Six Months Into a Presidency That Promised Not to Be a Counter-Power, Antonio Jose Seguro Has Used the Veto Once and Told the Government the Serra da Estrela Deserves More Than Promises
Sworn in on 9 March after winning 66.84 percent, he vetoed the public-buildings flags bill on 10 June, pressed the government on storm support, exam marking and fire prevention, and has still not said publicly whether Luis Neves should go.
António José Seguro completes six months in Belém on Wednesday. He was sworn in on 9 March, after winning the second round of the presidential election on 8 February with 66.84 percent, and he arrived with a formula he has since repeated almost verbatim: he would not be a counter-power to Luís Montenegro's government, but he would not be a passive President either. "I will not speak about anything and everything," he said on election night. Six months on, that sentence has turned out to be the most reliable guide to how he works.
One veto, and it was about flags
The only use of his hard constitutional powers so far came on 10 June, when he returned to parliament without promulgation the CDS-PP bill restricting which flags may be flown on public buildings. The text had passed with PSD, Chega and CDS-PP votes, against the PS, PAN, Livre, BE and PCP, with Iniciativa Liberal abstaining, and the argument in the chamber had been mostly about the LGBTQIA+ flag.
Seguro's message to parliament did not defend any particular flag. It said the bill failed to distinguish party-political display from humanitarian causes the Portuguese state has already signed up to. "When the holder of a political office raises a flag that symbolises peace, human rights or the protection of the climate, he is not imposing on the state an orientation foreign to it," he wrote. He also objected that "ideological flag" and "associative flag" were nowhere defined in the text, leaving the law uncertain in application.
Where he applied pressure instead
Most of the presidency has been exercised without the veto pen. Between 6 and 10 April he spent five days in the storm-hit centre of the country on his first Presidência Aberta, and came back with a specific complaint rather than a general one: farmers whose non-permanent crops fell outside the support schemes had suffered millions in losses that the government's own platforms could not process.
In July he intervened in the national exams marking crisis, first on the 8th and then formally on the 21st, insisting on "the obligatory safeguard of the principle of equality between all pupils" and that "no pupil can be harmed by technical or administrative difficulties unconnected to his effort and merit". He declined every invitation to say whether the Education Minister should resign.
On 7 August he promulgated the Prestação Social Única, the reform folding 13 benefits into one, but attached a warning to the signature: "No simplification process can translate into a reduction of social protection." He also flagged the coming portaria as the place where the real rules would be written, and said the extra work handed to municipalities needed to come with the money to do it.
His sharpest language came in August, at the 150th anniversary of the Egitanienses volunteer firefighters in Guarda, days after the independent technical commission reported on the 2025 fires. "Much was left undone after the earlier reports, from the 2017 fires," he said, and demanded that recommendations stop being "shelved, postponed sine die". He returned to the Serra da Estrela, where almost none of the 155 million euros announced after 2022 has been spent: "The Serra da Estrela deserves more than promises."
The test he has not answered
The Luís Neves affair is the one file on which Seguro has said least. His public position has been a repeated formula: "I am always very attentive to what is happening, but I speak at the right moment and in the right place." On 31 July, after prosecutors opened an investigation, he went as far as saying "the Prime Minister knows my opinion and my positions on all these situations". He has never publicly asked for the minister to go.
Tuesday's censure motion, rejected but debated, pushed the case into parliament and the pressure back onto Belém. Whether strategic silence is still the right instrument is the question the second six months will answer.
