About José Manuel Barroso
José Manuel Durão Barroso (born 23 March 1956) is a Portuguese politician and law professor. He served as the prime minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004 and as the president of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014. He has been one of the revolving door cases at the EU, which received the most media attention because only two months after the cooling off period, Barroso accepted a position as "senior adviser" and "non-executive chairman" of Goldman Sachs International and became subject of an ethics inquiry. == Early life and education == José Barroso was born in Lisbon to Luís António Saraiva Barroso and his wife Maria Elisabete de Freitas Durão. Durão Barroso (as he is known in Portugal) graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon. He subsequently obtained a Diploma in European Studies from the European University Institute, and received a master's with honours in political science from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Barroso became politically active in his late teens, during the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. In his university days, he was one of the leaders of the underground Maoist MRPP (Re-Organized Movement of the Proletariat Party, later Portuguese Workers' Communist Party (PCTP/MRPP), Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat). In an interview with the newspaper Expresso, he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Portuguese Communist Party. Despite this justification, there is a very famous political 1976 interview recorded by the Portuguese state-run television channel, RTP, in which Barroso, as a politically minded student during the post-Carnation Revolution turmoil known as PREC, criticises the bourgeois education system which "throws students against workers and workers against students." Barosso was also one of the founders of the Portuguese University Association for European Studies (AUROP) in 1979.
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