José Sarney

José Sarney, born José Ribamar Ferreira de Araújo Costa in Pinheiro, Maranhão, entered Congress in the 1950s, moved from the PSD to the UDN and joined the military regime's ARENA party after 1965. He governed Maranhão and became a senator and president of the government party, the PDS. In 1984 he broke with the PDS to lead the Liberal Front and became Tancredo Neves's running mate. Tancredo fell ill before the March 1985 inauguration and died in April, so Sarney governed until 1990. He later served as senator for Amapá from 1991 and presided over the Senate four times. He left the Senate at the end of his term in January 2015 and has held no elected office since. He is a novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

Supporters credit Sarney with steering a fragile transition to democracy without a military backlash, with legalizing parties, ending censorship and convening the assembly that produced the 1988 Constitution, and with laying the foundations of Mercosur. Critics argue that he governed as a product of the old regime, used more than a thousand radio and television licenses to win votes in the Constituent Assembly for a five-year term, and left office amid hyperinflation, with prices rising about 2,750 percent in his final year. His long dominance of politics in Maranhão, one of Brazil's poorest states, is often cited as an example of family-based oligarchic power, and a 2009 scandal over secret administrative acts damaged his reputation as Senate president.