The decree changing how free prescriptions are costed for Portugal's poorest pensioners takes effect on 17 October, and it carries a guarantee for anyone the pharmacy fails to warn about the cheaper option.

The clock started on 18 August. Decree-Law 169/2026 says in its final article that it takes effect 60 days after publication, which lands on 17 October. From that date, it's the rule pharmacies apply at the counter. That's 20 days away. We explained how the free-medicine rule changes when the decree came out: recipients of the complemento solidário para idosos, Portugal's top-up for pensioners on the lowest incomes, still take their medicines without…

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Addressing the UN General Assembly, the prime minister criticized how global oil prices are set, backed a two-state solution in the Middle East, and reaffirmed Portugal's full support for Ukraine.

Luís Montenegro took the podium at the UN General Assembly in New York and opened with something that hits every Portuguese wallet: the price of fuel. He called it a "senseless crisis" and asked the world to end "this collective masochism," a direct jab at the mechanism that sets oil prices globally, according to UN Portugal's account of the speech. His argument was that entire economies remain hostage to speculation and volatility in a market nobody…

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We counted the calamity legislation list the Government itself keeps on gov.pt: 37 instruments since 30 January, 24 of them in the first four weeks, none at all in July or August. The newest one rewrites the overtime rules for the people who answered the storm.

Storm Kristin crossed Portugal in the last week of January. The state of calamity lasted nineteen days. The legislation has not stopped. Decreto-Lei n.º 191/2026 appeared in the Diário da República on Tuesday, and we wanted to know where it sat in the queue. So we counted. The Government keeps a guide listing every piece of calamity legislation on gov.pt, updated as each one lands. We added up the entries on that page, one by one, with the date on each.…

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The proposal tabled on 17 September gives €160 a month in 2026, backdated to July, and €230 in 2027, but only to the PSP and GNR border units. Six of the seven PSP unions at the table were willing to negotiate. Two organisations are still holding protests over the 2024 deal.

Read that the government has offered Portuguese police another €160 a month and you will want the next line. The supplement tabled on 17 September is not for the PSP or the GNR as a whole. It is for two units: the PSP's national foreigners and borders unit, and the GNR's coastal and border control unit. The offer is €160 a month in 2026, backdated to July, rising to €230 in 2027. The interior ministry grounds it in how particular the job is: dedicated…

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Rates fall by 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points across the first six brackets, at a cost of about 400 million euros and covering nearly three million households. The government approved the bill on Thursday; parliament has not voted on it.

Portugal's cabinet signed off a bill on Thursday that lowers IRS income tax rates across the first six brackets. The cut runs from 0.3 to 0.5 percentage points, costs roughly 400 million euros and, according to the government's own statement, reaches close to three million households. The word doing the heavy lifting there is bill. Tax rates are not changed in cabinet. They are changed by a law passed in the Assembleia da República, and that is where the…

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Parpública notified the market regulator of a qualified holding of 91,723,676 shares, completed on 7 September once the Court of Auditors signed off. The Socialists want statutory criteria for when the state may buy into a private company.

The deal is done. REN told the market that Parpública holds a qualified stake of 91,723,676 ordinary shares, representing 13.7% of its capital, putting the Portuguese state back on the share register twelve years after it left. The shares changed hands and the price was paid on 7 September. When we wrote about this in August the open question was procedural. The contract with Pontegadea had been signed on 14 August but hung on a condition, and we said the…

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Brasília opened its first reciprocity case on 13 August. Add up every maximum the decree sets, stage by stage, and the outer limit falls in May 2027.

A month has passed since Brazil opened the first case in its history under the Economic Reciprocity Law, and nothing has been taxed. That is not drift. It is the regulation working as written. So we read the regulation and did the addition. The decree that puts the law into practice is Decree 12,551 of 14 July 2025, and the deadlines sit in articles 11, 13 and 15. Four stages, each with its own clock, and every one of them slower than a first reading…

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The request for an urgent debate reached the speaker's office on Monday morning, six days ahead of Chega's scheduled slot on 24 September. Chega's VAT bills would not take effect until January 2027.

Portugal's new parliamentary session opens on Wednesday, and the first fight is already in the diary. On Monday morning the Socialists asked for an urgent debate on the rising cost of living, to be held this Friday, which puts them in front of Chega, who had booked the same subject for 24 September. Six days is not much. In a parliament where the opposition is competing to look the least patient, it is enough. Fuel, food and housing costs. That is the…

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A Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos study reads every one of the 507 ministers appointed since 1976. Technical credentials climbed across five decades, and so did the share of ministers carrying a party card — from 52% under Costa to about 70% under Montenegro.

The headline number from Monday's Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos study is the unflattering one. Of the 507 people appointed to a Portuguese ministry since 1976, 113 of them — 22% — took the job with no professional experience anyone would call relevant to it. That comes from Who Governs Portugal? A Comparative Analysis of Ministerial Profiles (1976–2025), coordinated by Marcelo Camerlo and António Costa Pinto, which sets Portugal against Spain,…

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Magdalena Andersson's party led on 28.4% and election-night projections give the left bloc a majority in the 349-seat Riksdag. The definitive count only starts on Monday and takes about a week.

Sweden voted on Sunday, and the party that has shaped Swedish politics for most of the past century finished first again. Magdalena Andersson's Social Democrats took 28.4%, ahead of everyone else, and election-night projections hand the left bloc a majority in the Riksdag: 183 of 349 seats, off 51.3% of the vote against 46.8% for the right. "Election-night projections" is the operative phrase. The preliminary result published by Sweden's election…

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The party's national board has proposed an ordinary congress for that weekend, with around a thousand delegates to be elected across the districts first. It has to choose new national bodies and settle the statutory problems the Constitutional Court identified.

Chega is going to elect everything again. The party's national board has proposed an ordinary congress for 20, 21 and 22 November, with an agenda of two items that amount to one: choose the national bodies afresh, and clear up the organisational and statutory questions the Constitutional Court left hanging. André Ventura, the party leader, announced it at a press conference at the national headquarters in Lisbon. The proposal now goes to the party's board…

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The 2024 agreement delivered a risk supplement worth more than 300 euros a month. Two years on, the pay regime, the career structure and the appraisal system are still unrevised, and the Guard's professional association is calling protests through mid-October.

The secretariat of the Associação dos Profissionais da Guarda met on Friday at its national headquarters in Lisbon and left with a decision. The GNR is going out. The actions start at the end of this month, run through the middle of October, and finish in what the association describes as a major national protest. The arithmetic behind it is two years old. A 2024 agreement with the ministry raised the service and risk supplement by more than 300 euros a…

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The leaders' conference has set the autumn agenda: national exams, online gambling, the start of the school year, the INEM shake-up and the urban tenancy regime. The prime minister's first debate waits until 9 October.

The new legislative session opens on Wednesday with six plenary days already booked before the end of September. At the far end of the queue sits the date that matters to everyone: the 2027 State Budget proposal must reach the Assembly of the Republic by 12 October. The budget framework law puts the deadline at 10 October. This year that falls on a Saturday, so it slides to the following Monday.

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Decree-Law 182/2026, published on Thursday, sets up CELE 2 — the EU's second carbon market — for fuels burned in buildings and road transport. Fuel suppliers buy the allowances, there are no free ones, and the system is only fully running in 2028.

Thursday's Diário da República carried the law that brings the European Union's second carbon market into Portuguese law. Decree-Law 182/2026 partly transposes the 2023 EU directive that created CELE 2, and it reaches a set of emissions that had largely sat outside the existing scheme: the fuels burned in buildings, in road transport and in a handful of other sectors. The Council of Ministers approved the text on 9 July. The President signed it at the…

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Announced during the censure-motion debate: two measures worth €400 million each — a progressive supplement for more than two million pensioners, and an income-tax cut felt from November in payslip withholding and backdated to January.

The government picked a debate about its own survival to explain how it plans to spend €800 million. Opening his speech on Tuesday in the Chega censure-motion debate, Luís Montenegro announced two tax and benefit measures that will land in people's accounts before the year is out. The first is an extraordinary supplement for pensioners, paid on a sliding scale up to €1,611.13. It costs roughly €400 million and, according to the government's own statement,…

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Employers filed 1,777 non-renewal notices with the equality commission CITE in 2025, down from 1,894 in 2024. Non-renewal outnumbers formal dismissal roughly fifteen to one.

Portugal's equality commission for work and employment, CITE, received 1,777 notices during 2025 from employers who would not be renewing fixed-term contracts held by pregnant women, women who had recently given birth, breastfeeding mothers or workers on parental leave. The figure was published on Tuesday by the women's equality commission of the CGTP-IN trade union confederation, timed to National Natality Day. The 2024 total was 1,894. So the number has…

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We opened both government orders and compared the annexes. Two zones joined the shortage map for 2026/27 and four dropped off it — and the four that dropped off cover fourteen southern municipalities.

The €750 a month Portugal pays teachers who put off retirement applies this school year in eight pedagogical zones. Last year it applied in ten. That subtraction was reported as a subtraction — two fewer — and most coverage stopped there. Two is the net figure. The gross figure is four out and two in, and the four that left share a map: the Lezíria do Tejo, the Alentejo Litoral, the Baixo Alentejo. The Alentejo now has no zone on the shortage list at all.…

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Final turnout was 77.8%. The AfD took 39 of the Landtag's 83 seats, three fewer than it needs to govern alone. The CDU fell to 17.2% and Die Linke took 8.6%. The official result is not declared until 22 September.

The AfD recorded the best state result in its history on Sunday and still did not get there. Saxony-Anhalt's returning officer put the party on 43.8% of the vote, which converts to 39 of the Landtag's 83 seats. An absolute majority is 42. Three short. Small enough to fit in a sentence, big enough to decide who runs the state for the next five years. Turnout finished at 77.8%, and the morning had already flagged it: 34.72% of the electorate had voted by…

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Decree-Law 177/2026, published on Friday, is the seventeenth amendment to the Public Contracts Code. It lifts four thresholds at once, the largest of them from 150,000 to a million euros.

A town hall that wants a school roof rebuilt will soon be able to pick a firm, agree a price and sign, with no competition at any point, as long as the job comes in under 150,000 euros. The current cut-off is 30,000. That is five times more room. The rule appeared in the official gazette on Friday. Decree-Law 177/2026 is the seventeenth amendment to the Public Contracts Code since 2008, and it applies from 1 October, leaving buyers just under four weeks…

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That is the 2027 cost of measures already approved. Pensions account for €1.99bn, public-sector pay for more than €1bn, and debt interest for €776m more than this year.

Every year, by 31 August, the Portuguese government hands parliament a document with a name nobody would say out loud: the Framework of Invariant Policies. It does something genuinely useful. It shows MPs what the decisions already taken will cost next year, before a single new measure is debated. For 2027 the bill is €4.783 billion. Spending accounts for €5.042 billion; on the revenue side a net saving of €259 million softens the total. Pensions are the…

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Chega filed its censure motion on Wednesday and party leaders decide on Thursday whether the debate lands on 10 or 17 September. It is the 37th since 1976, and the arithmetic explains the pattern.

Chega filed its censure motion against the government on Wednesday. André Ventura announced it at the party's Lisbon headquarters, flanked by MPs Cristina Rodrigues, Pedro Frazão and Nuno Gabriel. Parliament's president, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, passed the scheduling to the conference of parliamentary leaders, which decides on Thursday whether the debate happens on 10 or 17 September. Before the dates, the arithmetic. That is usually where these stories…

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The electoral commission counted 383,117 votes for and 160,904 against on a 62.6% turnout. The text moves the prime minister's powers to the president, cuts parliament from 102 seats to 65 and sets the legal frame for December's elections.

Guinea-Bissau's National Electoral Commission released provisional results on Tuesday for Sunday's referendum, and the yes side took 70%. That is 383,117 ballots for the new constitution against 160,904 opposed. Of 914,428 registered voters, 572,714 turned out, a participation rate of 62.6%. The regional breakdown says more than the headline percentage does. Gabú gave the yes 90%, Bafatá 85%, Biombo and Quinara 79%, Cacheu and Tombali 70%, Oio 60% and…

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Law 34/2026 changes 32 articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure from 1 September. Prosecutors get a 20-witness ceiling, trials must be listed within two months, and stalling can now cost up to 10,200 euros.

Anyone with a criminal hearing listed this week is walking into a different rulebook from the one that applied on Friday. Law 34/2026 came into force today, rewriting 32 articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure, adding three more, and reaching into the Penal Code and the court-fees regulation as well. Parliament passed it on 12 June and the President signed it on 17 July, but nothing changed until 1 September.

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José Manuel Pureza closed his party's autumn forum with two ideas: Caixa Geral de Depósitos cutting its spread to absorb the ECB's 2026 rate rises, and doubling the property surcharge that funds Social Security.

Portugal's Left Bloc wrapped up its autumn forum in Setúbal with two proposals aimed at the same group of people: anyone paying a mortgage, and anyone relying on Social Security. The first has a name, the Caixa Brake. National coordinator José Manuel Pureza proposed that Caixa Geral de Depósitos spend twelve months absorbing the European Central Bank's 2026 rate rises rather than passing them through to payments on a borrower's own permanent home. The…

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André Ventura set 1 September as the deadline. If the interior minister is still in post, Chega says it files the motion that day.

Chega has finally put a date on it. If Luís Neves is still interior minister on Tuesday 1 September, the party says it will file a censure motion against Luís Montenegro's government that same day. André Ventura made the announcement on Friday, and it is the first time in this standoff that Chega has named a deadline rather than issued a warning. Ventura was careful to draw a line between the two things he is asking for. He says he does not want a…

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A draft decree-law reshaping the conservador and registry-officer careers has cleared public consultation and now goes to the Council of Ministers. The largest monthly rise is 288.49 euros, and it lands in the middle of the scale rather than at the top.

If you work behind the counter at a Portuguese conservatória, your pay scale is about to be redrawn. The draft decree-law revising the careers of conservador de registos and oficial de registos appeared on 3 August in separata 24/2026 of the Boletim do Trabalho e Emprego, has finished its twenty days of public consultation, and is now waiting on the Council of Ministers. The headline figure is 288.49 euros a month. That is the biggest rise produced by…

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The President promulgated a government decree on 24 August giving domestic effect to EU regulations on carriage of passengers and baggage by rail, road and sea, explicitly covering hand luggage, pets and bicycles.

Taking a bike on the train, travelling with the cat in a carrier, checking a bag onto a scheduled ferry — all of this has been regulated at EU level for years. What Portugal was missing is the dull, decisive part: who checks, who takes the complaint, who issues the fine. That gap is what the government has just closed. On 24 August, the President promulgated the decree giving domestic legal effect to the obligations arising from several European…

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Portugal's Council of Ministers approved the decree creating the Figueira da Foz Julgado de Paz on 20 August, covering civil disputes up to €15,000. The building was renovated months ago, but the court cannot open until the decree is promulgated, published and followed by a ministerial order fixing the date.

On Praceta Dr. Nogueira de Carvalho, in the parish of São Julião, there is a three-storey building with a hearing room, an office for the justice of the peace, a witness room and a space set aside for pre-mediation. The refurbishment cost around €72,000 and finished months ago. The one thing missing is a date for opening the door. The government's part arrived on 20 August. Meeting at the Prime Minister's official residence, the Council of Ministers…

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At a formal session in Vila Nova de Cerveira, António José Seguro named depopulation, ageing and distance from decision-making centres as problems the central state has to answer with investment.

Vila Nova de Cerveira sits on the Minho, in Portugal's far north-west, with a castle built under King Dinis and a contemporary art biennial now in its 24th edition. From there, on Sunday, President António José Seguro sent a message to the government. "I know the difficulties common to so many territories of the interior and the border. Depopulation, ageing, distance from the big decision-making centres," he told the biennial's formal session. "These are…

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Law 35/2026 sets criminal-policy priorities through 2028. It orders the Attorney General to set up a special team to investigate forest arson, staffed by the judicial police, the GNR and the forestry institute, opens forest clearing to prison work, and provides for stop-and-search in areas designated as having socially damaging crime.

In ten days Portugal acquires an investigation team that exists for one crime only, and that crime is setting fire to a forest. It is article 22 of Law 35/2026, the statute fixing criminal-policy priorities for 2026 to 2028, which under its article 29 comes into force on 1 September. The team is constituted by the Attorney General, after hearing the heads of the bodies involved, and brings together the Polícia Judiciária, the GNR and the forestry and…

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