The political rebirth of Antonio Costa, the new Socialist leader of the European Council

Some considered the Portuguese Antonio Costa (62 years old) politically dead when he resigned on November 7, 2023, after a search was carried out at his official residence. But the politician is known in Portugal as a skilled strategist with countless lives over the decades. This Thursday the Portuguese socialist was confirmed in his dream position: President of the European Council, for a period of at least two and a half years. After his sudden departure from the post of Prime Minister, Costa fulfilled his European ambition after years of informal campaigning behind the scenes.

In the absence of any allegations or evidence to support the alleged intervention by Costa in favor of a company that wanted to set up a data center in the Sines region (south-west of Portugal), the so-called ‘Operation Influential people He lost power and the experienced politician once again saw the possibility of gaining office in Brussels.

Costa, supported by the right-wing government

Prime minister for eight years – the second longest tenure in Portuguese democracy – mayor of Lisbon, minister and MEP between 2007 and 2015. The Socialist leader interrupted decades of active politics with a sudden judicial record, bringing an end to a legislature in which the Socialists had an absolute majority. The political cycle in Portugal turned with Costa’s departure last March, but the Socialists once again won the European elections on June 9, with one more MEP (eight) than the center-right coalition (seven).

In this year’s European election campaign, António Costa did not appear alongside the Socialist candidate, Marta Temido. The reason became clear on the night of the election itself: given the defeat of the centre-right coalition in power (PSD-CDS), Prime Minister Luis Montenegro announced that he would support the name of Socialist António Costa, even though he was from another political family – something that had already been agreed behind the scenes before the early legislative elections in March.

Costa did not want to upset the conservative government by participating in the electoral campaign and Montenegro managed to divert attention from his electoral defeat, and in the following days he reaffirmed that “the Portuguese Government will not only support, but will make every effort to ensure that António Costa’s candidacy is successful.” Montenegro argued that the support for Costa is “not only because he is Portuguese,” but “because he is pro-European and a bearer of the values ​​of peace, democracy and respect for political and economic solidarity among EU states.”

On 9 June, António Costa, commenting on the night of the European elections on a television station, declared that he would “never go ahead” without the support of his country’s government.

It is a political rebirth for a man who has been in the country’s public life for years, with an unexpected interruption in November 2023. This pause was brief, a time in which Costa tried to clean up the image of a process that discredited Portuguese justice: none of the charges have been proven and no one has been detained in the case.

From leader of socialists to prime minister

Ever present in political life, António Costa has emerged as a key figure in Portugal following the Socialists’ narrow victory in the 2014 European elections, with a centre-right government marked by austerity, with the Socialists getting only one deputy more than the centre-right coalition (a scenario similar to 2024).

In a television program in which he was a regular talk show host, Costa described the victory of the Socialist Party (PS) as “very small” and questioned the leadership of the party’s then-leader António José Seguro.

In a historic process of primary elections – which were never called in the PS, nor were they ever repeated – Costa won with 68% of the vote and became the leader of the Portuguese Socialists and the Socialist candidate for the first time in the 2015 legislative elections, but that night of October 4, 2015, Costa was considered politically dead: he lost the elections in a country accustomed to always seeing the most votes in the elections. His political death lasted only a few hours.

The same night, Jerónimo de Sousa, the historical leader of the Communist Party, said that the Socialists would not form a government simply “if they didn’t want to”, pointing to the left-wing majority present in Parliament, despite the fact that the right-wing coalition had received more votes.

Only then was an unprecedented political solution born, which united the Socialists, Communists, Blocists and Greens and which received the name “Geringonka”. The Socialists were able to govern with the parliamentary support of their left-wing parties. Their government was characterized by several reversals with respect to the austerity policies that marked the “Troika” period.

The country had a series of positive indicators and, four years later, António Costa’s PS once again won the parliamentary elections. In 2019, a new left-wing majority emerges from the elections, but this time the agreement has not been signed and the solution appears unstable. With the rejection of the left-wing allies of the 2022 general state budget, the government falls and the country is forced to hold early elections that give António Costa an unexpected absolute majority. No survey was able to predict this scenario, but Costa has carte blanche to govern with stability until 2026. However, the stability that the absolute majority in parliament gave Costa was not taken advantage of, as it was shaken by a series of cases that affected the members of the government and its popularity.

Several years of European electoral campaigns

During his time as head of government, Costa tried to increase his European influence – taking advantage of the Portuguese presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2021 – by leading negotiations with various European political families and keeping dialogue channels open. An example of this is Costa’s controversial stop in Budapest during the 2023 Europa League final, where he watched the match with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Costa had hidden his stop in Hungary from his official agenda and the opposition took the opportunity to criticise him for campaigning for the presidency of the European Council.

But faced with this possible early departure to occupy a European position on the horizon, the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, indicated that the legislative elections of 2023 were very focused on António Costa and that he would not accept a change in the leadership of the government without calling new elections. Costa promised to stay, but ironically, his hasty departure was only caused by the ‘operation’ Influential people‘ allowed him to fulfill his European dream.

Having been critical of the way the EU handled the sovereign debt crisis in the early 2010s, he has always opposed the idea imposed by Brussels that there was no alternative to economic stabilisation plans with austerity. In an interview with a Portuguese newspaper publicAntónio Costa even said that “Europe was the greatest reward given by Europe to Germany.”

Last week, the politician started a new life: he became the host of a television program (called Optimista) in which the former Portuguese Prime Minister wanted to tell the best of Portugal, showing examples of personalities and companies in which they stand out in their sector. The name of the program reflects the way in which the President of the Republic himself described Costa: a “irritable optimist.” But his career as a television presenter has been fleeting, since Costa’s political rebirth in November last year happened faster than anyone could have believed.