António Guterres


António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is a Portuguese politician and diplomat who has served as the ninth secretary-general of the United Nations since 2017. A member of the Portuguese Socialist Party, Guterres served as the prime minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002.
Born in Cascais, Guterres studied physics and electrical engineering at Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico, briefly taught systems theory and telecommunications, and became involved in politics while active in a Catholic youth group. Guterres served as secretary-general of the Socialist Party from 1992 to 2002. He was elected prime minister in 1995. He led the party to legislative victories in 1995 and 1999. Guterres announced his resignation as Socialist Party leader in 2002 following the party's losses in the 2001 local elections, with Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues succeeding him while he remained prime minister until losing the subsequent general election to José Manuel Barroso's Social Democratic Party. Despite this defeat, polling of the Portuguese public in both 2012 and 2014 ranked Guterres the best prime minister of the previous 30 years.
Guterres served as President of the Socialist International from 1999 to 2005. He was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2005 to 2015. He reformed the agency and addressed multiple global refugee crises. Guterres was elected secretary-general in October 2016, succeeding Ban Ki-moon at the beginning of the following year and becoming the first European to hold this office since Kurt Waldheim in 1981. As secretary-general, he has focused on peace, human rights, climate change, refugee protection, and diplomatic engagement with controversial global actors.
Guterres has held numerous advisory, board, and leadership roles in international organizations, foundations, and councils spanning journalism, finance, humanitarian aid, innovation, gender equality, and global policy. Guterres, a multilingual practicing Catholic, was married twice and has two children. He has received numerous national and international honors, honorary doctorates, and prestigious awards recognizing contributions to diplomacy, democracy, and global leadership.

Early life, education, and early career

António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres was born on 30 April 1949, in the parish of Parede, in the municipality of Cascais. Because he was born while his family was on vacation, he was registered when his family returned to Lisbon as having been born in Santos-o-Velho in Lisbon, the son of Virgílio Dias Guterres and Ilda Cândida dos Reis Oliveira Guterres.
Guterres attended the Camões Lyceum, where he graduated in 1965, winning the National Lyceums Award as the best student in the country. He studied physics and electrical engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico – Technical University of Lisbon in Lisbon. He graduated in 1971 and started an academic career as an assistant professor teaching systems theory and telecommunications signals, before leaving academic life to start a political career. During his university years, he joined the Group of Light, a club for young Roman Catholics, where he met Father Vítor Melícias, a prominent Franciscan priest and church administrator who remains a close friend and confidant.

Political career

Guterres's political career began in 1974, when he became a member of the Socialist Party. Shortly thereafter, he quit academic life and became a full-time politician. In the period following the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 that put an end to Caetano's dictatorship, Guterres became involved in Socialist Party leadership and held the following offices:
Guterres was a member of the team that negotiated the terms of Portugal's entry into the European Union in the late 1970s. He was a founding member of the Portuguese Refugee Council in 1991.
In 1992, after the Socialists' third consecutive defeat in Parliamentary elections, Guterres became secretary-general of the Socialist Party and leader of the opposition during Aníbal Cavaco Silva's government. At the time, he was the party's third leader in six years. He was also selected as one of the 25 vice presidents of the Socialist International in September 1992.
His election represented a break with tradition for the Socialists: not only was Guterres not associated with either the faction around then-president and former prime minister Mário Soares or the party's left wing led by Guterres's predecessor Sampaio, but he was also a devout Catholic, running counter to the party's historical secularism. He consulted with Portugal's civil society in formulating policy, meeting a range of intellectuals, scientists and entrepreneurs from across the country and the political spectrum in the run-up to the next general election.

Prime minister of Portugal

did not seek a fourth term as prime minister of Portugal and the Socialist Party won the 1995 parliamentary election. President Soares appointed Guterres as prime minister and his cabinet took the oath of office on 28 October that year.
Guterres ran on a platform of keeping a tight hold on budget spending and inflation in a bid to ensure that Portugal met the Euro convergence criteria by the end of the decade, as well as increasing rates of participation in the labor market, especially among women, improving tax collection and cracking down on tax evasion, increased involvement of the mutual and nonprofit sectors in providing welfare services, a means-tested guaranteed minimum income, and increased investment in education. During his time as prime minister, various reforms were carried out in areas such as education, housing, social welfare, healthcare, health and safety, sex discrimination, and family leave.
He was then one of seven Social Democratic prime ministers in the European Union, joining political allies in Spain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Greece and the Netherlands.

First term (1995–1999)

With a style markedly different from that of his predecessor, and based on dialogue and discussion with all sections of society, Guterres was a popular prime minister in his first years in office. Portugal was enjoying an economic expansion that allowed the Socialists to reduce budget deficits while increasing welfare spending and creating new conditional cash transfer programs. His government also accelerated the program of privatizations that Cavaco Silva's government had begun: 29 companies were privatized between 1996 and 1999, with proceeds from privatizations in 1996–97 greater than those of the previous six years, and the public sector's share of GDP halved from 11% in 1994 to 5.5% five years later. Share ownership was also widened, with 800,000 people investing in Portugal Telecom upon its privatization in 1996 and 750,000 applying for shares in Electricidade de Portugal.
In 1998, Guterres presided over Expo 98 in Lisbon, commemorating the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Vasco da Gama. Also in 1998, two nationwide referendums were held. The first one was held in June and asked voters whether abortion rules should be liberalized. The Socialist Party split over the issue of liberalization, and Guterres led the anti-abortion side, which eventually won the referendum. A second referendum was held in November, this time over the regionalization of the mainland. Both Guterres and his party supported such an administrative reform, but the voters rejected it.
Contrary to his party's stance and following the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses by the World Health Organization in 1990, Guterres said, in 1995, that "he did not like homosexuality" and that it was "something that bothered him".
On foreign policy, Guterres campaigned for United Nations intervention in East Timor in 1999, after it was virtually destroyed by Indonesian-backed militias when it voted for independence. He also finalized the 12-year negotiations on the transfer of sovereignty over Macau, which had been a Portuguese colony, to Chinese control in 1999.

Second term (1999–2002)

In the 1999 parliamentary election the Socialist Party and the opposition won exactly the same number of seats. Guterres was reappointed to office and from January to July 2000 occupied the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council. His second term in government was not as successful, however. Internal party conflicts, an economic slowdown, and the Hintze Ribeiro Bridge disaster damaged his authority and popularity. Nevertheless, some long-lasting measures were taken during his second term: in October 2000, the Parliament approved the decriminalization of drug use and in March 2001, same-sex civil unions were legalized.
In December 2001, following a disastrous defeat for the Socialist Party in local elections, Guterres resigned to "prevent the country from falling into a political swamp". President Jorge Sampaio dissolved Parliament and called for elections. Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, until then minister for social security, assumed the Socialist Party leadership, but the general election was lost to the Social Democratic Party of José Manuel Durão Barroso, who later became president of the European Commission.

President of Socialist International

Guterres was elected president of Socialist International in November 1999, overlapping with his second term as prime minister of Portugal until his resignation from the latter post in December 2001. He remained president of the Socialist International until June 2005.

Diplomatic career

In 2005, following Guterres's proposal, George Papandreou was elected vice president of the Socialist International; in 2006, Papandreou succeeded him as president of the Socialist International.
In May 2005, Guterres was elected High Commissioner for Refugees for a five-year term by the UN General Assembly, replacing Ruud Lubbers.