# Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues

# Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues

Eduardo Luís Barreto Ferro Rodrigues (born 3 November 1949 in Lisbon) is a Portuguese economist and a politician of the Socialist Party who served as President of the Assembly of the Republic from 2015 to 2022. He was re-elected to that office on 25 October 2019, the only candidate, with 178 votes in favour, 44 blank ballots and eight null votes among the 230 deputies; in 2015 he had been elected with 120 votes to 108 for Fernando Negrão.

He holds a degree in economics and is a professor at ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, where he was an assistant from 1973 to 1986 and an invited assistant professor from 1987 to 1991. From 1971 to 1986 he was a senior technician in the Office of Basic Studies of Industrial Economics at the Ministry of Industry and Technology. Before entering government he sat in Vítor Constâncio’s shadow cabinet (1986–1987), was the Socialists’ spokesman on the parliamentary economy and finance committee (1991–1993) and vice-president of the party’s parliamentary group (1993–1995). Under Prime Minister [António Guterres](/people/antonio-guterres) he was Minister of Solidarity and Social Security and then Minister of Labour and Solidarity. A decree of 25 November 1997 moved him from the first office to the second, and on 10 March 2001 he was appointed Minister of Social Equipment.

Ferro Rodrigues was secretary-general of the Socialist Party from 2002 to 2004. The Social Democratic Party won the early legislative election of 17 March 2002 and formed a coalition with the CDS–People’s Party under José Manuel Durão Barroso. When Barroso left to preside over the [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission), President [Jorge Sampaio](/people/jorge-sampaio) concluded that the existing parliamentary majority could still assure political stability and, on 17 July 2004, swore in a government led by [Pedro Santana Lopes](/people/pedro-santana-lopes). Ferro Rodrigues resigned the party leadership, calling that outcome a “personal and political defeat”. He then chaired the Assembly’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the [Council of Europe](/organizations/council-of-europe) (2004–2005) and was Portugal’s ambassador to the OECD from 2005 to 2011.

After returning to parliament he was vice-president of the Assembly from 2011 to 2014 and president of the Socialist parliamentary group from 2014 to 2015. While he led the Socialists, the Prosecutor General’s office recorded that he had been heard as a witness in the Casa Pia investigation on 4 June 2003, and stated that the written record of that hearing did not show him being confronted with the testimony of three witnesses.

## Early life and education

### Family and schooling

Eduardo Luís Barreto Ferro Rodrigues was born at home in Lisbon on 3 November 1949, at Rua Gonçalves Crespo, number 16, second floor. His mother, Marieta Paula Cidade Barreto Ferro Rodrigues (1919–2020), was a civil servant trained at the Escola Superior Colonial, later the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas. His father, Eduardo Alberto Ferro Rodrigues (born 15 April 1925; died in 2006), was an official of the [Banco de Portugal](/organizations/banco-de-portugal) and a writer for radio and the theatre, often with Santos Fernando, including work for the Parodiantes de Lisboa. Before 1974 the father’s texts were repeatedly censored for criticism of the regimes of António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano.

The family moved in 1964 to Sant’Ana à Lapa. Ferro Rodrigues was educated at the Lycée Français Charles Lepierre, including its French section, and his mother went over written and oral homework with him until the examinations of the second year of the liceu. In 1966 he was in the sixth year of secondary school there; a class photograph from that year also shows Augusto Mateus, later economics minister, and both men went on to what is now the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão. At a forum of former pupils held at the lycée in April 2017, he described the school as an enclave of liberties under the Salazar dictatorship.

A 2015 profile linked that upbringing to an early political memory: at eight he watched a charge by the Guarda Nacional Republicana against supporters of Humberto Delgado gathering at the Liceu Camões for a rally, an episode the same account set in a liberal family tradition.

### Economics degree and student opposition

He took a licenciatura in economics in 1972 at the Instituto Superior de Ciências Económicas e Financeiras (ISCEF), later the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão. During those years he joined the student movement against the Estado Novo. He presided over the ISCEF students’ association; decades later, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa still referred to him as the student leader of “Económicas.” As an activist against the dictatorship he was detained by the PIDE, the regime’s political police.

*The Fort of Caxias, in Oeiras, used as a political prison under the Estado Novo.*

Renascença reported that the arrest came out of the student struggles before 25 April 1974: the PIDE detained him on 1 May 1973, and he spent 12 days in the Fort of Caxias, in Oeiras. His memoir *Assim vejo a minha vida* gives that imprisonment a chapter of its own, and he returned to it in a SIC interview, “Júlia: Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues relembra prisão em Caxias.”

## Activism after the Carnation Revolution

### The Movimento de Esquerda Socialista

The Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES) was announced under that name on 10 May 1974, two weeks after the Carnation Revolution. The circle had met since July 1970, around base workers’ committees, and had left the plenary of the Comissão Democrática Eleitoral in July 1973. Formal founders included Jorge Sampaio and Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, with César Oliveira, João Cravinho, Nuno Teotónio Pereira and Augusto Mateus. It defined itself as fighting for the conquest of power by the workers, and was registered at the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça on 20 February 1975.

Its first congress, on 21 and 22 December 1974, adopted programmatic bases and split the organization: the Florida group, including Sampaio, Cravinho and Oliveira, left, while Ferro Rodrigues stayed. The weekly *Esquerda Socialista* ran from September 1974 to July 1975. For the 1975 Constituent Assembly election the MES launched *Poder Popular*, from the slogan “Lutar, criar, poder popular.” Paulo Bárcia directed seven issues that April, printed in 10,000 copies. After the second congress Ferro Rodrigues directed the paper from issue 30 through issue 48 of 21 July 1976, which reported the presidential results. Publication ended on 13 July 1978, at issue 83.

In August 1975 the MES backed the COPCON document on power from below and joined the Frente de Unidade Popular with the [Portuguese Communist Party](/organizations/portuguese-communist-party) and other far-left groups; after the PCP withdrew, the front continued as the Frente de Unidade Revolucionária. On 25 April 1975 the MES won 58,248 votes, 1.02 percent of those who voted, and no seats. It stood again in April 1976. Those were its only national elections.

MES militants joined the Grupos Dinamizadores de Unidade Popular—with the UDP, the PRP, the FSP, the LCI, the PCP(R) and unaffiliated activists—behind Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, second in June 1976 with 792,760 votes (16.46 percent). From 19 to 21 November a congress in Amadora founded the Movimento de Unidade Popular; Luís Moita became president, MES members sat on the national commission, and the PRP left before that vote. On 12 December the movement took 104,629 votes, about 2.5 percent. Registered on 25 October 1976, it contested only that local election. Ferro Rodrigues spoke, as a MES leader, at a fair in Linda-a-Velha. In April 1977 the MES withdrew, accusing the PCP(R) and the UDP of trying to dominate the front. Activity faded in 1977, and the [Constitutional Court](/organizations/constitutional-court) cancelled the registration in 1997.

### Break with the revolutionary left

The fourth congress, in 1979, recognized two tendencies, dropped democratic centralism and Marxism-Leninism, and resolved to break with “the traditional field of the far left.” Ferro Rodrigues and Vítor Wengorovius signed the manifesto “Para uma candidatura unitária” for the leadership. It still treated socialism as the strategic aim and rejected the reformism of the PS and the PCP, but it accepted a limited left turn inside the constitution and punctual alliances with the reformist camp. The MES did not stand in 1979—Wengorovius appealed for a vote for the PS or the APU—nor in 1980. It ceased activity in the first months of 1981. Judgment 666/97, published on 18 December 1997, cancelled the registration.

In 1998 Ferro Rodrigues called the MES an attempt to avoid both European social democracy and Moscow, and said the results had left no space for it. The Socialist Party, in his words, was the “necessary left.” Before joining it in 1986 he led Nova Esquerda, critical of the PS from outside; in 1983 he was assaulted after one of its meetings.

## Economic research and teaching

### The industrial-economics office

Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues began in a public research unit that an Assembly of the Republic biographical note calls the Gabinete de Estudos Básicos de Economia Industrial, and that historical work and the unit’s own imprints call the Grupo de Estudos Básicos de Economia Industrial (GEBEI). The 2015 note lists him as principal senior technician (*técnico superior principal*) of that office, in the Ministry of Industry and Technology, from 1971 to 1986. José Reis, in a 2019 chapter based on interviews with former members and deposited at the University of Coimbra, dates the start of his professional activity there to 1972. That is the year given for his *licenciatura* in economics at the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão of the Technical University of Lisbon, the school Reis still names by its earlier title, ISCEF.

The office came out of the planning administration of the late Estado Novo. Reis writes that a dispatch of 6 July 1973, from Hermes dos Santos as secretary of state for industry, created it formally, but that it already worked as a studies group inside the industry secretariat’s planning office. João Cravinho directed the group, with political room made by Rogério Martins, secretary of state for industry from 1969 to 1972. Cravinho later called it an adviser for structural industrial policy, supplying quantitative instruments rather than sitting inside the ordinary planning hierarchy. The work covered specialisation, exports, firm heterogeneity, capital, technology and tariffs, company finance, energy and investment, input–output tables, internationalisation and European integration. From 1977 it was moved repeatedly inside the administration, and Reis treats 1986 as its end, so that its life ran through the Carnation Revolution.

Reis credits Ferro Rodrigues, with José Félix Ribeiro and Lino Gomes Fernandes, with two studies of 1977 — a system of multisectoral matrices for mainland Portugal for 1974–1978, and *O sector exportador português e a internacionalização da produção* — and with the 1985 study *A especialização de Portugal em questão*. A bookseller’s notice of the export volume records a Lisbon printing of 1977, a preface by Cravinho and the GEBEI imprint, and summarises it as a study of export structure, foreign capital by industry and market, and the data available for policy if Portugal joined the European Economic Community. Félix Ribeiro told Reis that their last joint effort was a visit to the French centre CEPREMAP to sketch a project on accumulation in the Portuguese economy, once the regulation school’s concern with institutions had become important to them, and that the project was dropped because the office was already being closed.

### ISCTE and published studies

The Assembly note places teaching at ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa beside the GEBEI post: assistant from 1973 to 1986, then invited assistant professor from 1987 to 1991. Those years overlap the co-authored industrial studies, and a bookseller separately lists, under his name alone, *Políticas sociais e Estado-Providência: o financiamento da segurança social*, issued by the [Friedrich Ebert Foundation](/organizations/friedrich-ebert-foundation).

*Cover of Políticas sociais e Estado-Providência: o financiamento da segurança social, by Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues, issued by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.*

The listing gives no year. The 1985 specialisation study falls in the last year given for both the GEBEI post and the assistantship. In 2015 the Assembly note still called him a professor of ISCTE, as does a biographical note in a later homage volume from the institute, neither of which names courses. Ciência-Iscte records the 1972 degree, warns that the profile may be out of date, and lists no indexed publications.

## Socialist Party and early parliamentary career

### From independent candidate to party member

In 1985 [Mário Soares](/people/mario-soares), then secretary-general of the Socialist Party, invited Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues to stand as an independent on the Socialist lists for the legislative election of 6 October. Against [Aníbal Cavaco Silva](/people/anibal-cavaco-silva)'s Social Democratic Party and the new [Democratic Renewal Party](/organizations/democratic-renewal-party), the Socialists received 1,204,311 votes, 20.77 percent of ballots cast, and 57 of 250 seats in the Assembly of the Republic. The [Social Democrats](/organizations/social-democrats) led with 1,732,288 votes, 29.87 percent and 88 seats; turnout was 72.23 percent of 8,025,166 registered electors. In Lisbon the Socialist list took 255,030 votes, 19.80 percent and 12 of 56 seats, behind the Social Democrats (15 seats), the Democratic Renewal Party (13) and the United People Alliance (12). Ferro Rodrigues was not among the twelve Socialists named on the official return. The Assembly's biographical record lists him instead as a substitute deputy in the 1985–87 legislature, for Lisbon, and he joined the party in 1986.

In 1987 the Social Democrats won an absolute majority, with 2,850,784 votes, 50.22 percent and 148 seats, to the Socialists' 1,262,506 votes, 22.24 percent and 60 seats. In Aveiro the Socialist list received 81,675 votes, 22.87 percent and four seats, and Ferro Rodrigues again sat only as a substitute, for that constituency, through 1987–91. On 23 March 1988 he opened a Socialist interpellation on social and labour policy. The same biography assigns him Leiria only in the 1999–2002 legislature, outside this period.

### Committees, the shadow cabinet and Lisbon

From 1986 to 1987 he was a member of the shadow cabinet formed by Vítor Constâncio while the Socialists opposed Cavaco Silva's minority government; an RTP interview record describes the post as shadow minister for social affairs.

After Constâncio left the leadership, Jorge Sampaio's run for mayor of Lisbon was the party's main local project of 1989. Ferro Rodrigues later wrote that he, [António Costa](/people/antonio-costa), J. M. Galvão Teles and Nuno Brederode told Sampaio that either he advanced with a *movimento audacioso* or he was finished. The plan was an alliance with the rest of the left, although the Socialist organs had already ruled alliances out for those local elections. The visible negotiating team was led by Ferro Rodrigues and António Lopes Cardoso, with Costa also a member. On 11 July 1989 Ferro Rodrigues, Costa and João Proença met Luís Sá and Lino de Carvalho of the Portuguese Communist Party; Ferro Rodrigues said a formal coalition was possible.

The resulting Socialist–Communist–MDP/CDE–Greens list, headed by Sampaio, faced on 17 December 1989 a Social Democrat–CDS–[People's Monarchist Party](/organizations/people-s-monarchist-party) list led by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. Provisional Interior Ministry figures gave the left-wing list 180,635 votes, 49.07 percent and nine of 17 council seats, and [the centre](/organizations/the-centre)-right list 154,888 votes, 42.07 percent and eight; Sampaio was elected mayor, on a council turnout of 54.76 percent.

Ferro Rodrigues sat for Lisbon in the legislature elected on 6 October 1991. The Social Democrats kept an absolute majority, with 2,902,351 votes, 50.60 percent and 135 seats; the Socialists rose to 1,670,758 votes, 29.13 percent and 72 seats, and in Lisbon took 365,112 votes, 29.70 percent and 16 seats. From 1991 to 1993 he was the Socialist spokesman on the Committee on the Economy and Finance, and from 1993 to 1995 vice-president of the Socialist parliamentary group.

## Minister of social affairs and public works

### Guaranteed minimum income and social security

On 28 October 1995 President Mário Soares, on the proposal of Prime Minister António Guterres, appointed Eduardo Luís Barreto Ferro Rodrigues Minister of Solidarity and Social Security in the XIII Constitutional Government. The portfolio’s main statute was Law No. 19-A/96 of 29 June 1996, approved by the Assembly of the Republic on 30 May and promulgated by Jorge Sampaio. It created the *rendimento mínimo garantido*: a temporary, variable cash benefit in the non-contributory scheme, plus an insertion programme, for legal residents of Portugal whose household resources fell short of a minimum indexed to the social pension — 100 per cent for each of the first two adults, 70 per cent for each further adult and 50 per cent for each child, with 20 per cent of earnings disregarded. Claimants had to accept an insertion agreement and be available for work or training, unless age, health or defined family circumstances made that impossible.

The Court of Auditors later tied the law to a 1992 Council recommendation, issued during a Portuguese presidency of what is now the European Union, that states recognise a right to resources sufficient for a dignified life. Most member states already had some minimum-income instrument. Portugal’s law authorised experimental local projects until 1 July 1997, when the general regime took effect; Ferro Rodrigues signed the pilots’ regulation on 1 July 1996. In the Assembly, Luís Filipe Menezes, for the Social Democratic Party, called the benefit socially ineffective, “cega e inespecífica” (blind and unspecific), and open to perverse effects. He cited a doubling of French spending on a similar payment between 1989 and 1993 and said the PSD would vote against what he called a socialist-communist package.

On 25 November 1997 a reshuffle abolished the Ministry for Qualification and Employment and moved Ferro Rodrigues to a Ministry of Labour and Solidarity, joining labour to social security. Sampaio reappointed him when the XIV Constitutional Government took office on 25 October 1999. Law No. 17/2000 of 8 August then set the system’s framework: a citizenship subsystem, whose solidarity arm included the guaranteed minimum income and required no contribution record; a family-protection subsystem; and a contributory subsystem. Old-age pensions were to be calculated gradually on revalued earnings over the whole career, and two to four percentage points of employees’ contributions were to feed a capitalised reserve until it could cover two years of foreseeable pension spending. A [National Council](/organizations/national-council) was to include a tripartite executive committee of unions, employers and the state; private and mutual schemes were complementary to a system the state remained obliged to organise.

Outside assessments were more reserved. Audit Report No. 2/2000 (January 2000) found the statute well drawn but short of rules against fraud, rated internal control deficient, and reported that claims were often accepted on thin, unchecked documentation while undue payments were hard to recover. On the pilots, the share of signed insertion agreements was “francamente diminuta” (frankly low) beside benefits paid. A 1999 microsimulation by Miguel Gouveia and Carlos Farinha Rodrigues, assuming full take-up of the 1995 household-budget survey, put eligibility at 4.8 per cent of households and 5.7 per cent of the population. Inequality and the poverty rate fell only slightly, a gain largely erased once labour-supply responses were included; lower intensity and severity of poverty mostly remained.

### Labour portfolio and the Ministry of Social Equipment

In January 1999 the labour ministry presented a national child-labour study: more than 40,000 minors said they had a job, many of them 15-year-olds in industry, where hours and safety risks were greatest.

On the night of 4 March 2001 the deck of the Hintze Ribeiro bridge, between Entre-os-Rios and Castelo de Paiva, fell into the Douro, killing 59 people. Jorge Coelho, minister of state and of social equipment, resigned within hours, saying “a culpa não pode morrer solteira” — blame could not go unassigned — and that political consequences had to follow. Guterres accepted a request he treated as impossible to refuse. On 10 March, on Guterres’s proposal, Sampaio released Coelho at his own request, released Ferro Rodrigues from Labour and Solidarity, and appointed him Minister of Social Equipment; Paulo Pedroso took Labour and Solidarity. Secretaries of state for transport, public works, housing, and maritime and port administration were named the same day.

An inquiry published on 11 April 2001 concluded that riverbed erosion and sand extraction had brought [the bridge](/organizations/the-bridge) down. The opposition treated the reshuffle as evidence of weakness. Isaltino Morais, of the PSD, called the move — Ferro Rodrigues replaced in turn by one of his secretaries of state — a “rotação de cadeiras” and a poor sign that the prime minister could recruit beyond the cabinet. Basílio Horta, parliamentary leader of the CDS – People’s Party, said Guterres’s field of candidates had shrunk to people already in office.

The post lasted under a year. After heavy losses for the Socialist Party in the local elections of 16 December 2001, Guterres resigned, arguing that only resignation would avoid a “pântano político” (political swamp). He was still prime minister on 23 January 2002, when Sampaio, at Ferro Rodrigues’s request, released him from Social Equipment. *Público* reported on 20 January that Ferro Rodrigues had been elected the party’s secretary-general, succeeding Guterres.

## Leadership of the Socialist Party

### Defeat in 2002 and the 2004 European election

Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues became secretary-general of the Socialist Party (PS) in January 2002, succeeding António Guterres. Guterres had resigned as prime minister after the Socialists' losses in the December 2001 local elections, and Jorge Sampaio dissolved the Assembly of the Republic and called a legislative election for 17 March 2002. The leadership itself was settled by a direct vote of the membership, not by a congress ballot. Militants voted on 19 January; *Público* reported the next morning that Ferro Rodrigues had defeated Paulo Penedos, with the final count due on Monday 21 January, when he was to be formally confirmed. That count gave him 96.45 per cent of the votes to Penedos's 2.74 per cent, and he immediately stood as the Socialist candidate for prime minister.

The 17 March election was a narrow defeat. The National Elections Commission recorded 2,068,584 votes (37.79 per cent) and 96 of the 230 seats for the PS, against 2,200,765 votes (40.21 per cent) and 105 seats for the Social Democratic Party (PSD), led by José Manuel Durão Barroso, and 477,350 votes (8.72 per cent) and 14 seats for the CDS–People's Party. Turnout was 61.48 per cent of 8,902,713 registered electors. The PSD and CDS–PP, with 119 seats between them, formed a coalition government. Ferro Rodrigues, placed first on the Socialist list in Lisbon, led the PS in opposition. His term as secretary-general overlapped the Casa Pia investigation.

The party reversed that result at the [European Parliament](/organizations/european-parliament) election of 13 June 2004. The official map gave the PS 1,516,001 votes, 46.36 per cent of the valid vote, and 12 of Portugal's 24 seats. Força Portugal, a PSD–CDS coalition, was second, with 1,132,769 votes (34.64 per cent) and nine seats; turnout was 38.60 per cent. After the victory Ferro Rodrigues announced that he would seek another term as secretary-general.

### Resignation and the succession

On 29 June 2004 Barroso announced that he accepted the presidency of the European Commission and would leave the Portuguese premiership. Ferro Rodrigues, with the rest of the parliamentary left, argued that dissolution and a fresh election were the way to keep the institutions working regularly. On 9 July Sampaio rejected that course. He invited the PSD, the largest party at the 2002 election, to form a new coalition government under Pedro Santana Lopes.

Speaking that evening at the party headquarters, Ferro Rodrigues told reporters that Sampaio's choice had been "certamente uma decisão difícil" and expressed his "respeito e amizade" for the president, but he called the decision "errada e perigosa". He took it as his own loss: "Assumo toda a responsabilidade desta derrota", he said, describing what *Público* headlined as a "derrota pessoal e política". He resigned as secretary-general the same day, said he would leave the [Council of State](/organizations/council-of-state), and left the succession to a party congress, without saying whether he himself would be a candidate. He stayed in parliament and, in 2004–2005, was president of the Assembly's delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

José Sócrates won the direct ballot that followed, with 28,984 votes (80.1 per cent), against 5,693 (15.7 per cent) for Manuel Alegre and 1,505 (4.2 per cent) for João Soares; 48.2 per cent of 75,628 registered members voted. The 14th congress, meeting in Guimarães in early October 2004, confirmed him as secretary-general. Santana Lopes's cabinet did not last the parliament. On 22 December 2004, after the Council of State had on 10 December favoured dissolution, Sampaio dissolved the Assembly and fixed a legislative election for 20 February 2005. The PS, under Sócrates, won that election with 2,588,312 votes (45.03 per cent) and 121 seats.

## The Casa Pia investigation

### Witness status and the prosecutor’s statements

While secretary-general of the Socialist Party (Portugal), Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues was heard in the Casa Pia child sexual abuse scandal only as a witness. In May 2003, after the party’s spokesman, Paulo Pedroso, was placed in pre-trial detention, Ferro Rodrigues spoke of “an architecture of mounted testimonies” against himself and Pedroso. Prosecutor-General José Souto Moura told RTP that Ferro Rodrigues was “not a suspect of any crime in the Casa Pia case or of any other.”

He had asked to be heard, and on 4 June 2003 was questioned as a witness at the Department of Investigation and Penal Action in Lisbon. *Público*, citing the order by which investigating judge Rui Teixeira detained Pedroso, reported that Ferro Rodrigues’s telephone had been intercepted and that conversations, including calls involving parliamentary leader António Costa, had been treated as a serious disturbance of the inquiry. He was not made an *arguido* that day, and was not later indicted.

On 10 November 2003, after a *Correio da Manhã* report, the Prosecutor-General’s Office confirmed, in a note he had requested, that he had been heard as a witness on 4 June and that the record did not show he had been confronted with three witness statements linking him to the abuse, or shown their contents.

### Complaints, the trial and later accounts

When charges were filed that December, the party said at least one statement sought to associate him with sexual acts against children. On 31 December a criminal complaint was lodged; a statement signed by José Vera Jardim called the claims a “very serious calumny” and a “villainy.” The Public Prosecution archived it for lack of evidence. A private prosecution for defamation followed. In June 2007 the Lisbon instruction court declined to commit two former Casa Pia pupils for calumnious denunciation, and on 18 July 2008 the Lisbon Court of Appeal agreed unanimously: they had spoken in the interest of justice and could not be convicted for the legal duty to testify.

At trial a principal witness said, on 21 September 2005, that he had seen Ferro Rodrigues at a house in Vila Viçosa to which he had gone with the main defendant, former driver Carlos Silvino, and on 12 October that he had seen him outside a Restelo villa known in the file as the “casa dos erres.” Former provost Catalina Pestana said two young people had described abuse by him at a house in Colares. Called by Silvino and Carlos Cruz, he testified on 20 December 2007 that he had thought such talk “absurd” until lawyer Saldanha Sanches said his name and Pedroso’s were in the file. He called contacts with senior Socialists, the Prosecutor-General and President Jorge Sampaio self-defence, and spoke of a possible attempt “to decapitate the leadership” of the main opposition party.

Pedroso was charged and then, in May 2004, not committed for trial. In *Fernandes Pedroso v. Portugal* (12 June 2018) the [European Court of Human Rights](/organizations/justice-ecthr) held that his pre-trial detention violated Article 5 of the Convention. On 3 September 2010 the Lisbon court sentenced Silvino to 18 years, Cruz and Ferreira Diniz to seven years each, Jorge Ritto to six years and eight months, Hugo Marçal to six years and two months, and Manuel Abrantes to five years and nine months, and acquitted Gertrudes Nunes. Ferro Rodrigues was not a defendant. In 2016 he told *Expresso* that the Public Prosecution had refused to investigate his complaints and had left him to prove the contrary. In a 2023 interview on the memoir *Assim vejo a minha vida*, he described those years as the worst of his life and said an opposition leader could still be calumniated and intercepted with impunity.

## Permanent representative to the OECD

### The Paris mission

On 25 August 2005 the Council of Ministers of José Sócrates’s government named Eduardo Luís Barreto Ferro Rodrigues head of Portugal’s permanent delegation to the OECD in Paris, with effect from 2 November 2005. Resolution No. 58/2005 (2nd series), published in the *Diário da República*, 2nd series, No. 171, of 6 September 2005, ended the 2002 appointment of Basílio Adolfo de Mendonça Horta da França and stated that the posting did not fill a vacancy in the diplomatic career. The Assembly of the Republic’s biographical note lists 2005–2011 as his years as ambassador to the OECD.

*The Château de la Muette in Paris, headquarters of the OECD, where Portugal’s permanent delegation is based.*

Under the OECD rules of procedure, which annex the Council’s 2006 resolution on governance, the Council is the body from which the organisation’s acts derive and meets both as ministers and as permanent representatives. Permanent representatives are to give a whole-of-government view in sessions normally held monthly and chaired by the secretary-general, with decisions in principle by mutual agreement.

His recorded comments concern employment and the organisation’s view of Portuguese policy in the financial crisis. On 21 May 2009, at an international conference in Lisbon on the global economic crisis, he called rising unemployment one of the crisis’s main worldwide problems and said it would not be solved inside a “brutal” recession. He reported the OECD’s judgement of the government’s response as “correct and courageous”, citing social support, the training of young people and help for those most at risk of exclusion, and said he would have preferred a more proactive European Commission. Opening the Socialist Party’s parliamentary days on 5 July 2010, he said the OECD gave “total support” to a new international airport, logistics platforms and international rail links, and had praised policy since 2005 on modernisation, skills, fiscal consolidation, a new labour code, tax fraud and the Simplex programme.

### Return for the 2011 election

He left the post to stand in the [legislative election of 5 June 2011](/facts/2011-portuguese-legislative-election). On 8 April *Diário de Notícias* reported that the former Socialist secretary-general wanted to leave the Paris embassy after six years and had discussed a return with the party leadership, including the unconfirmed possibility of heading the Lisbon list once Jaime Gama declined to stand again. The same report set the congress against the government’s request for external financial help. On 6 April Sócrates told the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Durão Barroso, that Portugal intended to activate the European financial-support mechanisms. The next day he announced that Ferro Rodrigues would lead the Socialist list in Lisbon.

Resolution No. 12/2011, signed by Sócrates on 2 June 2011 and published on 20 June, recorded that he had asked to be relieved in order to stand on 5 June, and ended the 2005 appointment with effect from 20 April 2011. The election, held during the legislature chosen on 27 September 2009, gave the Social Democratic Party 108 seats with 38.66 per cent of the vote and the Socialists 74 seats with 28.05 per cent, down from 97 seats in 2009. The official map of 17 June 2011 places him first among the 14 Socialists returned for Lisbon.

## President of the Assembly of the Republic

### Vice-president, group leader and the 2015 vote

After his posting as Portugal’s permanent representative to the OECD, Eduardo Ferro Rodrigues returned to the Assembly of the Republic and was a vice-president of the House from 2011 to 2014. In the Socialist Party contest of 2014 he backed António Costa against the secretary-general, António José Seguro. Costa won the primary on 28 September; Alberto Martins, who had supported Seguro, resigned as leader of the Socialist parliamentary group, and Costa invited Ferro Rodrigues to succeed him. On 3 October the group elected him with 45 votes in favour, 11 against, six blank and three null, 65 of its 74 deputies having voted. He left the Assembly vice-presidency and led the Socialist benches until October 2015, reversing the arrangement of 2002–2004, when Costa had been his parliamentary leader.

The [legislative election of 4 October 2015](/facts/2015-portuguese-legislative-election) left the Portugal à Frente list of the Social Democratic Party and the [CDS – People's Party](/organizations/cds-people-s-party), under Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, the largest force but short of a majority. On 23 October, at the opening of the XIII legislature in São Bento Palace in Lisbon, deputies chose the president of the Assembly by secret ballot. Ferro Rodrigues received 120 votes and Fernando Negrão, proposed by the PSD and supported by the CDS–PP, 108, with two blank ballots; all 230 members voted. [Luís Montenegro](/people/luis-montenegro), leader of the PSD group, said the result broke a practice under which the list that had come first proposed and elected the president. Socialist deputies stood to applaud; the PSD and CDS–PP benches stayed silent. Speakers for the Portuguese Communist Party, the Left Bloc and the Ecologist Party “The Greens” treated the vote as a new balance of forces, and Costa used the sitting to answer the President of the Republic, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, who the day before had distinguished among parties inside the democratic arc.

On 10 November the Assembly approved a Socialist motion rejecting the programme of Passos Coelho’s XX Constitutional Government, by 123 votes (PS, [Left Bloc](/organizations/left-bloc), PCP, Greens and [People–Animals–Nature](/organizations/people-animals-nature)) to 107. Presiding, Ferro Rodrigues did not put the other rejection motions to a vote once one had taken effect, and the cabinet resigned into a caretaker role. On 26 November Cavaco Silva swore Costa in as prime minister of the XXI Constitutional Government, a Socialist minority cabinet sustained in parliament by the parties to its left, the arrangement known as the *geringonça*.

### Second term, the Council of State and the 2022 departure

On 25 October 2019, at the start of the XIV legislature, Ferro Rodrigues was the only candidate and was re-elected with 178 votes in favour, 44 blank and eight null, out of 230 deputies. He was the third president of the Assembly to be returned to the office. He said he would try to remain the president of every deputy and called for a culture of dialogue in a parliament of ten parties, where the Socialist government was stronger but still without an absolute majority.

The president of the Assembly is the second figure of the state. Under Article 142 of the Constitution the office-holder sits, while in the post, on the Council of State, the head of state’s political advisory body. If the Constitutional Court finds the President temporarily unable to exercise the office, or if the office is vacant, the president of the Assembly assumes the functions in the interim. That step was not taken in December 2017, when Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had surgery for an umbilical hernia: the presidency’s physician said there was in practice no impediment and that the president remained able to serve, so Ferro Rodrigues did not become interim head of state.

During the [COVID-19 pandemic](/drivers/covid-19-pandemic), the Conference of Leaders in March 2020 adopted by a majority a reorganization Ferro Rodrigues had proposed. Plenary business was reduced, and deputies could register a floating quorum of 116 in the hour before a vote and then leave the chamber; a suggestion that votes be taken with only a one-fifth quorum was not accepted. The PSD and the CDS–PP would have preferred the Standing Committee to substitute for the plenary.

On 27 October 2021 the Assembly rejected the draft state budget for 2022 at first reading, by 117 votes to 108, with five abstentions; only the Socialist benches voted in favour. The same day Marcelo received Ferro Rodrigues and Costa and set hearings with the parties and a meeting of the Council of State. On 4 November, from Belém, he announced that he would dissolve the Assembly and call an election for 30 January 2022. The decree of dissolution was issued on 5 December, at the end of the period allowed, so that bills still before parliament could be finished. The rejection was reported as the end of the *geringonça*.

On 18 November 2021 Ferro Rodrigues told the Conference of Leaders that he would not stand at the [election of 30 January 2022](/facts/2022-portuguese-legislative-election), and that the XIV legislature would be his last as a deputy, a limit he had set in 2019. The first sitting of the XV legislature was held on 29 March 2022. [Augusto Santos Silva](/people/augusto-santos-silva), the sole candidate, was elected president with 156 votes in favour, 63 blank and 11 null, and succeeded Ferro Rodrigues, who had held the chair through the two preceding legislatures and did not return to the House.

## Personal life, writings and honours

### Family

The biographical note of the Assembly of the Republic states that Ferro Rodrigues is married to Maria Filomena de Aguilar and that they have two children, João Luís de Aguilar Ferro Rodrigues and Rita de Aguilar Ferro Rodrigues. In the *Diário da República* the surname is spelled Aguillar: Maria Filomena Lopes Peixoto de Aguillar, born in Lisbon on 8 September 1947, a history graduate of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, and a public servant since 1967. From 1998 she was deputy director-general for international economic relations in the Ministry of the Economy; an order of 15 September 2003, published on 3 January 2004, appointed her deputy director of that ministry’s management office.

Their son, [the economist](/organizations/the-economist) João Ferro Rodrigues, told *Público* in 2021 that he was born in 1976, studied at the Catholic University of Portugal and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Rita de Aguilar Ferro Rodrigues worked as a television presenter; in March 2018 she and SIC ended, by mutual agreement, a relationship of 17 years.

His father, Eduardo Alberto Ferro Rodrigues, died in the early hours of 15 February 2006, aged 81, while his son was Portugal’s ambassador to the OECD. Born on 15 April 1925, he wrote plays and radio programmes, including material for the Parodiantes de Lisboa, and before the Carnation Revolution his scripts were censored for criticism of António de Oliveira Salazar and Marcelo Caetano. He was also an employee of the Banco de Portugal. In March 2017, voting at Alvalade in Sporting CP elections, Ferro Rodrigues said he had been a member for 67 years, as long as he had been alive.

### Memoir and decorations

Objectiva, an imprint of Penguin Livros, published *Assim vejo a minha vida* in October 2023, a 376-page first edition (ISBN 9789897873584). Presenting it at the Belém Cultural Centre, he called it an “exercise in memory” across 73 years, not an autobiography, a settling of accounts or a return to active politics, but self-criticism and a tribute to family, friends and companions. António Costa was in the front row; Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa closed the session.

In *Diário de Notícias*, the writer Luís Filipe Castro Mendes praised its “admirable colloquial frankness” and the honesty of its closing pages on the present and the future.

The Grand Cross of the Order of Liberty was granted by an alvará of 5 October 2016 and published, with the surname misspelled “Fero”, in the *Diário da República* on 15 February 2017; a rectification of 17 April 2017 restored “Ferro Rodrigues”. Rebelo de Sousa imposed the insignia at Belém Palace on 24 November 2016, in a ceremony Ferro Rodrigues called a privilege. On leaving the speakership he received the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Christ by an alvará of 21 April 2022, published on 12 May 2022.

[Felipe VI](/people/felipe-vi) conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of [Charles III](/people/charles-iii) by Royal Decree 576/2016 of 25 November 2016, published in the *Boletín Oficial del Estado* the next day, while Ferro Rodrigues was President of the Assembly. A Brazilian presidential decree of 25 November 2021, printed in the *Diário Oficial da União* on 26 November, admitted him to the supplementary roll of the Order of Rio Branco in the grade of Grand Officer, listing him as a Portuguese deputy.

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/eduardo-ferro-rodrigues