Portugal 1999

Portugal’s population in 1999 was estimated at 10.1 million people, with a growth rate of 0.2%. The economy of Portugal was largely dependent on its agricultural sector, which accounted for around 5% of the country’s GDP. This was supplemented by the services and manufacturing industries. Foreign relations in 1999 were largely positive with the country enjoying strong ties with many European nations and the wider international community. Politically, Portugal had been a constitutional democracy since 1976 when it formally adopted a democratic system. The ruling party at this time was the Socialist Party (PS), which had been in power since 1995. In 1999, Jorge Sampaio was President and had been since 1996. See ethnicityology for Portugal in the year of 2018.

Yearbook 1999

Portugal 1999

Portugal. Visit Countryaah official website to get information about the capital city of Portugal. The Portuguese ruling Socialist Party, Partido Socialista (PS), won a convincing victory in the autumn parliamentary elections. The party won 44% of the vote against the 32.5% that the Conservative Social Democratic opposition party, Partido Social Democrata (PSD), had to settle for.

  • Also see Abbreviationfinder.org to see the acronym of PRT which stands for Portugal and other definitions of this 3-letter abbreviation.

Map of Portugal Lisbon in English

Prime Minister António Guterres and his party, however, failed to gain a majority in parliament as PS managed to get only 113 of the 230 seats. The Guterre government benefited from the general economic downturn in Portugal, and the prime minister himself enjoys great popularity among the people.

Guterres had gone to the election with promises of painful economic reforms, and his comment that PS did not succeed in gaining a majority in Parliament was: “The people did not feel we deserved better”. The Communist Party, Partido Comunista Portugues (PCP), was similar to the right-wing Liberal People’s Party, Partido Popular (PP), in less than 10% of the vote.

However, Portuguese revolutionary leader Ernesto Melo Antunes died of lung cancer in the summer. He was the brain behind the political reform program designed in the army to end 40 years of dictatorship and which led to the bloody revolution of 1974, when Portugal became a democracy.

The world-famous Portuguese fado singer Amália Rodrigues passed away in the fall. Fado are melancholic songs that began to be sung in Lisbon’s poor neighborhoods and eventually penetrated into the lounges and on the international stages thanks in large part to Amália Rodrigues.

In November 2016, the government announced plans to exempt victims of sexual harassment, rape, circumcision, slavery and trafficking in order to pay court costs.

In January 2017, Parliament passed a transgender identity law. The law made it easier to change names and genders.

Also in January, Portuguese António Guterres assumed the post of UN Secretary-General. He was UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2005-15.

Costa’s government was popular in Portugal. Opinion polls in March 2017 showed a 42% support for his social democracy. An increase of 10% compared to the elections in 2015. At the municipal elections in October, the party received the mayor post in 158 out of 308 municipalities. The party’s support during the election was 38%.

In July, the country won the European Football Championship with a 1-0 victory over the host country France.

The country was exposed to heavy forest fires in 2017. Fires in the Pedrogão Grande in June cost 65 lives, and a number of fires cost 41 lives in October. In October, the opposition party CDS set a distrust agenda for the government because it could not prevent the loss of human lives in the fires. The opposition’s attempt to give the government responsibility for natural disasters was expressed as its desperation for the government’s success. The minority government was supported by the left and was not voted down.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the use of drugs. The result has since been a dramatic reduction in the crime associated with drugs and a dramatic reduction in the number of overdoses and sequelae. At the same time, the community put most of its prejudices on drug addicts on the shelf.

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