Seguro Returns Decreto 49/XVII to Parliament Tuesday Morning — Tribunal Constitucional Struck Down the Nationality-Loss Accessory Penalty Unanimously on Friday and Hugo Soares Signals PSD Will Not Force a Reconfirmation Override

President António José Seguro returned Decreto n.º 49/XVII to the Assembleia da República on Tuesday morning, citing Article 279, paragraph 1 of the Constitution after the Tribunal Constitucional declared the accessory penalty of perda da nacionalidade unanimously unconstitutional on Friday — the second time the bench has struck down the measure in this legislature. Within hours of the veto landing at São Bento, PSD parliamentary leader Hugo Soares confirmed that the right-wing majority that approved the decree will not invoke its two-thirds margin to force a reconfirmation, citing a refusal to provoke conflito institucional with Belém. The AD government's signature naturalised-citizenship sanction is, in this drafting, effectively dead.

What Decreto 49/XVII Would Have Done

Decreto 49/XVII rewrote the Código Penal to introduce an pena acessória de perda da nacionalidade — a court-imposed loss of Portuguese citizenship — that would have applied to dual-nationals convicted with effective prison sentences of five years or more for a specified slate of crimes committed within fifteen years of obtaining Portuguese nationality. The drafting was the second attempt by the parliamentary majority — PSD, CDS-PP, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal — to land the security-package centrepiece after the first version was sent back by the Tribunal Constitucional earlier in the legislature. The 15-year clock and the 5-year carceral threshold were the principal levers the second drafting moved in an attempt to clear the proportionality bar.

The Tribunal Constitucional's Second Strike

The Tribunal Constitucional handed down its second ruling on the file on Friday, declaring por unanimidade, inconstitucional a segunda versão deste decreto. The unconstitutionality was anchored on the proposed Article 69-D of the Penal Code — specifically paragraphs 1, 4 (sub-paragraphs a through e and h), and paragraph 5 — and rested on the constitutional principles of equality and proportionality that the first ruling had already flagged. A unanimous decision on a second-version drafting closes the door to the kind of technical narrowing the AD majority had used to clear the first ruling, and removes any plausible third attempt under the same architecture.

Why the PSD Is Walking Away

The parliamentary arithmetic that approved Decreto 49/XVII would, in principle, support a reconfirmation override of Seguro's veto — the four-party right-wing bloc that voted the decree through holds more than the two-thirds margin Article 136 of the Constitution requires to force the President to promulgate a vetoed decree. Hugo Soares closed that path on Tuesday, telling the press that the PSD considers the essencial achievement to be a separate nationality-law reform already moving through Parliament, and that forcing reconfirmation of a decree the Tribunal Constitucional has twice declared unconstitutional would be politically and institutionally unacceptable. The PS — which referred the decree to the Tribunal Constitucional under the fiscalização preventiva route, calling it a cedência à extrema-direita — claims the win.

What It Means for Naturalised Residents

For the segment of the Portuguese population that holds nationality by naturalisation — and the wider pipeline of foreign residents on the multi-year track to citizenship — the practical effect is that the 15-year conditional citizenship overlay that Decreto 49/XVII would have layered on top of Article 26 of the Constitution is not coming. The separate nationality-law reform — which moves the residency-clock anchor and tightens the documentary chain at AIMA — continues on its own track and will eventually return for promulgation. But the specific mechanism that would have allowed a Portuguese court to strip citizenship from a naturalised dual-national as part of a criminal sentence is now off the legislative table for the remainder of this drafting cycle.

The Constitutional Architecture

Article 279(1) of the Constitution — the provision Seguro invoked — is the standard return-to-Parliament mechanism following a Tribunal Constitucional unconstitutionality ruling on preventive review. The President is bound, on a TC strike-down, to either veto the decree or expurgate the offending norms before promulgation; Seguro chose the full veto. The Assembleia can then either drop the file, redraft, or — with a two-thirds majority — force reconfirmation in a version that excises the unconstitutional norms. The PSD's Tuesday signal closes the third path; the second is constrained by the Tribunal Constitucional's second-version unanimity. The most likely outcome is the first.