Portugal's Bid to Strip Citizenship From Serious Criminals Heads for a Second Parliamentary Defeat

A long-running attempt to make the loss of Portuguese nationality a punishment for serious crime is heading for defeat in Parliament — for the second time. On 3 July 2026 deputies debated whether to salvage a decree that would let courts strip citizenship as an accessory penalty, and the arithmetic points to rejection.

This is a separate matter from the civil Lei da Nacionalidade (Nationality Law) reform that lengthened residency requirements earlier this year. At issue here is a criminal penalty: the idea that someone convicted of the gravest offences could forfeit their Portuguese citizenship on top of a prison sentence.

Why it keeps failing

The Tribunal Constitucional (Constitutional Court) has already struck the measure down, ruling — unanimously in its most recent decision — that it breached the constitutional principles of equality and proportionality. Because a Portuguese citizen by birth and one by naturalisation would be treated differently, the court found the penalty discriminatory. The President declined to promulgate it.

To override that and confirm the original decree, Parliament needs a two-thirds majority of the deputies present, and in any case more than an absolute majority — at least 116 of the 230 seats. The numbers are not there.

Where the parties stand

• Chega (led by André Ventura) wants the original text confirmed, with crimes such as slavery, human trafficking and child sexual abuse explicitly covered, and has threatened to push for a referendum if Parliament rejects it again.
• PSD and CDS, the governing partners, proposed narrower amendments limiting nationality loss mainly to terrorism and crimes against the state, hoping to avoid an "institutional conflict" with the Constitutional Court.
• Iniciativa Liberal opposed both the Chega confirmation and the PSD/CDS amendments.
• The left — PS, Livre, PCP, Bloco de Esquerda and PAN — said it would reject the amendments outright.

With the left against and Chega refusing to back a watered-down version, the PSD/CDS compromise has no path to the majority it needs. Ventura framed the split bluntly: "Whoever tries to please the left ends up with the left."

What this means for naturalised residents

• No change to your status: If the decree falls, there is no new mechanism to remove citizenship as a criminal penalty. Naturalised Portuguese keep exactly the protections they have now.
• The debate is not over: A referendum threat and repeated redrafts mean citizenship-stripping will stay on the political agenda, even if this text dies.
• Two tracks, one theme: Alongside the tougher residency clock now facing new applicants, the episode shows how far the right is willing to push on nationality — worth watching for anyone on the naturalisation path, a journey the AIMA backlog has already made longer.

For now, the constitutional guardrails are holding. The likeliest outcome of this week's debate is that the decree lapses once more — leaving the government to decide whether to try a third time or let the issue rest.