PS Lays Down a Defence-Programming Law as Portugal's Path to 5% of GDP by 2035 Lands in São Bento — Marcos Perestrello Wants Parliament Inside the Loop on Every Procurement Decision

The Socialist Party has put a defence-programming bill on the parliamentary table that would expand the Assembleia da República's role in major defence procurement and personnel decisions, in direct response to the next ten years of NATO spending commitments that take Portugal's defence budget from roughly 2% of GDP today to 5% by 2035. The bill — co-signed by former Secretary of State for National Defence Marcos Perestrello — was framed by its proponents as a structural cohesion instrument rather than a partisan procurement audit.

The 5% number that drove the bill

NATO's 2024 Hague summit established a glide path that takes alliance members to 5% of GDP in defence spending — composed of a 3.5% "core" defence allocation plus a 1.5% "defence-related" allocation covering infrastructure, cyber and dual-use civilian-military projects — by 2035. For Portugal, with 2025 GDP of roughly €280 billion, that implies an annual envelope rising from around €5.6 billion today (2%) to roughly €14 billion by 2035 in nominal terms, with the additional €8.4 billion compounding through the next four legislatures. The PS's argument is that decisions on capital programmes of that scale must, structurally, pass through Parliament rather than be authorised inside the Council of Ministers and the Ministério da Defesa.

What the bill does mechanically

The PS proposal makes three specific changes. First, it expands the Conselho Superior de Defesa Nacional's parliamentary representation from two to three deputies — a recognition, the bill text says, of the more fragmented post-2024-election political landscape, which makes a two-deputy delegation no longer representative. Second, it creates a new Lei de Programação de Pessoal Militar (military-personnel programming law) that sets multi-year force-strength and recruitment targets, modelled on the existing Lei de Programação Militar (LPM) which covers equipment. Third, it requires every major defence procurement above a threshold to receive a parliamentary debate and ratification, expanding the existing LPM-vote envelope.

Perestrello's framing

Marcos Perestrello — currently Vice-President of the Assembleia, formerly a Secretary of State for National Defence in Costa's XXI government, and former Vice-President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly — argued in a Thursday interview that defence problems "are not solved with isolated measures" and require "great popular support." His structural point is that 5% of GDP cannot be sustained politically across multiple electoral cycles unless major procurement programmes acquire the same parliamentary legitimacy as budget law, which gets a yearly vote. "All main decisions need to pass through Parliament with broad debate and consensus," Perestrello said. The implicit reference is to the 2030-onward window when defence spending starts compounding meaningfully — and where opposition political swings could otherwise reverse multi-decade procurement commitments.

Where it sits in the defence policy stack

The bill lands on top of an already-busy defence-procurement calendar. The Marinha is finalising a six-vessel new oceanic-patrol-ship order. The Força Aérea is in the F-16AM upgrade cycle and rotating the Estonia Baltic Air Policing detachment. The Exército is restructuring around the new heavy mobile brigade and the EU PESCO commitments. Defence Minister Nuno Melo has not yet publicly commented on the PS bill; the Ministério da Defesa's preferred route to 5% has been a sequence of LPM revisions rather than a structural reform of the LPM itself. The PS's procedural ambition would slow that process meaningfully — which is precisely what the proposers see as the point.

What's likely to happen in committee

The PS does not have a majority and will need PSD, IL or Chega support to pass the measure. PSD has signalled in past parliamentary debates that it broadly favours stronger LPM procedural rigour but has resisted expansion of the Conselho Superior de Defesa's parliamentary delegation in past legislatures. Chega's support would be transactional. The Bloco de Esquerda and PCP positions, where they have signalled them, run against expanded defence spending in any form. The most likely procedural outcome is committee review, partial adoption, and a vote-by-vote split at the final reading — pushing the substantive debate into the Q3 2026 budget cycle, when the LPM revision would otherwise have gone forward unchallenged.

Sources: PÚBLICO interview with Marcos Perestrello (7 May 2026); NATO Hague summit declaration (2024); LPM 2024-2035 update.