, and public servants' wages were taken into account to limit extra payments. On 18 October 2011, the Portuguese Minister of Finance,
Vítor Gaspar, said to the Portuguese television
RTP 1 that the wage cuts imposed on public servants the previous week in the presentation of the State Budget for 2012 were the only way to avoid a much more painful and complex policy of public servant mass firing. He said that if wage cuts were not enforced, it would be necessary to get rid of about 100,000 public servants immediately (under the terms of the law, Portuguese public servants were shielded from unemployment, so a number of special
derogations would be needed to achieve this). In November 2015, the Socialist Party announced it would terminate with Passos Coelho-era reassignment program for public sector employees which included planned job cuts, called
Mobilidade Especial, later
Requalificação. • Public administration: since the beginning, the government promised to disclose within 90 days the list of public entities which were to be eliminated, reintegrated into other public institutions or privatised due to their uselessness. These included dozens of financially strapped public institutions, foundations and public companies at a local, regional and national level, which were considered ineffective and futile and prone to overspending and
overstaffing. • Taxes: tax rise. Higher
indirect taxes, like
VAT (IVA), for almost all goods and services. • Labour: Labour laws were also altered, but most of the changes could not affect current workers due to the leftist, labor movement-inspired Portuguese Constitution of 1976 and its Court (the
Tribunal Constitucional), only those starting a new job from there on, while some public holidays were moved from mid-week to Mondays or Fridays to avoid typical extra-long bank holiday weekends. Faced with growing unemployment and hoping to avoid greater public unrest, the government cut the time needed to qualify for unemployment benefits from 15 to 12 months, but reduced the benefit period from 30 to 18 months and created new rules which reduced the monthly unemployment benefit granted to each unemployed citizen. • Privatisations: release of state ownership on the utility
Energias de Portugal (EDP), the grid management company REN –
Redes Energéticas Nacionais, the financial institution
Banco Português de Negócios and the flag carrier
TAP Air Portugal by the end of 2011. The insurance company of the public bank
Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) was also for sale. Revenue from the sale of other parts of CGD was to be used to beef up the bank's capital ratios and its ability to lend to companies. Besides this, the government kept the promise to withdraw its special rights (
golden shares) in companies such as
Portugal Telecom. • Finance: The creation of a
development bank was defined as a priority by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho in the parliamentary debate that began the activities of the remodeled
XIX Constitutional Government of Portugal's cabinet on July 24, 2013, an installation commission was soon created that allowed the Council of Ministers, in October 2014, to formalize the creation of the Financial Development Institution (IFD - Instituição Financeira de Desenvolvimento) which was the percursor of the
Banco Português de Fomento. Portugal Ventures, a state-run venture capital and private equity organisation which would later become part of the Banco Português de Fomento group, was also founded in 2012 by Passos Coelho's cabinet. • Transports: the
Lisbon-Madrid high-speed rail line was put on hold. The decision was taken bearing in mind the cost-cutting measures and the contracts that had already been signed. Transport providers like the Lisbon (
Carris) and Porto bus companies and subway systems were also assessed to see if and when they could be sold off. The government programme also added that the road and rail transport companies, like
Comboios de Portugal, "urgently need" to solve their chronic operating deficits and growing
debts. On 8 December 2011, tolls were introduced on four
shadow toll highways and in 2012, more than 300 km of railways were closed (to all traffic or to passenger only). • Regulators: the regulatory bodies were turned into independent authorities with their officials being chosen through a process which comprises the government, the parliament and the presidency. • Media: the media company owned by public broadcasting corporation
RTP was to be restructured as early as 2012 to halt costs, and the privatisation of one of the two TV channels it owns (RTP1 and RTP2) was also on the table.
Lusa news agency was also to be reorganised, following the state's goal of rethinking its position in regard to the national media. • Monitoring measures: the government created a special unit to monitor the measures agreed with the so-called international
troika composed by the
International Monetary Fund,
European Commission and
European Central Bank. This special unit was subordinated to
Carlos Moedas, the deputy secretary of state of Prime Minister Passos Coelho. • Health: Public hospitals were turned over to private management "whenever this is more efficient, maintaining the essentially free health care services". The fees and taxes a citizen had to pay to use the national health service were substantially increased. • Foreign affairs: Passos Coelho's cabinet enforced international relations policies directed towards increased economic relations with Portuguese-speaking countries like
Angola and Brazil, as well as openly supporting the creation of an economic and fiscal government for the European Union. The government also supported a State-backed emigration policy to help unemployed and underemployed citizens who wish to flee rampant poverty and social regression, to find a job in foreign countries. On the other hand, the government created programs that issued residence permits to wealthy foreign investors, entrepreneurs and skilled workers in high demand. • Social integration: In 2013, the
XIX Constitutional Government of Portugal, led then by Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, passed the National Strategy for the Integration of the Romani Communities, creating a Consultative Group for the Integration of the
Portuguese Gypsy Communities. The
Portuguese Constitutional Court, with the praise of most unions and opposition party leaders, eventually rejected the equivalent to 20% of the government's austerity policies proposed by Passos Coelho and his cabinet. Most of the rejected proposals were related with
labor market flexibility,
public pensions' sustainability, civil servants' privileges and job cuts in the civil service.
Criticism During his first year in cabinet, it became clear that the deep economic and financial crisis of Portugal would prompt several policy changes and increasing dissent over the cabinet's judgement. After an inaugural speech in which he promised, in the long run, to stabilise the economy, promote financial growth, employment, and protect those who needed the most, he moved on to adopt deep austerity measures that, in the view of his detractors, within the first year of government, led to the exact opposite. High-paying jobs and pensions were slashed while the lower ones were less affected. In addition, his government had earlier adopted a promoting stance on emigration, often advising the growing number of young unemployed people to leave the country. ==Honours==