Antonio Costa: from quitting under cloud to top EU job

Just months after quitting under a cloud of corruption allegations, Portuguese ex-premier Antonio Costa sealed an impressive comeback Thursday as European Union leaders chose him for one of the bloc's top jobs.

At a summit in Brussels, the affable former lawyer was picked as the next president of the European Council, whose job involves overseeing meetings of the EU's 27 squabbling leaders.

Tapped alongside him were Ursula von der Leyen for another term heading the European Commission, and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as the EU's next foreign policy chief.

Helping to win over leaders was Costa's experience as a pragmatic and skillful tactician, capable of negotiating unlikely agreements and turning setbacks into opportunities.

"In democracy, politics has to be based on compromise. One goes into politics to make deals," the 62-year-old said in an interview this year.

Coming from the EU's southwestern fringe -- he is seen as bringing a political and geographical balance to the team headed by von der Leyen, a conservative former German defence minister at the helm since 2019.

"He's her perfect symmetrical opposite," one diplomat said. "He is a Social Democrat, he is from the south."

The thumbs up from EU leaders completed a stunning reversal of fortune.

In November, Costa abruptly resigned after eight years as prime minister after being implicated in a probe into his administration's handling of energy-related contracts.

The corruption inquiry, while not formally closed, has since appeared to come apart, with a court determining in April that there was no indication a crime had been committed.

- Family from Goa -

The Lisbon-born Costa was raised in intellectual circles frequented by his father, a communist writer with family roots in Goa, Portugal's former colony in India, and his mother, a journalist and women's rights advocate.

Nicknamed "Babush", a term of endearment for a little boy in Goa, Costa joined the Socialist Party youth wing in 1975 when he was just 14, a year after a coup ended a decades-long right-wing dictatorship.

Educated in law and political science, Costa's big political break came in 1995, when he was named secretary of state for parliamentary affairs in the minority government of Antonio Guterres, the current UN secretary-general.

Four years later, he became justice minister. Then, after a brief stint as a member of the European Parliament, he became interior minister in 2005 in the Socialist government of Jose Socrates.

After two years, he stepped down and became mayor of Lisbon, winning re-election in 2009 and 2013.

The move to municipal politics allowed Costa to distance himself from Socrates, who stepped down in 2011 after negotiating an international bailout for the country, and who was arrested in 2014 on charges of corruption and tax evasion.

- Determined and tenacious -

That same year, Costa became head of the Socialist Party, and while the party lost 2015 elections, Costa came to power by forging an unprecedented pact with the radical left to "turn the page on austerity".

Riding the wave of the global economic recovery and a tourism boom, Costa undid some of the austerity measures imposed by his predecessors in exchange for an international aid package.

And his government balanced the books, posting the first budget surplus in Portugal's recent history.

He led the Socialists to victory in the 2019 election, though they fell short of an outright majority.

In October 2021, after failing to win budgetary support from two small far-left parties, Costa called snap polls that finally brought him an absolute majority in January 2022.

Appreciated by Socialists across Europe, his pragmatic streak helped him extend his influence beyond his political sphere. In 2020, he visited Hungary's hardline Prime Minister Viktor Orban to overcome opposition to a post-Covid recovery plan that proved crucial for Portugal.

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