In the life of nations there are figures that are intertwined with their history. Because of the mark they left, they become more than themselves: they become symbols of an era, a moment, a cause. They are what are sometimes called “representative figures”. There aren’t many, but they exist – and through them we see the history of countries and peoples.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão was one of them: a symbol of contemporary Portugal. Gone that’s why not just the man we all know; Someone who represented the changes in the country and the achievements of Portuguese liberal democracy also left. Pinto Balsemão became this representative figure when doing and your life a mission: the constant mission of freeing civil society from the threat of all political radicalism that tried to chain it.
This was what he did during the Estado Novo, during the time of that regime that preferred the Portuguese to be subjects and not citizens. Pinto Balsemão became a citizen in this regime that did not want citizens. He worked as a journalist, often against censorship and prior examination. He found himself directly affected by PIDE’s manipulations. He helped create the Liberal Wing that tried to change the regime from within. If it is true that your objective then falhouit is also true that this same attempt to change the regime managed to something deeper: managed to shake up the country by talking about Europe, denouncing PIDE, defending press freedom. Years later, what had been a defeat would become a victory when he founded the PPD/PSD, which turned its struggle into a dictatorship – free civil society – your cause in democracy.
He was also what he did as a ruler. As Prime Minister, Pinto Balsemão did, changed and transformed – something that today seems like a mirage after years of inertia in governing the country. Pinto Balsemão was the Prime Minister who fulfilled democracy and made it effective: with him the first constitutional revision was carried out, the military tutelage of the regime was put an end, the dream of entering Europe was prepared. “The government is responsible for building and providing the foundations, without ever imposing the political leadership of a centralizing State apparatus,” he once wrote.. That is exactly what he did in government, freeing civil society from the controls and tutelage of those who still tried to muzzle it, no longer with the autocratic language of the old regime, but often with the revolutionary and progressive lexicon.
And freeing civil society is what he did as a great businessman – mainly as a great pioneer of press freedom in Portugal. If we have freedom of information and the press in the country today, we owe it to a large extent to Francisco Pinto Balsemão, who defended it and put it into practice from the beginning to the end of his life. Founded the Expresso, he founded SIC. With it, she opened a world to the Portuguese that they didn’t know and transformed a country that, on television, was still monochromatic.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão had the privilege of leaving all these marks on our lives. He always did it with the same motivation, with the same objective. In October 2023, when presenting him with the Medal of Honor from the city of Lisbon I remembered this: that he made his life’s mission to liberate civil society in the civic, governmental and business dimensions. Today I see which did so with a clear value as its foundation – moderation. His fight to liberate civil society was a fight for moderation, for moderation against radicalism of all kinds, left and right. That is why, even though he leaves, his example will remain very much alive.
The post Francisco Pinto Balsemão: a moderate nonconformist appeared first on Veritas News.
