Jorge Neto

Jorge Manuel Ferraz de Freitas Neto was born on 3 January 1957. According to the PSD, he was born in Lousada, a municipality in the Porto district, which remained central to his life and politics; the Portuguese Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Porto. His political involvement began in 1974, the year of the Carnation Revolution, when he joined the JSD, the youth organisation of the Social Democratic Party, and began contributing to Pelo Socialismo, a paper published jointly with the party newspaper Povo Livre.

He studied law at the University of Coimbra, graduating in 1980, and was admitted to the Portuguese Bar Association in 1982. He later took a course in modern political theory at the London School of Economics.

Neto practised law for more than four decades and was the founder of Jorge Neto and Associados, a law firm with offices in Porto and Lousada. He taught as a guest lecturer at the Universidade Independente and was registered as an arbitrator with the commercial arbitration centre of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

He was elected to the Assembly of the Republic for the Porto constituency in the eighth, ninth and tenth legislatures, serving from 1999 to 2004 and from 2005 to 2009. From 2001 to 2004 he was vice president of the PSD parliamentary group, and from 2000 to 2002 he belonged to the shadow cabinet of the party leader Jose Manuel Durao Barroso.

In November 2004 Prime Minister Pedro Santana Lopes appointed him Secretary of State for Defence and Veterans in the 16th Constitutional Government, replacing Jose Pereira da Costa, who had left for personal reasons. He was one of three PSD deputies brought into the government in that reshuffle and served until the government left office in 2005.

From 24 October 2007 to 21 April 2010 he was director of Povo Livre, the official PSD newspaper. In business, he served on the board of the Confederation of Portuguese Business (CIP) and as vice president of its general council from 2014 to 2016, and chaired the general meetings of several companies.

Neto kept a lifelong connection to Lousada, where his law firm had one of its two offices and where the PSD said he left a lasting mark on local political life. His firm described him as fluent in Spanish, French, English and Italian. Details of his family life were not widely reported.

Jorge Neto died on 22 October 2026, aged 69. The PSD announced his death the same day in a note of condolence that expressed the party's deep dismay and conveyed its sympathy to his family. The note, reported by the Lusa news agency, SIC Noticias, CNN Portugal, Publico and SOL, said: "Jorge Neto was an active militant, a lawyer of recognised merit and a man of notable culture and intelligence. His capacity for dialogue and his generosity marked his career, leaving an indelible mark on national politics and on the municipality of Lousada, where he was born." The cause of death was not made public.

Neto's career spanned half a century of PSD politics, from the party's youth wing in the revolutionary year of 1974 to leadership roles in its parliamentary group, the Barroso shadow cabinet, the Santana Lopes government and the party newspaper Povo Livre, which he had first written for as a young man. The party remembered him for his dialogue across divides, his legal ability and his devotion to Lousada.