António Luís Santos da Costa (born 17 July 1961) is a Goan - Portuguese lawyer and politician who has served as president of the European Council since 2024. He previously served as prime minister of Portugal from 2015 to 2024 and secretary-general of the Socialist Party from 2014 to 2024.
Born in Lisbon, Costa was secretary of State for Parliamentary Affairs from 1995 to 1997, minister of Parliamentary Affairs from 1997 to 1999, minister of Justice from 1999 to 2002, minister of Home Affairs from 2005 to 2007, as well as mayor of Lisbon from 2007 to 2015.
Costa was elected secretary-general of the Socialist Party in 2014. Costa's near nine-year tenure as prime minister is the second longest, with Costa also being the longest-serving politician in government functions, in Portuguese democracy, and the longest of any Iberian Peninsula national leader in the 21st century. On 7 November 2023, Costa resigned following an investigation involving members of his government in connection with alleged corruption and malfeasance in handling lithium mining and hydrogen projects in the country. The president of Portugal decided to dissolve Parliament and called for a snap election. Costa stayed as prime minister in a caretaker capacity until 2 April 2024, when he was succeeded by Luís Montenegro.
In December 2024, Costa succeeded Charles Michel as president of the European Council. As president of the European Council, Costa reaffirmed support for Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Born in the parish of São Sebastião da Pedreira in Lisbon, António Costa has Goan Catholic origins on his father's side. In Goa, Costa is affectionately known as Babush, a word in Konkani meaning 'a young loved one'. He is the son of the advertising professional and writer, as well as a prominent member of the Portuguese Communist Party, Orlando da Costa (himself the son of a Catholic Goan man and, on his mother's side, the grandson of a French woman, a direct male-line descendant of Marada Poi, a 16th-century Gaud Saraswat Brahmin), and his first wife, the journalist Maria Antónia Palla, first woman to join the leadership of the Portuguese Journalists' Union.
Costa graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon in the 1980s when he first entered politics and was elected as a Socialist deputy to the municipal council. He completed the mandatory military service in 1987 and later practised law briefly from 1988, before entering politics full-time.
António Costa joined the Socialist Youth in 1975, at the age of 14. In the 1982 local elections, Costa was elected as a member of the Lisbon municipal assembly, being re-elected in 1985 and 1989. In the 1991 legislative election, Costa was elected as member of the Assembly of the Republic from the district of Lisbon.
For the 1993 local elections, Costa was picked as the mayoral candidate for the municipality of Loures, a suburb of Lisbon. This contest threw national attention because Costa did a campaign stunt by promoting a race between a Ferrari and a donkey to highlight the difficulty in roads and transportation to Lisbon, and to point for the necessity of better roads and a subway connection to Loures. Costa narrowly lost the mayoral race to the Unitary Democratic Coalition (CDU) candidate by a 35 to 34 percent margin.
In the 1996 presidential election, António Costa was the campaign director of Jorge Sampaio's successful run for the Presidency of the Republic. Costa's first role in a Socialist government was as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs under Prime Minister António Guterres between 1997 and 1999. In Guterres' second term, Costa held the office of Minister of Justice from 1999 to 2002. Costa also coordinated the organization of the Expo '98 in Lisbon.
In the 2002 legislative election, Costa was elected a member of parliament from the district of Leiria and, due to the defeat of the PS in this election, became the party's parliamentary leader in opposition. During the 2003 Casa Pia child sexual abuse scandal, António Costa's name was involved in wiretaps where he appears to want to interfere with the Public Prosecutor's Office to avoid the arrest of the PS deputy Paulo Pedroso. Costa was a member of the European Parliament for the Socialist Party (Party of European Socialists), heading the list for the 2004 European elections after the death of top candidate António de Sousa Franco. On 20 July 2004, he was elected as one of the 14 vice-presidents of the European Parliament. He also served on the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Costa would remain a member of the Party of European Socialists (PES) coalition.
Costa resigned as an MEP on 11 March 2005 to become Minister of State and Internal Administration in the government of José Sócrates following the 2005 national elections.
António Costa resigned from all government offices in May 2007 to become his party's candidate for the municipality of Lisbon, Portugal's capital city. He was elected as Lisbon's mayor on 15 July 2007 and reelected in 2009 and 2013, with a bigger majority each time. In April 2015, he resigned his duties as mayor, while he was already the secretary general of the Socialist Party and the party's candidate for prime minister, so that he could prepare his campaign for the October 2015 general elections.
In September 2014, the Socialist Party chose Costa as its candidate to be prime minister of Portugal in the 2015 national elections. In a ballot to select the party's candidate, gaining nearly 70 percent of the votes, he defeated party leader António José Seguro, who announced his resignation after the result. By April 2015, he stepped down as mayor to focus on his campaign.
During the campaign, Costa pledged to ease back on austerity and give more disposable income back to households. He proposed to boost incomes, hiring and growth to cut the budget deficits while scrapping austerity measures and cutting taxes for the middle and lower classes, asserting that would still allow deficits to reduce in line with the Euro convergence criteria. Also, he pledged to roll back a hugely unpopular hike in value added tax on restaurants and reinstate some benefits for civil servants.
On 4 October 2015, the conservative Portugal Ahead coalition that had ruled the country since 2011 came first in the elections, winning 38.6% of the vote, while the Socialist Party (PS) came second with 32.3%. Passos Coelho was reappointed prime minister the following days, but António Costa formed an alliance with the other parties on the left (the Left Bloc, the Portuguese Communist Party and the Ecologist Party "The Greens"), which altogether constituted a majority in Parliament, and toppled the government on 10 November (the People–Animals–Nature party also voted in favour of the motion of rejection presented by the left alliance). After toppling the conservative government, Costa was chosen as the new prime minister of Portugal by President Cavaco Silva on 24 November and assumed office on 26 November.
By March 2017, polls put support for Costa's Socialists at 42 per cent, up 10 points from their share of the vote in the 2015 election and close to a level that would give them a majority in parliament were the country to vote again. In the 2017 local elections, Costa further consolidated power in Portugal as his party captured a record haul of 158 town halls out of the country's 308 cities and towns; nationwide, the Socialists’ vote share topped 38 per cent, again up from their result in the 2015 parliamentary election.
During his tenure, Portugal experienced its deadliest wildfires ever, firstly in Pedrogão Grande in June 2017 (65 dead) and later across the country in October 2017 (41 dead). In October 2017, the opposition People's Party (CDS) launched a motion of no-confidence in Costa's government over its failure to prevent the loss of human lives in the lethal Iberian wildfires, the second such disaster in four months; the motion was largely symbolic as the minority Socialist government continued to be backed in parliament by two left-wing parties.