PSD, PS and Chega File a Joint Four-Judge List for the Tribunal Constitucional Plenary on 12 June — Brites Lameiras Gives Chega Its First Seat

The PSD, PS and Chega parliamentary benches handed in a joint candidate list for four Tribunal Constitucional judges on Saturday 30 May, locking in a 12 June plenary vote that — if it clears the constitutionally required two-thirds majority — will hand Chega its first-ever seat on Portugal’s highest court and end an eight-month deadlock on the bench’s renovation.

The Four Names

The agreed list pairs two PSD nominees with one each from PS and Chega:

• Joaquim Cardoso da Costa (PSD) — former Secretário de Estado and director of the Centro de Competências Jurídicas do Estado, the central legal services arm of the Government.
• Maria Paula Ribeiro Faria (PSD) — tenured professor in constitutional and criminal law, with prior public-law arbitration practice.
• Gabriela Cunha Rodrigues (PS) — sitting Tribunal da Relação judge currently serving as chief of staff to the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça president.
• Luís Filipe Brites Lameiras (Chega) — former Tribunal da Relação judge in Lisbon and Porto, a career magistrate now retired from the bench.

The plenary will vote on the list as a single block rather than name by name — the eleição não fatiada formula Notícias ao Minuto flagged on Friday — which both pre-empts a Chega-only veto on individual nominees and removes the leverage IL and PCP would otherwise have to push a tactical down-vote on one of the four.

How the Four Got Here

Two of the four vacancies were left open last October when PSD-proposed judges José António Teles Pereira and Gonçalo Almeida Ribeiro resigned. PS-proposed Joana Fernandes Costa and José João Abrantes — the latter the court’s departing president, who formally renounced the office in May — complete the count. Under the standard bilateral framework, the Parliament would have elected three of the four seats; the April PSD-PS-Chega understanding stretched it to four to fold Chega in without leaving any of the three parliamentary blocs out.

Luís Montenegro and José Luís Carneiro were directly involved in the closing rounds, as Observador reported Friday, with the negotiation extending to parallel deals on the Provedor de Justiça and Conselho de Estado lay seats. The Chega slot is the politically loaded one: André Ventura’s party has campaigned for institutional representation across the higher courts and the CSM since the 2024 legislatures, and Brites Lameiras — a magistrate with a multi-decade relação bench record rather than a political profile — was selected partly to defuse the predictable PCP/BE/Livre objection that the nomination is partisan.

What the Vote Locks In

The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority for TC nominations — 154 votes in a 230-seat Assembleia. The PSD-PS-Chega combined bench clears that bar comfortably, but the unanimous-block voting structure means individual deputies cannot abstain on one nominee while approving the other three. If the list passes intact on 12 June, the court will sit at full strength for the first time in three terms, and the next presidential succession — with João Loureiro tipped to take the chair, per Observador’s Thursday read — falls inside the new bench’s remit.

The institutional read across this is sharper than a single bench renewal. The 2026 TC has had to rule on the IRS Jovem fiscal scope, the limpeza de terrenos extension framework, the Plano de Emergência da Saúde measures and a docket of nationality-law amendments in the past twelve months alone. Whoever sits on the bench for the next nine years will be ruling on the post-2026 Government’s most-contested legislative output — and on Saturday morning, for the first time since the 1976 Constitution wrote the court in, the bench that takes those decisions includes a Chega-proposed name.