Adolfo Mesquita Nunes
Adolfo Miguel Baptista Mesquita Nunes is a Portuguese jurist and politician with CDS – People's Party. He served as Member of the Assembly of the Republic from 2011 to 2013, and as Secretary of State for Tourism in Pedro Passos Coelho's first and second governments from 2013 to 2015.Biography
Adolfo Mesquita Nunes was born in Lisbon but raised in Covilhã with his paternal family. He earned his bachelor's degree in Law from the Catholic University of Portugal, and later a master's degree in Legal and Political Sciences in 2008 from the University of Lisbon.
He has been a member of CDS – People's Party since 1997. As a Member of Parliament, he became notable for being the only in the CDS caucus who voted for adoption by same-sex couples in 2012, and for being a member of the parliamentary committee on the international bailout programme in the wake of the 2010–2014 Portuguese financial crisis. As Secretary of State for Tourism under Minister of Economy :pt:António Pires de Lima|António Pires de Lima, he promoted deregulation of the sector.
In 2020, Adolfo Mesquita Nunes was put forward as a potential candidate in the 2021 Portuguese presidential election, with the support of some in the moderate right-wing of the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Initiative, as well as his own party.
Mesquita Nunes publicly came out in an interview to the newspaper Expresso in 2018, saying he had not done so before because he found such an announcement unnecessary; while calling it as a private matter, he also said he had never made any attempt to conceal it, citing an incident during the campaign for the 2017 local elections in which one of his political campaign billboards in Covilhã was spray painted with the word "gay" and he specifically asked for it not to be taken down as it wasn't calumnious. Mesquita Nunes became the first person in a major party leadership position to come out in Portugal, something that infrequently happens among Portuguese politicians.
