Conselho de Finanças Públicas Flags a 6.9% Despesa Líquida Spike for 2026 — Brussels-Anchored Medium-Term Plan Already Breached on the 5.8% 2025 Read

The Conselho de Finanças Públicas (CFP, Public Finance Council) — Portugal's independent fiscal watchdog chaired by Nazaré da Costa Cabral — projects net spending (despesa líquida) growth of 6.9% for 2026, a figure that sits roughly 230 basis points above the trajectory committed by Portugal in the Medium-Term Budgetary-Structural Plan (Plano Estrutural Orçamental de Médio Prazo) negotiated with the European Commission under the new EU fiscal framework, according to the CFP's spring projections re-examined in a ECO opinion analysis published Thursday morning. The forecast crowns a fiscal trajectory in which net spending grew 10% in 2024 (before discretionary revenue measures) and 5.8% in 2025 — already above the Brussels-anchored path — before the 6.9% 2026 read.

The technical concept under the new EU fiscal rules is net primary expenditure: total General Government spending minus interest, cyclical unemployment outlays, EU-financed expenditure and discretionary revenue measures. Portugal committed in the 2024-2028 plan submitted to the Commission to keep net spending growth on a glide path consistent with debt at 55% of GDP by 2030 from the 2025 read above 90%. The CFP arithmetic implies the country is already overshooting the slope, with the 5.8% 2025 print and the 6.9% 2026 forecast both above the medium-term ceiling.

The arithmetic feeds a longer-running argument between the CFP and the Ministério das Finanças (Ministry of Finance) led by Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, who in late March publicly accused the CFP of "críticas políticas" (political criticism) after the body flagged "dúvidas" over the 2026 Orçamento do Estado (State Budget). The CFP's April projections turned slightly more optimistic on the headline balance, reversing a forecast deficit into a 0.1% surplus on the 2026 print, but the underlying spending-trajectory message has stayed unchanged: the budget is meeting the headline target by relying on cyclically high tax receipts and EU-funded projects, while structural net spending continues to drift above the committed slope.

The piece's headline reference to Centeno picks up the long-running professional history of Banco de Portugal (BdP) governor Mário Centeno, the Eurogroup ex-president who served as Portugal's Finance Minister from 2015 to 2020 and who, since June 2023, has steered the BdP's own budgetary projections. Those BdP forecasts have run consistently more conservative than the Ministério das Finanças baseline on the spending side, and the CFP's 6.9% 2026 net-spending read sits in the same conceptual band as Centeno's BdP Boletim Económico published Tuesday this week, which lifted Portugal's 2026 investment forecast to 4.5% on the Sines Start Campus data-centre cluster but kept a hawkish tone on the public-spending arithmetic.

For 2026 onward, the binding question is whether the trajectory triggers the Excessive Deficit Procedure (Procedimento por Défices Excessivos, PDE) reactivation under the new Brussels framework. The Commission's preventive arm assesses cumulative deviation across three-year windows, and Portugal's combined 10%-5.8%-6.9% trajectory across 2024-2026 implies an overshoot of roughly 3.5 to 4 percentage points of GDP versus the committed slope. That is well above the 0.6% "materiality" threshold that triggers a Commission report under Article 126(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU. The CFP report has positioned itself as the early-warning siren; the Government's response in the autumn Orçamento do Estado 2027 package is now the file to watch.