Tribunal Constitucional Annuls Daniel Adrião's Expulsion From the PS — Court Calls the Comissão Nacional de Jurisdição's 2025 Decision 'Illegal' and the Former Leadership Candidate Demands a Public Apology From José Luís Carneiro

The Tribunal Constitucional on Friday, 25 April 2026, annulled the expulsion of former Partido Socialista leadership candidate Daniel Adrião from the party — a ruling that lands squarely in front of the new general secretary José Luís Carneiro and reopens the question of how Portuguese political parties handle internal discipline. The court, on the public reading of the decision provided by Adrião himself, described the Comissão Nacional de Jurisdição's expulsion order as ilegal e juridicamente inválida.

The 2025 Disciplinary Sequence

Adrião — twice a candidate to lead the PS, in 2014 and again in 2018 — was suspended from the exercise of his rights as a militante in September 2025 after he ran on an independent list in a Lisbon parish election against the official PS candidate. The Comissão Nacional de Jurisdição, the party's internal disciplinary body, formalised an expulsion later in the autumn. The practical consequence was that Adrião was barred from attending the PS National Congress of 27–29 March 2026, the congress at which Carneiro was confirmed as general secretary and the party set its post-defeat strategic line.

It is the procedural and substantive validity of that expulsion that the Tribunal Constitucional has now thrown out. Adrião lodged the appeal under the regime that allows any militante to challenge a party's internal disciplinary measures before the constitutional jurisdiction, on the grounds that political parties are not exempt from the constitutional principles of due process and proportionality. The court's ruling, in his telling, agrees that the disciplinary chain leading to expulsion did not satisfy those standards.

What Adrião Is Asking For

In the statement issued after the ruling, Adrião made three specific demands: readmission to the PS as a full militante; restoration of all the partidária positions and rights he held before September 2025; and a public apology from the party for what he called graves e concretas consequências — the suspension from party bodies, the exclusion from the Congress, the public stigma of expulsion. He has already written formally to Carneiro to request the readmission be acted upon.

Adrião framed the ruling beyond his own situation. O Estado de Direito tem de ser respeitado também dentro dos partidos políticos, he said — the rule of law must be observed inside political parties as well. That framing is the part of the decision that lawyers across the spectrum will be reading closely, because the Tribunal Constitucional rarely intervenes in internal party governance and when it does, the case sets a benchmark for how disciplinary processes have to be conducted across all parties on the Portuguese spectrum.

The Carneiro Question

For José Luís Carneiro, who has spent his first month as PS leader trying to project both confidence — I will be PM, there is no internal rival, he told reporters on Thursday — and a renewed focus on opposition to the Montenegro-Pinto Luz government, the Adrião ruling is an unwanted procedural problem. Refusing readmission would mean standing publicly against a constitutional-court decision; granting it brings back into the party a figure who has twice contested the leadership and who has just won a high-profile vindication of his right to be inside the party that tried to throw him out.

The Wider Precedent

The decision lands in a moment when internal party discipline cases have multiplied across the PS, the PSD and Chega, particularly around independent candidacies in the September 2025 autárquicas. The Tribunal Constitucional's reading on Adrião gives every militante elsewhere who was expelled or suspended for similar reasons an immediate template for appeal. The next CNJ-equivalent decision in any of those parties will be drafted with this ruling in the room.