The number two of the Socialist Government, which took office this Thursday, is from the Algarve. Mário Centeno was born in Vila Real de Santo António and, 48 years later, becomes Minister of Finance, after having been the mentor of the PS program in this area, in the 2015 Legislative Elections.
An appointment that was already announced, due to the important contribution made by Mário Centeno to the PS program and in the negotiations with the PCP and the BE, but which was not predictable, before the release of this document, as the Algarve economist never held any political position , having made a career as a specialist in Economics, in the Economic Studies Department of Banco de Portugal, of which he was deputy director until 2013.
His career was based on a successful academic path, which led him to a doctorate at Harvard University, in the United States, but which had its origins in the Algarve. Mário Centeno grew up in the city on the banks of the Guadiana River and studied there until he was 15, when he moved with his parents and siblings to Lisbon.
José Baía, current director of the Tavira Secondary School and president of the Tavira Municipal Assembly, taught the now finance minister, although, he confesses, he doesn't remember this student clearly. «I was his teacher in the 5th year, right when I started teaching. I remember that he was the grandson of Mr. Joaquim Gomes, who had a restaurant, where we used to have lunch», he recalls. While they lived in Vila Real, Mário Centeno's father was a banker and his mother worked at the post office, he being the second of four children of the couple.
The Joaquim Gomes restaurant is still active today, in the center of VRSA, but it no longer belongs to the family. It was sold in 1998, after the death of grandfather Joaquim Gomes, who was himself an Alentejo native from Mértola who escaped a hard life in the Mina de São Domingos.
According to the most loyal friends of the Government's new number two, the fried cuttlefish with ink (whose recipe even appears in the Algarve Tourism Region cookbook) is one of the gastronomic specialties that Mário Centeno himself likes to cook, perhaps to remember its Algarvian roots.
The finance minister, who was sworn in yesterday at 16 pm, has family members not only in the land where he was born, but also in Tavira, where he still maintains a house, where he continues to return on vacation, with his wife and teenage children.
After moving with his family to Lisbon, he continued his studies there, at Escola Secundária Patrício Prazeres, and joined the degree in Economics at the Higher Institute of Economics and Management (ISEG), where he joined the honor roll and concluded with a average of 16 values. Performance that convinced the prestigious Harvard University to accept him, in 1995. Five years later, he earned a doctorate in economics from this North American university.
When he arrived at Harvard, at the age of 27, Mário Centeno was already married to a former colleague at ISEG and his first child, Tiago, the eldest of three, was born during this period when the family lived in the North American city of Cambridge.
“Harvard was a revolution in my way of seeing the economy in almost everything”, said Mário Centeno, in a recent interview to “Visão” magazine. "I became much more sensitive to the relationship between the economy and people." The fact is that, he stressed, "sometimes, macroeconomics forgets that people are on the other side." And the example he gave of this situation is that “when the previous government thought about these [austerity] measures, it thought that the young people would accommodate their standard of living and that they would stay here and impoverish. This did not happened". Just as a microeconomist would have predicted.
After completing his PhD, Mário Centeno returned to Portugal and began working at Banco de Portugal, in the Department of Economic Studies, where he had already collaborated between 1993 and 1995. There he became a renowned specialist in labor economics, with articles published in dozens of international magazines. Since the beginning of 2014, he has been a special advisor to the BdP board of directors.
At the same time, he developed an academic career, as a visiting professor at the Higher Institute of Economics and Management, from 1993, and at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, since 2006.
In his professional environment, Mário Centeno is considered a liberal, but he himself disputes this "label". And, choose the term "fusion" to better define yourself. As I told “Vision”, “we cannot let society crush the individual. This is my liberalism».
And the Portuguese will now see what this Algarve-born economist has in store for them, as head of the crucial Finance portfolio.
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