José Manuel Durão Barroso (Portuguese pronunciation: ; born 23 March 1956) is a Portuguese politician. He is the 11th President of the European Commission, since 23 November 2004. He served as Prime Minister of Portugal from 6 April 2002 to 17 July 2004.

Barroso graduated in Law from the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon and has an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from the University of Geneva (Institut Européen de l'Université de Genève) in Switzerland. His academic career continued as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon. He did research for a Ph.D at Georgetown University and Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C.. He is a 1998 graduate of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. Back in Lisbon, Barroso became Director of the Department for International Relations at Lusíada University (Universidade Lusíada). He also received an honorary degree from Warsaw School of Economics (2007), Liverpool University on 3 July 2008 and from Chemnitz University of Technology on 8 May 2009.

Barroso's political activity began in his college days, before the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974. He was one of the leaders of the underground Maoist MRPP (Reorganising Movement of the Proletariat Party, later PCTP/MRPP, Communist Party of the Portuguese Workers/Revolutionary Movement of the Portuguese Proletariat). In an interview with the newspaper Expresso, he said that he had joined MRPP to fight the only other student body movement, also underground, which was controlled by the Communist Party. Despite this justification there is a very famous political 1976 interverview recorded by RTP in which he criticizes the bourgeois education system which "throws students against workers and workers against students", showing clear left-wing and maoist inclinations. In December 1980, Barroso joined the right-of-centre PPD (Democratic Popular Party, later PPD/PSD-Social Democratic Party), where he remains to the present day.