Portugal Joins the 16-Member Amigos da Coesão Letter Pressing Brussels for a Slower Next Generation EU Repayment and Fresh Joint Debt Issuance — Coalition Defends the N+3 Rule, 85% CEF Co-Financing and GNI-Rebate Elimination

Portugal has signed a joint letter with 15 other European Union member states — the Amigos da Coesão coalition — pressing the European Commission for a slower repayment schedule on the Next Generation EU borrowing programme and for a new round of joint European debt issuance to finance long-term strategic investments. The text was reported on Tuesday 26 May 2026 by ECO and lands at a moment when the EU's next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) negotiation is opening and the post-PRR fiscal architecture is being drawn.

The coalition counts Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia — sixteen capitals whose budgets lean heavily on the Cohesion envelopes and on agricultural transfers, and which collectively form the political bloc that has historically resisted attempts to shrink the structural-funds chapter.

The headline ask is a 'more gradual repayment system' for Next Generation EU. The borrowing programme, launched in 2020 to fund the pandemic recovery, must start being repaid from 2028 onward, and the current calendar tilts the burden into the second half of the 2028-2034 MFF. The Amigos da Coesão want that schedule stretched so that repayment does not crowd out cohesion and agricultural transfers in the years where execution of those policies is supposed to be at its peak.

The second ask — a fresh joint debt issuance — is more political. The coalition argues that another tranche of common borrowing is necessary 'to finance investments and essential European public goods for long-term strategic autonomy,' language that aligns with the defence-industrial and clean-tech files now dominating Brussels. The frugal-four bloc and parts of the German political spectrum have been hostile to repeating the NGEU model; the Amigos da Coesão letter is, in effect, the opening move of the cohesion-bloc rebuttal.

The text also defends a series of operational rules that have shaped cohesion delivery on the ground. It calls for the maintenance of the N+3 rule, which gives member states three years beyond an annual allocation to deploy funds before they are decommitted — a flexibility that countries with slower absorption rhythms rely on. It backs adequate pre-financing and co-financing rates, and asks specifically for an 85% co-financing rate on the Connecting Europe Facility for member states with below-EU-average GDP per capita. It calls for the elimination of the GNI-linked rebates that today reduce contributions for several northern member states, and for specific access measures to keep small and medium-sized enterprises connected to the funds.

Portugal layered a separate national communication onto the joint letter, emphasising that 'new spending areas cannot come at the expense of existing policies' — code for the line that defence and competitiveness ambitions must not be financed by cutting the Cohesion or the Common Agricultural Policy. With Castro Almeida's Ministério da Economia e da Coesão Territorial managing the open PRR file and the next-MFF cycle simultaneously, the Tuesday signature signals that Lisbon will fight the 2028-2034 envelope on cohesion-bloc lines rather than from the frugal-state framing it occasionally flirts with on deficit grounds. For Portuguese expat and resident readers tracking how Brussels decisions filter into Lisbon's fiscal room, the Amigos da Coesão letter is the early indicator of where Portugal will sit when the harder MFF negotiations open in autumn.