Elisa Ferreira


Elisa Maria da Costa Guimarães Ferreira, GCC is a Portuguese politician and economist who served as the European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms in the administration of President Ursula von der Leyen between 2019 and 2024. She previously served as vice-governor of the Bank of Portugal from 2016 until 2019. She was as Member of the European Parliament for the Socialist Party; part of the Party of European Socialists between 2004 and 2016. In 2019, she was selected by Portugal to serve as a European Commissioner.
Previously, she was in charge of the Ministries of Environment and Public Works during the governments of António Guterres.
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Political career

Member of the Portuguese Government, 1995–2002

Ferreira served as Minister of Environment and as Minister for Planning in the government of António Guterres.

Member of the European Parliament, 2004–2016

Ferreira was a Member of the European Parliament from the 2004 European election until her resignation in 2016. Throughout her time in parliament, she served as a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs. In this capacity, she drafted the committee's own-initiative report on closer coordination of economic policies, which calls for the European Central Bank to be granted powers to monitor “financial stability in the euro-area” and to be involved “in EU-wide macroprudential supervision of systematically important financial institutions.” She was also in charge of the parliament's report on the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure in 2011 and led the parliament's work on the Single Resolution Mechanism in 2013.
From 2004 to 2014, Ferreira was a member of the parliament's delegation to the ACP–EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. In 2015, she joined the Special Committee on Tax Rulings and Other Measures Similar in Nature or Effect.
In 2012, Ferreira was part of the Socialists and Democrats expert “alternative troika” sent to Greece to assess what measures can be taken to spur job growth.
In addition to her committee assignments, Ferreira was a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on Long Term Investment and Reindustrialisation. She also represented the Parliament at the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali and the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań.

Banco de Portugal, 2016–2019

In June 2016, Elisa Ferreira resigned from the European Parliament after she was nominated by the Portuguese Government to join the board of directors of the Bank of Portugal. She was replaced by Manuel dos Santos.

European Commissioner, 2019–2024

On 27 August 2019 Prime-Minister António Costa announced that Ferreira had been proposed as the Portuguese commissioner in Ursula von der Leyen's European Commission, to take office on 1 November 2019, taking the portfolio of Cohesion and Reforms. She became the first Portuguese woman to be put forward as commissioner.

Life after politics

After leaving the European Commission, Ferreira resumed her former occupation as university teacher at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto.

Electoral history

Porto City Council election, 2009

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Other activities