Socialists will abstain in budget vote to avoid crisis in Portugal

The general secretary of the Socialist Party (PS) of Portugal, José Luís Carneiro, confirmed this Thursday that his group will abstain in today’s vote on the 2026 budget project presented by the Government of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro (center-right) to avoid a political crisis. “If it weren’t for the responsibility of the Socialist Party, Portugal would today be plunged again into a political crisis with unpredictable consequences,” said Carneiro during his intervention in the plenary session of the unicameral Assembly of the Republic (Parliament) before the vote on the budget bill. With its abstention, the PS, which is the third force in Parliament with 58 deputies behind the far-right Chega party, with 60 seats, and the AD government coalition, which has 91, is going to allow the Executive’s draft to move forward in the chamber.

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“We concluded the debate on the State budget with the same responsibility with which we began it. The responsibility of putting the interests of the people and the country above all else, we kept our word,” said Carneiro. The PS Secretary-General demanded that the Government, which will now have to comply with the obligation to keep “the accounts correct” that it inherited from the socialist executives and to apply the European aid, which, he emphasized, his party brought to Portugal. Even so, he complained that this budget project does not respond to the vision of PS and that it is “empty of content”.

Broadly speaking, the draft being voted on today contemplates investments in public housing and tax cuts, such as more than 2.152 million euros to increase the supply of public properties and mobilize those that are state-owned for real estate projects, as well as a reduction in VAT in the construction sector from 23 to 6%.

In fiscal matters, these budgets include a reduction in the Personal Income Tax (IRS, in Portuguese), both through an increase in the limits of the different brackets and by reducing the rates of the second to fifth tiers by 0.3 percentage points.