Colossus of Lisbon

Date: 22/05/1997

ALTHOUGH he was regularly arrested and even exiled from his native Portugal for his political activities under the Salazar dictatorship, Mario Soares remains remarkably relaxed about the treatment he received during those dark days.

He remembers with humour rather than animosity the simplistic refusal the authorities gave to his request to read a particular novel by Stendhal during one of the many times he was in prison in the late Sixties.

“Political prisoners had to write down what books they wanted and why. When I indicated that I wanted a copy of Le Rouge et Le Noir, it was refused because it had the word 'red' in the title,” he says with a wry smile.

Soares ran up against the same unquestioning and blinkered application of the dictatorship's rule book during his four years in exile in France in the early Seventies.

Any attempt to submit articles from Paris to a Portuguese newspaper under his own name on even the most non-controversial of subjects, such as French film stars, would immediately fall foul of the censor and hit the editor's 'spike'.

“It was at a time when Giscard d'Estaing was French president so I invented a new name for myself - Clin d'Estaing. When the censor saw an article I had submitted about a French political party's conference, he asked who the author was. On being told he was a cousin of Giscard, he let the piece through,” he recalls mischeviously.

It was hardly surprising that the young Soares came into conflict with the Salazar regime. As a student activist, he took a leading part in various anti-fascist movements.

Later, as a qualified lawyer, he was a regular defender of political prisoners.

That high-profile behaviour soon made him a target for the state police. He was arrested a dozen times in the space of three years, deported in 1968 to the former Portuguese African colony of São Tomé and then forced into exile in France two years later.

In many ways, those tense early days provided a solid foundation for the many political battles Soares has had to fight during a lengthy public career and help to explain his political maxims.

“My thesis in politics is that you should have enemies. When you do not have enemies, you do not have good friends,” he explains, adding: “You can learn as much from defeat as from victory. What is important for a politician is to experience both victory and defeat. You should not always have the red carpet treatment.”

Now a chubby and cheerful elder international statesman, Soares is still much in demand and is still being fêted after a lengthy political career during which he has played a pivotal role in re-establishing democracy in Portugal and ensuring the country's entry into the European Union.

Two months ago, he was elected president of the international European Movement and next Tuesday (27 May) his many achievements will be honoured when he travels to Brussels to receive the prestigious Bentinck Prize, created in 1972 in honour of the late distinguished Dutch diplomat Adolphe Bentinck.

Previous recipients of the 13,000-ecu prize have included Helmut Schmidt, Vaclav Havel, Roy Jenkins and Jacques Delors. Like Soares, they were all chosen for their outstanding contribution to the construction of a unified and democratic Europe, the fight for human rights in Europe and the search for a just and durable peace on the European continent.

The prize will join a long list of awards which Soares has already received and the honours which have been bestowed on him by more than 40 countries ranging from Austria to Zaïre. They all pay tribute to the remarkable role he has played in Portuguese political life for almost a quarter of a century as foreign minister, prime minister and president.

The full details of his progress from student activist to renowned statesman are now being made widely available - in what constitutes a first in Portuguese political life - through public access to his personal archives.

This computerised collection of more than 2 million documents even includes rare examples of clandestine papers which Soares hid in a network of houses to prevent them from being discovered by Salazar's secret police.

It is these many achievements which, according to Pier Virgilio Dastoli, secretary-general of the international European Movement, explain Soares' equanimity. “He has no bitterness from his early days because he achieved his life's dream. He made a triumphal return to Portugal when the Salazar regime fell and established democracy,” he says.

A life-long supporter of European cooperation and integration, Soares brings a new perspective to the position of European Movement president, previously held by Giscard d'Estaing.

Both have a distinctive charismatic style and are well-known in Europe. But whereas Giscard is a man of the centre-right from a big country, Soares is from the left with his roots in one of southern Europe's smaller member states.

For the international European Movement, that combination is important for the general well-being of the cross-party organisation.

Soares' arrival will also improve the movement's access to leading Socialist politicians, who traditionally have been harder to cultivate than those on the centre-right.

His strong personal contacts with Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok and French Socialist leader Lionel Jospin could well reduce that deficit.

“Giscard has a very detailed knowledge of all EU issues. Soares' approach is less technical and more culturally oriented. He focuses on broad policy trends and on ways of engaging public opinion. He is a clear federalist and has no fear of promoting the cause of federalism even though it is not a particularly popular message in Portugal right now,” explains one colleague.

Soares openly disagrees with those who believe that the European Union's original raison d'être of banishing war between its members is now a less potent message for young people than it was 40 years ago.

“It is still an important theme for Portugal. Twenty years ago, young Portuguese had to fight and die for their country. Now there is peace. The Union is also an important guarantor of human rights and democracy,” he insists.

At the same time, the Union has introduced a new dimension which finds favour with today's youth. As he extolls the EU's virtues, Soares points to the mobility which young people, in marked contrast to their parents and grandparents, now enjoy and which helps make the Union's benefits more tangible.

Soares' involvement in the European Movement has subsequently provided him with two new political challenges.

The first, which he will tackle at the end of the month, will be to try to revive the movement in Portugal.

The second involves a longer time frame: as part of a small group of prominent personalities, he is helping to draft a blueprint for the Union's future which is due to be completed next year.

This is expected to feed into the debate that European Commission President Jacques Santer has launched with his Agenda 2000 programme as the EU considers the path it should tread in the next century.

While European questions occupy a large part of Soares' attention, they do not do so at the expense of wider issues.

Since 1985, he has been heavily involved in the economic, environmental and legal aspects of the world's oceans. Acutely aware of Portugal's own maritime past, Soares, who became president of the World Independent Commission on the Oceans in 1995, is actively campaigning to try to bring the organisation's headquarters from landlocked Switzerland to Lisbon.

Next year, when the Portuguese capital hosts Expo 98, he may well succeed.