Carlos Moedas

Biography

Carlos Manuel Félix Moedas (in Russian the surname is found in two spellings) was born on 10 August 1970 in Beja, in the Alentejo. His father, a communist, was a journalist and was associated with the newspaper Diário do Alentejo; the son did not share his father’s views.

At eighteen he moved to Lisbon and enrolled in civil engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico. He spent his final year in Paris, at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, on the Erasmus programme: he was one of the first Portuguese students to have that opportunity. He received his engineering degree in 1993.

From 1993 to 1998 he managed projects for the Suez group in France. In 2000 he graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA and went to work in the mergers and acquisitions department of Goldman Sachs, then at the investment bank Eurohypo, in its real estate division. In August 2004 he returned to Portugal, to the consulting company Aguirre Newman Portugal (now Savills Portugal), and in 2008 he founded his own firm, Crimson Investment Management. During the eurozone crisis he headed the economic research unit of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and, together with Eduardo Catroga, negotiated Portugal’s 2011 state budget. In the parliamentary elections of 5 June 2011 he stood for the PSD in the Beja constituency and was elected a member of parliament: for the first time since 1995 the party won a seat there. A few days later, on 21 June, Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho appointed him Secretary of State in the prime minister’s office. He represented the government in the negotiations on the financial assistance programme with the troika: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In 2014 Passos Coelho nominated him to the European Commission, and on 1 November Moedas took office as Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation in the Commission led by Jean-Claude Juncker. He was given Horizon 2020, the EU’s largest framework programme for research, with a budget of about 80 billion euros for 2014–2020. He held the post until 2019. In 2020–2021 he sat on the board of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In February–March 2021 he announced his candidacy for mayor of Lisbon, at the head of a coalition of the PSD and the Christian-democratic CDS–People’s Party. On 26 September 2021 he defeated the incumbent mayor, Fernando Medina, with 34.3 per cent of the vote, and took office on 18 October. In October 2025 he was re-elected for a second term (41.7 per cent). Since 2024 he has also been a member of Portugal’s Council of State.

His honours include the Gold Medal of the Portuguese Order of Engineers (2019); honorary doctorates from University College Cork (2016), ESCP Business School (2018), NOVA University Lisbon and West University of Timișoara (both 2022); the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry (2023); the rank of Knight of the papal Order of St Sylvester, for his work on the organisation of World Youth Day 2023 in Lisbon; and the French Legion of Honour (2025). In 2020 he published the book “Vento Suão: Portugal e a Europa”.