Barack Obama is coming to Lisbon on 10 October, and tickets run from €39 to €250
Barack Obama headlines the sixth edition of the Game Changers Forum on 10 October at Lisbon's MEO Arena. His session is the centrepiece of a day with more than 30 speakers.
Diary note for anyone who enjoys this sort of thing: on 10 October, Barack Obama will be on a stage in Lisbon talking about leadership.
Where is it, and how much does it cost to see Obama in Lisbon?
It is at the MEO Arena in Parque das Nações, as part of the sixth Game Changers Forum. The session is billed as “A Conversation with President Barack Obama” and headlines a day with more than 30 speakers on the main stage, built around leadership, resilience and how much human relationships weigh in any project trying to shift something.
Tickets are already on sale and run from €39 to €250 depending on where you sit. Not cheap, but not the usual price of admission to hear a former US president either, and the organisers are aiming to fill a room that holds more than 20,000 people in show configuration.
Has Obama been to Portugal before?
He has. He was in Lisbon in 2010, still in the White House, for the NATO summit, and came back in 2018, by then a former president, for a conference in Porto on climate change. Since leaving office he has become one of the most in-demand names on the international conference circuit, alongside the work of the foundation he set up with Michelle Obama, the Obama Foundation.
Nobody should expect live American politics from him in Lisbon — these events usually stay in conversational register, with White House stories and advice about making decisions with too little information and too much noise. But the timing helps: October in the United States means the eve of elections, and there is no way that stays out of the room.
For Lisbon, it is another big name in a year when the country has kept turning up on the international radar for varied reasons, from tourism to tech investment — Google’s subsea cable has just landed in Sines, and it is the same trend talking.
Image: Reino Baptista / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
