Mario Soares, former Portugal president and prime minister, has died at age 92. Soares was a central figure in the country’s return to democracy in the 1970s after decades of rightist dictatorship, Euronews reported. Portugal’s current Premier Antonio Costa described him as a man who had struggled for freedom throughout his life. April 25, 1974, was the day of Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” when it overthrew the dictatorship that had been headed by strongman Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. After embracing Portugal’s democratic movement as a socialist, Soares was jailed 12 times and then exiled for his political activities during Salazar’s dictatorship. Soares headed the country’s first democratically elected government in 1976. The founder of the Portuguese Socialist Party was premier three times and later spent a decade as the country’s head of state. “Today Portugal lost its father of liberty and democracy, the person and face the Portuguese identify most with the regime that was born on April 25, 1974,” the Socialist Party said in a statement.
