Adriano Moreira turns 100 this Tuesday. The former CDS president and former Overseas Minister of Estado Novo was born on September 6, 1922 in Macedo de Cavaleiros, moved to Lisbon as a child and studied at the university during World War II. A lawyer by training, he was one of the first Portuguese academics to reflect on the phenomenon of European integration and the reality of Portuguese colonialism in the 20th century, even in the 1950s, a decade in which he was part of the first Portuguese delegation to The United Nations.
He met Mário Soares in prison, when they were cellmates for a brief period, and became friends for life. He was invited by Salazar to join his government as Minister of Overseas, due to the harsh criticism he made of the way the colonies were administered and the reforms he proposed. Adriano Moreira’s time in the Salazar government was brief —two years, between 1961 and 1963— due to discrepancies over the political direction, but it would definitely mark his life.
When he left the government, he returned to academic life, married and had six children. After April 25, he left the country and spent time in Brazil, before returning to Portugal and active political life in 1980. He joined the CDS, of which he would become president in 1986, and today he is one of the names central to the history of the centrists. He was a deputy until 1995 and, more recently, he was part of the Council of State. Today, at 100 years old, he maintains his routine at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, of which he became president.
On the occasion of the centenary of Adriano Moreira, the Observer retrieves the interview published in October 2020. It is an interview conducted on March 11, 2019, aimed at integrating the European Archive of Voices, a project organized by the European collective Arbeit an Europe whose The main objective is to collect the memory of personalities from all over Europe (beyond the borders of the EU) who, having been born before the Second World War, were witnesses from the beginning of the entire process of building European identity. contemporary. For this reason, a large part of the interview focuses on Adriano Moreira’s perspective on the construction of the European Union.
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Source: Observadora
