“The most important thing I take from the book is that, thanks to the PSD-led government at the time, Portugal managed to overcome this situation. [a crise económico-financeira entre 2010 e 2014] with great dignity,” said Durão Barroso, who was Prime Minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004.
Durão Barroso took part in the presentation of the book “Diplomacy in Troika Time”, by the former Portuguese Ambassador to Germany Luís de Almeida Sampaio.
President of the PSD between 1999 and 2004, Durão Barroso, added that it was due to the executive under the leadership of his successor Pedro Passos Coelho, who realized “that he had to do something, that the country “is never in a position of humiliation for his creditors”.
“When Portugal, in the previous government, asked for intervention, it had 200 million euros in its coffers. The country was on the verge of bankruptcy. Who caused this situation and who solved it?” up. criticism of Jose Socrates’ PS government.
Presenting the book, former Social Democratic ministers, such as Maria Luís Albuquerque and Paulo Macedo, were responsible for the Finance portfolio, former Education Minister Nuno Crato, as well as other PSD leaders and former centrist leaders, such as Ribeiro e Castro and Ana Rita Bessa (currently director of publishing house LeYa).
In a somewhat lengthy speech between 2004 and 2014, the EC president praised the former ambassador’s work as a testimony to “one of the most difficult moments the country has experienced” and a “Portuguese vision” on Germany’s investment in the European Union project, since “nothing happens in the European Union without the consent of Germany”.
The foreword to the book is by Pedro Passos Coelho, who was unable to attend for personal reasons, but Durão Barroso praised the contribution of the former prime minister who “appreciates the book” but “isn’t yet the book he will write” and it will be announced.
In the work, the Portuguese ambassador in Berlin classified between 2012 and 2015 as “demanding”, but “vital”, the mission to represent in Germany a country that “had reached the bottom”.
“Being Portugal’s ambassador to Germany in the time of a Troika was certainly not the most enviable mission among diplomats,” confesses Luís de Almeida Sampaio in the book “Diplomacy in a Time of Troika” (Ed. Dom Quixote), presented today in Lisbon by José Manuel Durão Barroso.
“Portugal had again bottomed out from an economic and financial point of view and the Germans were the creditors of the rescue package we received in conjunction with a spartan adjustment program,” he recalls, adding that for this reason the mission that began in Berlin at the end of March 2012 and lasting until 2015 was “vital”.
The ambassador emphasizes that he wants to contribute to the history of one of the “hardest and most demanding” periods of Portuguese diplomacy, but in the first chapter he highlights the objectives that the mission aimed to fulfill.
Source: DN
