Portuguese politician. Prime Minister of Portugal. Sá Carneiro graduated in law from the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon in 1956. He became a member of the National Assembly in 1969 and one of the leaders of the Liberal Wing ("Ala Liberal") which attempted to work for the gradual transformation of Salazar's dictatorship into a Western European liberal democracy. In May 1974, a month after the Carnation Revolution, Sá Carneiro founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) and became its secretary-general. The PPD was soon renamed to Social Democratic Party (PSD); despite Sá Carneiro's original claims to be leading a left-of-centre party, he and the party soon drifted to the right, becoming the country's main centre-right force. He was minister without portfolio in a number of provisional governments, and was elected as a deputy to the Constitutional Assembly the next year. In 1976, he was elected to the Assembly of the Republic. In November 1977, he resigned his office as president of the party, only to be reelected to that office the next year. In the general election of late 1979, he led the Democratic Alliance, a coalition of his Social Democratic Party, the right-wing Democratic and Social Centre Party, and two smaller parties, to victory. The Alliance polled 45.2 percent of the popular vote and gained 128 of the 250 seats in the Assembly of the Republic; 75 of these were from PSD. President António Ramalho Eanes subsequently called him to form a government on January 3, 1980, and formed Portugal's first majority government since the Carnation Revolution of April 25, 1974, succeeding Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, Portugal's first and only female Prime Minister. In a second general election held in October that year, the Democratic Alliance increased its majority. The Alliance received 47.2 percent of the popular vote and 134 seats, 82 of them from PSD. His tenure as Prime Minister of Portugal ended abruptly 11 months later. On December 4, 1980, while on his way to a presidential election rally in Porto, the Cessna 421 he was flying on caught fire and crashed into a building in Camarate, Loures, soon after takeoff from the Lisbon Airport. Inside the plane were his lover, Snu Abecassis, Defence Minister Adelino Amaro da Costa and his wife Maria Manuela, the prime minister's chief of staff António Patrício Gouveia and the two pilots. All of them died in the crash. Eyewitnesses claimed they saw pieces falling from the plane just moments after it took off. Rumours have continued to fuel conspiracy theories that the crash was in fact an assassination, but no firm evidence has come to light. There were even different theories as to who might have been the target of such an assassination, as Sá Carneiro was travelling with the Defence Minister Adelino Amaro da Costa, who had said he had documents relating to the October surprise conspiracy theory and was planning on taking them to the United Nations General Assembly. For the 1995 re-opening of the judicial investigation, the victims' bodies were exhumed, and a forensic report concluded that there had probably not been an explosion on the aircraft, although the possibility was not ruled out. In 2004, the 8th parliamentary inquiry into the affair, headed by Christian Democratic Member of Parliament Nuno Melo concluded in its unanimous final report that the incident had been caused by an explosive device on the aircraft. Dependent to a considerable extent on Sá Carneiro's personal popularity, the Democratic Alliance was unable to maintain its momentum in the wake of his death. Faced with a national crisis, the public rallied behind the incumbent president, António Ramalho Eanes, who easily defeated the Alliance candidate in the presidential election a few days later. The airport where Sá Carneiro was heading to has been named after him as Francisco de Sá Carneiro Airport. His funeral gathered large crowds and he was originally entombed in Alto de São João Cemetery alongside his lover Snu Abecassis, whose remains were both later moved to Lumiar Cemetery.