Bloco de Esquerda Tables Bill This Week to Reverse the Donor Blackout at the ECFP — Socialists Draft Parallel Proposal as Constitutionalists Warn the January Cutoff Violates Transparency Doctrine

The Bloco de Esquerda tabled a bill in the Assembleia da República on Thursday, 23 April 2026, that would amend the political-financing rulebook to reopen public access to the names of people who donate to political parties — three months after the Entidade das Contas e Financiamentos Políticos (ECFP) stopped publishing the lists in January.

The Bloco's proposal would write into Lei n.º 19/2003 a carve-out from the General Data Protection Regulation, permitting the disclosure of donor identification for purposes of interesse público — including scientific or historical research and statistical analysis — and would compel the ECFP to publish nominative lists of contributors above defined thresholds. Until last winter, the entity routinely did so; it now publishes only the donation amounts, “expurgadas dos dados pessoais que identificam os doadores.”

How the blackout happened

The ECFP's reversal followed a 25 March opinion from the Comissão de Acesso aos Documentos Administrativos (CADA), which ruled that donor identification reveals political convictions and therefore qualifies as sensitive personal data under the GDPR. CADA also rejected the argument that a journalist's professional status, by itself, is sufficient to justify access to nominative documents held by the entity.

The opinion was triggered by audits in which PCP, BE and Chega raised data-protection objections. The PCP has since denied any attempt to block disclosure, saying it favours “transparency rules accompanied by data-protection safeguards.”

PS prepares a parallel bill

The Socialist Party has announced its own legislative initiative to clarify that donations to parties and to electoral campaigns “should be public and accessible as they were until now.” Parliamentary spokesperson Pedro Delgado Alves argued that “publicity and knowledge of who finances political parties have elevated public interest” and that anyone making a political contribution must accept that scrutiny comes with it.

Both proposals will land in the Assembleia in the same window. Together with parliamentary hearings the Bloco has requested with the ECFP and CADA, they set up a clash between two competing readings of the same legal texts: the GDPR's protection of sensitive data on the one side, and the constitutional principle of transparency in party financing on the other.

Jurists call the blackout illegal

The decision has drawn sharp criticism from constitutionalists. Former ECFP president Margarida Salema called it “a decades-long setback” and described the omission of donor names as “grave and illegal,” arguing that party-financing legislation specifically contemplates disclosure and cannot be folded into the general regime for administrative documents. Transparency International Portugal has advocated a proportionality rule under which higher donations would warrant greater disclosure, even where privacy interests apply.

What changes if either bill passes

If approved, the Bloco's text would require the ECFP to resume publication of nominative donor lists with full personal identifiers — including taxpayer or civil-identification numbers and the value of each contribution — for use in research, journalism and statistical work. The PS bill takes a similar route through a different door: amending the financing law itself rather than legislating a GDPR carve-out.

Either way, the Assembleia is now asked to settle a question the ECFP and CADA could not: whether the public has a right to know who pays for Portuguese politics.