PS and PSD Block the Chega Push to Declassify FP-25 and Post-25 April Far-Right Archives — Cultural-War Framing Replaces the Security-Risk Argument Inside the Comissão

The Socialist Party (PS) and the Social Democratic Party (PSD) closed ranks against a Chega motion to declassify the surviving Forças Populares 25 de Abril (FP-25) files and the parallel archive on the post-25 April far-right bombing networks, with both groupings telling Wednesday's parliamentary committee that the proposal amounted to "ajustes de contas" with history rather than a transparency exercise. Público's politics desk carried the breakdown.

The Chega motion would have triggered an inter-ministerial process — pulling SIS, the Polícia Judiciária, and the Ministério da Justiça into a joint review of files held under the 1991 segredo de Estado regime — and would have set a 12-month deadline for declassifying everything not still tied to an open investigation. BE and Livre publicly backed the motion in committee, leaving PS and PSD as the blocking majority.

The framing PS and PSD chose

What is novel about Wednesday's vote is the wording the two centrist groupings adopted. Earlier blocks of similar declassification motions — including the 2024 push from the Iniciativa Liberal on the post-25 November files — were defended on national-security grounds, with both parties citing live SIS interests or third-country dependencies. This week the talking points moved to "guerras culturais," with PS rapporteur invoking the risk of "instrumentalização da memória" and PSD spokespeople framing the Chega request as a vehicle for "branqueamento" of the post-25 April violence.

The shift matters because it lowers the evidentiary threshold the blocking parties have to satisfy. National-security arguments require — and have in past committees been challenged on — a file-level showing that the material in question still touches a live operational interest. A cultural-war framing makes the block a political judgement that the requesting party can simply file again the next session.

What's in the archive the motion would have opened

The FP-25 files cover the group's bombing and assassination campaign between 1980 and 1987, with the bulk of the operational paperwork held by the Direcção Central de Combate ao Banditismo and migrated to the Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo under a 50-year embargo that expires in stages between 2030 and 2037. The parallel post-25 April far-right archive — covering the ELP, MDLP, and the Operação Curlew investigations — sits under the same regime.

A subset of the FP-25 material has already moved out of segredo de Estado on standard 25-year timelines, and the Centro de Documentação 25 de Abril at the Universidade de Coimbra holds the public-research copies. Chega's motion was specifically about the remaining sealed portion — roughly 60% of the original holdings, by the Torre do Tombo's own count.

The committee path forward

The motion died in the Comissão de Assuntos Constitucionais on Wednesday and will not move to a plenary vote in its current form. Chega has signalled it will refile with a narrower scope confined to the FP-25 portion, which removes the post-25 April far-right material — the file set that BE and Livre were most interested in opening — and might therefore reshape the coalition behind the next round.

The journalist who broke the story is Ana Bacelar Begonha, with the article behind Público's paywall at publico.pt. The committee's full minutes will publish on the Assembleia da República portal at parlamento.pt within the standard 10-business-day window.