José Manuel Durão Barroso, GCC (pronounced: IPA, ) (born in Lisbon, March 23, 1956) is a Portuguese politician and the 11th President of the European Commission, being the first Portuguese to hold the post. He served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 6 April 2002 until 29 June 2004, when he resigned to become President-designate of the European Commission. The appointment was formally endorsed by the European Parliament on July 22, and he was due to take over officially from Romano Prodi on 1 November 2004. However, this process was delayed until 23 November due to problems regarding parliamentary approval of the Barroso Commission.

José Manuel Barroso is married to Maria Margarida Pinto Ribeiro de Sousa Uva, with whom he has three sons: Luís (currently studying for a MSc in European Political Economy at the London School of Economics), Guilherme and Francisco. Apart from his mother tongue, he speaks English, has taken a course to acquire a basic knowledge of German and is professionally fluent in French. This was decisive for him in gaining the support from the Francophone lobby in Brussels.

He graduated in law from the University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa) and has an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from the University of Geneva (Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève) in Switzerland. His academic career continued as an Assistant Professor in the Law School of the University of Lisbon. He did research for a Ph.D at Georgetown University and Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C.. He is a 1998 graduate of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar . Back in Lisbon, Barroso became Director of the Department for International Relations at Lusíada University (Universidade Lusíada).

Barroso's political activity began in his college days, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. He was one of the leaders of the underground Maoist MRPP (Reorganising Movement of the Proletariat Party, later PCTP/MRPP-Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat). In an interview with the newspaper Expresso, he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Communist Party. One of the more memorable episodes of Barroso's period of Maoist MRPP activism was his theft of several items of furniture from the dean's office of the Lisbon University Faculty of Law. The several items of furniture, including chairs and a desk, were transported by Barroso in a truck from Lisbon University to MRPP headquarters where the party's then leader, Arnaldo Matos, ordered Barroso to return the stolen property immediately. In December 1980, Barroso joined the right-of-centre PPD (Democratic Popular Party, later PPD/PSD-Social Democratic Party), where he remains to the present day.

In 1985, under the PSD government of Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva(now President of Portugal), Barroso was named Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs. In 1987 he became a member of the same government as he was elevated to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (answering to the Minister of Foreign Affairs), a post he was to hold for the next five years. In this capacity he was the driving force behind the Bicesse Accords of 1990, which led to a temporary armistice in Angola's civil war between the ruling MPLA and the opposition UNITA guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi. He also supported independence for East Timor, the former Portuguese colony, then a province of Indonesia by force. In 1992, Barroso was promoted to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and served in this capacity until the defeat of the PSD in the 1995 general election.

In opposition, Barroso was elected to the Assembly of the Republic in 1995 as a representative for Lisbon. There, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1999 he was elected president of his political party, PSD, succeeding Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa (an eminent Professor of Law), and thus became Leader of the Opposition. Parliamentary elections in 2002 gave the PSD enough seats to form a coalition government with the right-wing Portuguese People's Party, and Barroso subsequently became Prime Minister of Portugal on 6 April 2002. As Prime Minister, facing a growing budget deficit, he made a number of difficult decisions and adopted strict reforms. He reduced public expenditure, which made him unpopular among leftists and public servants. On July 5 2004, having become President-designate of the European Commission, Barroso arranged with Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio the terms of the cessation of his job as Prime Minister of Portugal. According to Barroso, he left office to prepare for the European Commission job, safe in the knowledge that he was acting in Portugal's "best national interest" and confident in the stability of its "democratic institutions". He hosted U.S President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar in the Portuguese Island of Terceira, in the Azores, in which the four leaders met and finalised the controversial U.S-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

José Manuel Barroso resigned to become President of the European Commission, and made clear that he had resigned as Prime Minister of Portugal in the belief that he would be succeeded by Pedro Santana Lopes, his second-in-command in the PSD. But the nomination of Santana Lopes, then the Mayor of Lisbon and a man with a reputation for being a populist leader but with little government or international experience, provoked heated opposition in his own party and from rival parties. His opponents on the left were concerned that Paulo Portas, Minister of Defence and leader of the right-wing Popular Party (CDS/PP), the junior coalition partner, could gain greater influence. CDS-PP had in the past espoused significantly more conservative policies on immigration and the EU than the Social Democrats. Pressure for a more eurosceptic approach caused tensions within the coalition and proved potentially embarrassing for José Manuel Barroso as Commission President. President Jorge Sampaio warned that he would use his constitutional powers to intervene if Santana Lopes failed to uphold Barroso's commitment to fiscal rigour or seek to make substantial changes in the previous government's policies on the EU, defence, justice and foreign affairs. These warnings were to be effected when Santana Lopes' government was dismissed by the President on December 11 2004.

In June 2004, following his being proposed as a consensus candidate by the European People's Party, the European Council appointed José Manuel Barroso President-designate of the European Commission. The European Parliament endorsed him in the position by 413 votes to 251, with 44 blank ballots and three spoilt ones. Usually known as Durão Barroso in his homeland, in his first press conference as President he was asked how to pronounce his name, to which he replied "call me José Manuel Barroso or just José Barroso".

Among Barroso's goals as President of the European Commission is to revive public confidence in the Commission, which is widely regarded as having lost its sense of direction since the departure of Jacques Delors, who presided over it from 1985 to 1995 and who is widely regarded as its most dynamic and successful president ever.

Before his appointment, Barroso was expected to be a cautious reformer, and is considered likely to champion the interests of Europe's smaller states (which may be explained by the fact that his parents were from the municipality of Valpaços in Northern Portugal, at one time the poorest region in the EU). He has said that he opposes capping EU spending, from which many EU member states benefit greatly.

During his presidency of the European Commission, the following important issues were on the EU's agenda: *EU Constitution and the Reform Treaty *Bolkestein directive, an initiative of the European Commission aimed at creating a single market for services within the European Union. *Lisbon Strategy *Galileo positioning system *Budget controversy (see also: UK rebate) *Doha Development Agenda negotiations (esp. the negotiations about agricultural protectionism). *European Institute of Technology

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* Official site