Former Economy and Finance Minister Joaquim Pina Moura died this Thursday at home in Lisbon, at the age of 67, due to a neurodegenerative disease, his son, photojournalist João Pina, told Lusa.
With a degree in Economics, Joaquim Pina Moura attended the Mechanical Engineering course at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and was a director of the Students’ Association between 1972 and 1974. He was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party between 1972 and 1991, having joined the Socialist Party in September 1995.
He served as Deputy Secretary of State to Prime Minister António Guterres until 1997, the year he was appointed Minister of Economy of the XIII Constitutional Government. In 1999, he was appointed Minister of Finance and Economy of the XIV Constitutional Government, also led by António Guterres.
Pina Moura was also a director at Galp and president of Iberdrola Portugal.
Joaquim Augusto Nunes de Pina Moura was born in Loriga, in the municipality of Seia (Guarda district), on February 22, 1952, he entered politics very young and at the age of 19 he was a candidate for the democratic opposition to the 1969 elections in Porto, where he lived since he was 4 years old and studied at the Faculty of Engineering, a course that the 25th of April 1974 interrupted.
He graduated in Economics and he did a postgraduate course in Monetary and Financial Economics at the Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, in Lisbon, where he was an assistant.
From “Cunhal dos pequeninos” to the super administration of the PS and manager
At the age of 20, as a member of the PCP, which he joined in 1972, he used the same pseudonym – “Duarte” – as the historical leader of the Portuguese communists. For this reason, it started to be called, for years, “Cunhal of the little ones” and seen, by some communist militants, as its “dauphin”.
But the his political journey began before the Carnation Revolution in 1974, passed through militancy in the PCP youth organization, which he coordinated, and ascended to the Central Committee, together with Zita Seabra, in 1976.
That year, after the period of the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (PREC), Pina Moura was one of the leaders of the Union of Communist Students (UEC) and three years later he worked with Vítor Dias in the Information and Propaganda Section, from where he left in 1987 to the PCP economic activities commission.
The following year, in 1988, he voted against the expulsion of Zita Seabra and began his dissent there, with criticism of the party’s strategic orientation, although he was still elected that year to the Central Committee.
In several congresses, and in their preparation, disagreements with Cunhal, his and critics like Barros Moura, Raimundo Narciso or José Luís Judas followed.
In 1988, he defended the secret vote, the opening of the official body, Avante! internal discussion and the presentation of alternative motions.
At a meeting at the PCP headquarters, Cunhal replies that if the 150,000 activists wrote motions, there would be no paper coming, it reads on a profile entitled “Pina Moura: The major orchestrator”, published in the newspaper Público, in November 1995.
In 1990, he insists on the proposal. No results. At the congress in which Carlos Carvalhas was elected secretary-general, Pina Moura supported him, but makes a critical intervention, questions Leninism.
“I feel that it is my duty to express my disagreement here”, he began by saying, after the vocative “comrades”. He is enthusiastic, but in the end, he received some applause.
Lusa described the event in this way: “Pina Moura, alternate member of the Central Committee, rejected the ‘Marxist-Leninist analysis’, challenged the ‘democratic centralism’ and opined that the PCP must ‘start over’.”
The break only happened the following year, in 1991, when the PCP’s militant 130 attacked Cunhal’s leadership for the support of the Portuguese communists to the coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, the country praised by the party for decades and that months later ceased to exist.
He left the party, without speaking to Cunhal, on October 3, 1991, the day the PSD won the second absolute majority, delivering a letter at the Soeiro Pereira Gomes headquarters in Lisbon.
“I left that day, but I had already decided to leave about two months earlier, when, contrary to the Central Committee, the Political Commission decided to publicly support the coup – which was later defeated – against Mikhail Gorbachev. Then I realized that I had no more nothing to do within the Communist Party, “he recalled in an interview with Expresso in February 2000.
Guterres’ right-hand man
In 1992, he was at the foundation of Plataforma de Esquerda with other ex-communists, such as Barros Moura, Raimundo Narciso, already approaching António Guterres’ PS, moving away from leaders like Miguel Portas and Daniel Oliveira, later founders of the Left.
With the arrival of António Guterres at the head of the PS, he became one of the “independents” who helped launch the General States to a New Majority, which paved the way for the victory of the Socialists in the 1995 legislatures.
With the PS in the Government, Pina Moura, who would become a militant that year, is one of Guterres’ “right arms”, which is worth the nickname “cardinal”.
It was Jorge Coelho, from the so-called “hard core” of guterrismo, who read an article in Avante !, in which the ecclesiastical title appeared, comparing Guterres and Pina Moura with Luís XII and Richelieu.
From then on, the PS leader himself used, by grace, this nickname, unlike the critics and the opposition, who used it with irony.
Dand Deputy Secretary of State for António Guterres, in 1995, successively passes through the portfolio of Economics, succeeding Daniel Bessa and Augusto Mateus. In 1999, he gained a new name, “superministro”: he joins the Economy and Finance portfolios, which concentrates all the economic policy.
With the fall of Guterres in 2002, Pina Moura remains in the Assembly of the Republic, where she arrived in 1995, and started a career linked to large companies.
He was a director of Galp and president of Iberdrola Portugal – in addition to the position of deputy, which earned him a wave of criticism in the party and outside.
It was in 2007 that he left all his party positions to take a place in the administration at Media Capital, owner of TVI, which he accumulated with that of president of Iberdrola, which he held until 2013.
In 2005, in response to the question of OIndependent on how a convinced communist becomes a manager of international capitalism, Pina Moura replied: “I live very well with what I was and what I am. I will never be a prisoner of media tyranny. I am very well with myself and that is account”.
In recent years, after having fallen ill, Joaquim Pina Moura withdrew from public life, making some stays in the area of Loriga, his homeland.
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