Livre Opens Its Autumn Accusing the Government of Passing the Rejected Labour Package One Chapter at a Time

Parliament threw out the government's labour reform on 19 June. On Sunday, at the close of her party's autumn opening in Porto, the Livre spokesperson Isabel Mendes Lopes told the room that the package is coming back anyway, and that it will arrive one chapter at a time.

Her word for it was "às postas", which is what a fishmonger does to a fish: cut it into steaks and sell it by the piece. The accusation is that the Labour Minister has not abandoned the measures that fell with Trabalho XXI (Labour XXI), but is letting them return separately, inside other people's bills, where there is no single vote to rally against.

Why the tactic would work

The June defeat was not a narrow one. Chega joined the entire left bench to sink the rewrite of the Código do Trabalho (Labour Code), leaving PSD, CDS-PP and Iniciativa Liberal alone in favour. That vote followed a general strike and months of union mobilisation. Mendes Lopes argued on Sunday that the same measures, taken singly, would be "easier for the far right to approve, because it will not feel the pressure of the streets so much". A hundred-article package is a target. A single amendment to somebody else's bill is not.

She named the first instalment: the committee stage, this coming week, of the citizens' bill extending initial parental leave to 180 days at full pay. The PSD's alternative, she said, is the one that was already in the labour package, which does not lengthen the leave, raises the payment slightly, and removes the protection for single-parent families that the citizens had written in. We set out what is actually on the table in that vote on Friday. Livre's own amendment goes to nine months, with an ambition of a year, and keeps single parents inside it.

The budget half of the speech

The rest was an opening bid for the 2027 State Budget, and it reads as a list of things the party has lost before and intends to lose again more loudly. Turning the Passe Ferroviário Verde into a national mobility pass valid across the whole territory. More money for the abono de família (child benefit) and the child guarantee. A public network of care homes, announced separately by the other spokesperson, Jorge Pinto. More for the energy-poverty programme "3 C". And a "social inheritance": roughly 5,000 euros set aside for every baby born in Portugal, payable at 18.

Behind the list sits a procedural complaint that will matter more than any single item. Mendes Lopes accused the government of telling parliament in advance that there is little room to amend the budget it will table, and said Livre "rejects this conditioning". Every opposition party says a version of this every October. What makes it worth noting this year is the arithmetic: a minority government that lost its flagship reform in June needs the budget to pass, and the price of passage is usually paid in amendments.

What to watch

Two dates. The committee vote on parental leave, which tests whether the piecemeal route works at all, and the budget debate, where Livre has promised to return with proposals already rejected once. Also next week, separately, the party takes online gambling regulation back to the floor.

The government has not answered the "às postas" charge. It is, for now, an opposition characterisation of a pattern rather than a documented strategy. The parental leave vote is the first place it can be tested against a result.