The best way to evaluate someone’s legacy is to imagine what their community – and the country – would be like if that person had not existed, or if they had not done what they managed to do. Let us ask ourselves, as the writer Lídia Jorge did, what Portugal would be like if Francisco Pinto Balsemão had not left his comfort zone and decided to act in politics, journalism, culture and other areas of national life where he left his legacy over more than fifty years.
For starters, it would have been a different country from a political point of view. European integration itself could have been delayed by several years. It was Francisco Pinto Balsemão who, as Prime Minister and together with Mário Soares, carried out the constitutional review that, in 1982, ended once and for all the military’s supervision over our democracy. This fact is something that many neither know nor dream about how important it was for the normalization of our democracy and for Portugal’s integration into the European community.
On the other hand, we have Balsemão’s legacy in the media. And here there is no doubt about the importance of his legacy: he founded Expresso, reinventing the written press in Portugal and creating a newspaper at the level of what was best done in the most advanced countries in Europe at the time.
Later, in the 90s, when the sector finally left the State’s purview, Balsemão launched the first private television channel in Portugal, SIC, which gave rise to a whole revolution. Anyone who still remembers Portugal, which had only two state channels, one of which was half-time, remembers the difference made by the arrival of a different, more airy television channel.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão has always defended journalism and this explains the admiration that many journalists dedicate to him, even those who, for some reason, are critical of his ideas or some of the decisions he made. Like any myth, that of “Balsemão, the good boss”, will not tell the whole story. But there will be more than enough truth for Expresso to have established itself, since 1973, as a reference newspaper, very credible and appealing to an urban and cultured Portugal. And so that today, in these days of October 2025, many journalists and workers from the Impresa group feel like orphans after the death of the founder.
As always happens, only time will allow us to make a more complete assessment of Francisco Pinto Balsemão’s legacy. And, like any other personality, his also had lights and shadows, both as a politician and as a media entrepreneur. But these facts – the end of military tutelage over democracy and the founding of Expresso and SIC, together with his defense of freedom and journalism – are more than enough for us to say, like the President of the Republic, that Portugal has lost one of the most remarkable personalities of the last six decades.
Meanwhile, the future of the Impresa group will be played out in the coming weeks, in ongoing negotiations with the Italian group MFE. Balsemão has always refused to give up control of the Press and the urgency of the current operation is due to this fact.