José Manuel Barroso

José Manuel Durão Barroso, born on 23 March 1956, is a Portuguese politician and law professor who led his country's government and later one of the European Union's main institutions. He studied law at the University of Lisbon and political science at the University of Geneva, and in his student years he was active in an underground Maoist movement under the Estado Novo. He joined the Social Democratic Party in December 1980 and rose through the governments of Aníbal Cavaco Silva, serving as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and then as Minister of Foreign Affairs until 1995. Elected party president in 1999, he became Prime Minister of Portugal on 6 April 2002 at the head of a coalition with the Portuguese People's Party, pursuing deficit reduction and hosting the 2003 Azores summit on Iraq. He left that office before finishing his term when the European Council nominated him president of the European Commission in 2004, a post he held for two terms until 2014. His later move to Goldman Sachs International drew an ethics inquiry.