Jorge Fernando Branco de Sampaio (; 18 September 1939 – 10 September 2021) was a Portuguese lawyer and politician who was the president of Portugal from 1996 to 2006. Sampaio was a member of the Socialist Party, a party which he led between 1989 and 1992. He served as the Mayor of Lisbon from 1990 to 1995 and High-Representative for the United Nations' Alliance of Civilizations between 2007 and 2013.
Sampaio was an opponent of the Estado Novo dictatorship, participated in the student movement of the 1960s, and played an active role in the political movements that led to the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974. Subsequently, he worked as a lawyer for political prisoners.
As president of Portugual, he used international diplomacy to raise the profile of the cause of Timor-Leste, supported the 1999 referendum and used Portugal's diplomatic channels to champion Timorese freedom during this transition as he sought to foster peace in the country. He was present during the transition and formal independence in 2002, and paid a historic visit to the country in 2000. Sampaio oversaw the handover of Macau to China, after a 442 years of Portuguese rule; two months after his re-election, he was confronted with the collapse of the Entre-os-Rios bridge in March 2001.
Early life Sampaio was born in born into a liberal middle-class family in Lisbon on 18 September 1939. He was the eldest son of Fernanda Bensaúde Branco (1908-2000), a Lisbon native and private English teacher, and António Arnaldo de Carvalho Sampaio (1908-1984), a native of Guimarães, a physician specializing in Public Health and a major promoter of the National Vaccination Program. The Sampaio family lived in the United States and the United Kingdom for some years due to the professional activity of his father. His maternal grandmother, Sara Bensliman Bensaúde, belonged to a Sephardic family, who came from Morocco and settled in Portugal in the early 19th century. She converted to Catholicism and married Sampaio's maternal grandfather (1880–1940), an officer of the Portuguese Navy and Foreign Minister of Portugal. Sampaio's maternal great-granduncle was the businessman (1835–1922). Sampaio considered himself neither Jewish nor Catholic; he was an agnostic.
In an interview for the daily newspaper Público, Sampaio said he recalled his parents "putting tapes on the windows, because it was feared that Hitler would come down that way [to Portugal]". His brother is psychiatrist and academic (born 1946).
Sampaio grew up in a manor house in Sintra. He attended Queen Elizabeth's School in São Bento, Lisbon. In the 1947–1948 school year, the Sampaio family—except Daniel—moved to the United States and settled in Baltimore, where his father taught at Johns Hopkins University. Sampaio enrolled at the YMCA, where he practiced boxing and swimming; he also attended piano lessons at the Peabody Institute and participated in its orchestra. At the end of the school year, Sampaio returned to his aunt's and uncle's house in Lisbon, and soon after to Sintra when his parents returned from the US. In 1949, Jorge Sampaio attempted to enroll at Colégio Militar, but failed, so he enrolled at Liceu Pedro Nunes. After finishing the fifth grade, Sampaio chose a set of subjects that gave him access to the law course at Liceu Passos Manuel.
Political career Jorge Sampaio started his political career as a student of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon. Sampaio had a key role in student resistance and the 1960s academic crisis protesting against the fascist Estado Novo regime, and led the Lisbon students union between 1960 and 1961. Following his graduation in 1961, Sampaio started a career as a lawyer before entering politics following his father's advice, and often defended political prisoners. After the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, Sampaio took on his first political role when he was tasked with negotiating the release of political prisoners at Fort-prison of Caxias. He was in charge of the defense of the accused in famous cases such as the "Beja Revolt" in 1961, a military-civilian uprising led by opposition figures, including the supporters of General Humberto Delgado, aimed at seizing the military barracks in Beja, an act of resistance against the totalitarian-conservative dictatorship of Salazar (), and those arrested 1972 during the protest against the colonial war and the dictatorship. The documents that opposed the exile of Mário Soares, who Sampaio would later succeed in the presidency of the Republic, were in his office. He also worked as a director for the Portuguese Bar Association. In the 1970s, he was a co-founder of Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES).
Carnation Revolution and political beginnings On 25 April 1974, during the Carnation Revolution, Sampaio was awakened by a friend's telephone call; he went to his office to gather information but returned home when the Armed Forces Movement ordered via radio no-one should leave their homes. Sampaio originated the slogan "25 de Abril, sempre!" ("Always the 25 of April!").
In May 1974, Sampaio co-founded the Movement of Socialist Left ("Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES)") but soon after abandoned the political project when, in the first MES congress in December, he strongly opposed its Marxist-Leninist ideology. On 28 September 1974, Sampaio participated in the barricades to prevent the arrival of citizens at a demonstration in support of General António de Spínola, then-president of the Republic, in an act known as the "demonstration of the silent majority".
After the failed communist coup of 25 November 1975, Sampaio founded Intervenção Socialista (IS) (Socialist Intervention) in an attempt to unify the left but with little success. In 1978, IS was absorbed by the Partido Socialista (PS) ("Socialist Party") and Sampaio joined that party, where he was associated with its left-most wing.
Sampaio was first elected to the Assembly of the Republic in the 1979 legislative election as a deputy for Lisbon, an office he successively held until 1991. Between 1979 and 1984, Sampaio was the first Portuguese member of the European Commission for Human Rights of the Council of Europe. Between 1987 and 1988, he was president of the parliamentary bench of the PS. On 18 November 1988, Jorge Sampaio became a candidate for Secretary-General of the PS, and on 16 January 1989, after defeating Jaime Gama, he succeeded Vítor Constâncio, who resigned. Sampaio led the PS until 1992, when António Guterres defeated him by winning the primaries, after being presented as an alternative following the party's poor results in the 1991 legislative election.
Mayor of Lisbon Also in 1989, Sampaio was elected the 62nd Mayor of Lisbon with a left-wing coalition the PS led after winning 49.1% of the vote against PSD candidate Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. This alliance was the first between the PS and the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) after the Carnation Revolution, and was joined by the PEV, the UDP, the MDP/CDE and the PSR, and inaugurated a policy of municipal alliances with the PCP at Sampaio's initiative, which the PS did not support.
Sampaio's mandate as mayor of Lisbon saw the conclusion of the Plano Estratégico e do Plano Diretor Municipal (PDM) and of the Plano Especial de Realojamento (PER), the consolidation and inauguration of Lisbon as European Capital of Culture in 1994, the reconstruction of Chiado district that burned down in 1988, and the opening of the Chiado and Music museums.
Sampaio was re-elected for a second term as mayor in 1993. In February 1995, he announced his intention to run for the following year's presidential election, which he confirmed in July. Due to his candidacy, Sampaio resigned from his mayoral post and was succeeded by João Soares on 15 November, the day he presented his candidacy before the Constitutional Court.
Presidency (1996–2006) First term: 1996–2001
The electoral campaign began on 31 December 1995; throughout the campaign, polls favored Sampaio over the other candidate, former Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva. Sampaio won the election with 3,035,056 votes (52.66%)Comissão Nacional de Eleições (1996) and was sworn in on 9 March 1996 in a ceremony at the Assembly of the Republic, succeeding Mário Soares. There was also a historic coincidence: it was the first time the sitting president and prime minister were members of the same political party.
On 13 April, Sampaio was admitted to Lisboan Santa Cruz hospital to undergo heart surgery and was discharged 12 days later. On 27 July, he was again admitted to the hospital for open heart surgery. Due to this, Sampaio requested leave for a temporary impediment at the Constitutional Court; it was the first-such incident. Sampaio was replaced by the President of the Assembly Almeida Santos.
On 19 May 1996, during the 1996 Taça de Portugal Final at Estádio Nacional, a S. L. Benfica cheerleader launched a rocket that killed a Sporting CP fan. Sampaio called for an emergency meeting at halftime in which he tried to cancel the second half of the match. In May 1998, Sampaio inaugurated Expo '98 in Lisbon.
In 1998, Sampaio became the first president to call referendums: the first was held on 28 June about abortion and the second was held on 8 November about regionalization.
East Timorese struggle
Upon becoming president in 1996, Sampaio and the government of António Guterres began to work on the independence of East Timor, which was then a province of Indonesia. In Oslo in 1999, in a CNN debate on the situation in Timor with Nobel Peace Prize winners José Ramos-Horta and bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, Sampaio's intervention had international repercussions due to his confrontation with the Indonesian ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Nugroho Wisnumurtio. Sampaio supported the independence of East Timor.
After the resignation of Indonesia's President Suharto in 1998 and the succession of B. J. Habibie, Portuguese and international diplomacy led to the holding in East Timor of an independence referendum for the province. The plebescite was held on 30 August 1999 and was followed by a campaign of extreme violence and terror by pro-Indonesian militias, and Portugal put pressure on the international community, especially the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, to take a position. A crisis cabinet was convened at Belém Palace. Sampaio and the Portuguese government made contacts for an international peacekeeping force to enter the territory. On 15 September 1999, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1264 was adopted and the International Force East Timor was established.
Former President of East Timor José Ramos-Horta said Sampaio "was a great defender of the East Timorese cause and played a crucial role in the political and diplomatic solution that led to independence". Sampaio visited East Timor for the first time in February 2000; he was the first Portuguese head of state to do so but his visit was shortened when he learned of the death of his mother. Sampaio returned to East Timor in 2002 following the country's Independence with Xanana Gusmão as president. East Timor was also the destination for Sampaio's last official trip in 2006.
End of Portuguese sovereignty over Macau
In 1999, negotiations for the transfer of sovereignty over Macau to China came to an end and on 19 December, the transfer was completed with the Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. Shortly before midnight, Sampaio made a farewell speech, ending 442 years of Portuguese colonialism in Macau. Sampaio's participation in the ceremony was doubtful in March of that year because Sampaio refused to take part without the resolution of questions about the territory's future.
Second term: 2001–2006
On 19 October 2000, Sampaio announced his candidacy in the 2001 presidential election. Sampaio won the election, defeating Joaquim Ferreira do Amaral with 2,401,015 votes (55.55%).Comissão Nacional de Eleições (2001)