The Socialists Set Their Price for the 2027 Budget: Hands Off the Constitution, Pensions and Health Law

The negotiation over Portugal’s 2027 state budget has begun — and the Partido Socialista (Socialist Party) is not asking for measures so much as promises. Secretary-general José Luís Carneiro has met Prime Minister Luís Montenegro at São Bento to open the dialogue, and in an interview with Público and Renascença published Thursday he named his conditions: respect for “constitutional values” and “the security of pensions”, while insisting that “everything is open” as to how the PS will ultimately vote.

According to Observador, the Socialists put at least four decisive points on the prime minister’s table. They want to block any constitutional revision negotiated between the PSD and Chega; prevent a rightward rewrite of the Lei de Bases da Saúde (Health Basic Law); rule out changes to the pension system; and secure concrete measures responding to last winter’s storms. The meeting took place after the State of the Nation debate, in which Montenegro assured parliament there is “no negotiating process” under way on constitutional revision — only “an understanding that the matter will be dealt with next year”. That is not reassurance enough for the PS, which wants certainty that the PSD will not align with Chega to touch the material limits of the Constitution at a moment when the right holds a two-thirds constitutional majority in parliament.

The storms have given Carneiro his sharpest line of attack. “The government knows it managed the storms crisis badly — it only executed 18% of what it promised — and many issues remain unresolved in support for families and businesses, in the recovery of infrastructure and heritage,” he said, arguing the budget must answer those needs “once and for all”. The government’s recovery record has come under renewed scrutiny just as Brussels moves money: the European Commission approved a €65.37 million advance from the EU Solidarity Fund for Portugal on the same day.

The tactical picture differs from a year ago. The PS enabled the 2026 budget through abstention after persuading the government to strip out politically charged measures on taxation and labour rules, but made no commitment to the next exercise. This time, party sources told Observador, the Socialists believe they arrive “in a position of much greater value than a year ago” — and rather than removing measures from the proposal, they want to extract forward-looking commitments on matters of substance. The expectation in the party is that the government will again present a stripped-down proposal on 10 October, reducing the budget to “an instrument of current management”, as one PS official put it.

Carneiro has been building pressure for weeks: in a CNN Portugal interview earlier this month he accused Montenegro of an “incapacity for political leadership”. A further meeting between the two is expected “still in July or in September”. By contrast, there is no record of any scheduled conversation between the government and Chega since the collapse of the labour-law revision, which fell in parliament after André Ventura’s party unexpectedly voted it down.

The budget arithmetic gives the PS its leverage, and its wish-list shows how far the ground has shifted from classic budget bargaining. With the government already having left the door open to a 2027 minimum wage above €970, the fight over OE2027 will be less about line items than about what kind of political guarantees a minority government is willing to give to survive the autumn.