Francisco Manuel Lumbrales de Sá Carneiro, GCTE, GCC, GCL (; 19 July 19344 December 1980) was a Portuguese politician, Prime Minister of Portugal for most of 1980, and founder of the Social Democratic Party. He only held office of Prime Minister for eleven months, dying in a plane crash with his partner, "Snu" Abecassis (born Ebba Merethe Seidenfaden), on 4 December 1980. A parliamentary inquiry said in 2004 that there was evidence of a bomb in the aircraft, after a 1995 inquiry had concluded there was evidence of sabotage. Background Sá Carneiro was born in Vitória, Porto, the third of the five children of lawyer José Gualberto Chaves Marques de Sá Carneiro (1897–?) and Maria Francisca Judite Pinto da Costa Leite (1908–?) of the Counts of Lumbrales in Spain. Career A lawyer by training, Sá Carneiro became a member of the National Assembly in 1969 and, in turn, one of the leaders of the "Liberal Wing" (Ala Liberal) which attempted to work for the gradual transformation of Marcelo Caetano'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), together with Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Joaquim Magalhães Mota, Carlos Mota Pinto, João Bosco Mota Amaral, Alberto João Jardim, António Barbosa de Melo and António Marques Mendes, and became its secretary-general. The PPD was soon renamed the 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 the PSD. President António Ramalho Eanes subsequently called on him to form a government on 3 January 1980, and formed Portugal's first majority government since