Welcome to the Week em Breve, a wrap-up of important Portuguese news to keep you up to date and in the know.
Constitutional Court upholds raising residency requirements, including for golden visa holders
Portugal’s Constitutional Court has ruled that several items in the government’s proposed nationality law are unconstitutional, including provisions regarding the possible loss of nationality for serious crimes, according to news reports.
But the court has upheld the provision to raise the required minimum residency to 7 years for people from the European Union or the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, and to 10 years for everyone else — and to start counting those years only after residency has been granted, rather than from the time it was applied for, as before, as Forbes details in a new report.
That’s despite lobbying by a group of American golden visa investors who said the move would “betray” the trust they put in the country when they poured their money into the scheme.
Lisbon Court orders Chega leader André Ventura to remove anti-Roma posters or pay €2,500 per poster per day
The Civil Court of Lisbon on Monday has ruled that the anti-Roma political campaign posters promoting the presidential campaign of Chega leader André Ventura are discriminatory and ordered Ventura to remove them within 24 hours, Público reported.
Ventura will have to pay €2,500 for each day, and each poster, that’s up past the deadline, according to the publication.
Meanwhile, yet another Chega member is embroiled in controversy — police have arrested municipal candidate Rui Pedro Moreira on suspicion of sexual abuse of minors and child pornography that allegedly took place at the equestrian center where he was a coach, according to Público.
Portugal working with U.S. over Portuguese suspect in Brown University, MIT killings
U.S. investigators are working with Portuguese authorities to piece together the motives for the shootings allegedly carried out by a Portuguese native.
More information continues to emerge about the troubled, contentious past of Cláudio Valente, the main suspect in the killing of two Brown University students and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist.
Valente died by apparent suicide last week.
Many former classmates, professors, and colleagues describe Valente as highly intelligent, and while at least one former colleague said he was “truly sweet,” others say Valente looked down on everyone else and once called a Brazilian colleague a “slave.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has suspended the green card lottery program under which Valente became a U.S. resident, according to CNBC.
Portugal greenlights minimum wage increase
Following strikes that paralyzed the country earlier this month, when millions of people took to the streets of major Portuguese cities to protest the government’s proposed labor reforms, the government has approved an increase in the national minimum wage.
It’s going up from €870 per month in 2025 to €920 next year, Minister for Cabinet Affairs António Leitão Amaro said last week, adding that during the tenure of Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, the government has raised the minimum wage by €100.
Foreign companies in Portugal pay more on average than local firms
Meanwhile, a new report suggests that employees of foreign companies in Portugal are more productive — and earn substantially more — than their counterparts in national companies.
More specifically: those at foreign-owned subsidiaries in Portugal were on average 69.6% more productive in 2024 and earned on average 44.2% more, according to the National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estatística – INE).
INE said that 11,066 branches of foreign firms operated in Portugal in 2024 — just 2.1% of all non-financial firms.
But they employed 704,000 people — or 18.3% of the non-financial companies’ overall labor force.
Portugal salaries are about 57% of Euro area average
Despite the higher pay at foreign firms, the average salary in Portugal in 2024 was just €24,818, compared to the European Union average of €39,808 and €43,512 for the Euro area, according to a new report from Eurostat.
Portugal is also well behind neighbouring Spain (€33,700).
The highest average salary was in Luxembourg (€82,969), followed by Denmark (€71,565), while the lowest was in Bulgaria (€15,387), with Greece slight above €17,954).
Average Portuguese home costs 21 years of average Portuguese salary
Those earning minimum wage don’t have much of a chance of home ownership in Portugal: a new study found that even on an average Portuguese salary, it would take 253 months — or about 21 years — to afford an average Portuguese home.
That’s according to BestBrokers, whose new report suggests it’s not as bad as it could be in other countries — it would be 62 years in Nepal, for example, — but also not as good as, say, in the United Kingdom, where it would be about 14 years, or in the U.S., where it would be just 71 months.
Home speculation cancelled out government affordability measure
Meanwhile, a tax exemption for under-35s buying their first home — introduced by the Portuguese government purportedly to help address housing affordability — only led to sellers raising the asking price, quickly factoring in the tax exemption, according to a new paper published in the Real Estate Economics journal by two professors from the economics department of ISCTE-IUL.
“The unintended consequences of the tax exemption highlight the risks of implementing demand-side measures without corresponding supply-side adjustments,” the authors wrote.
Low-qualified Portuguese top emigration
It’s no wonder, then, that 65,000 Portuguese left the country last year, as reported last week by the Emigration Observatory of the Center for Research and Sociology Studies (Observatório da Emigração, do Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia – CIES), which added that most of those people were “poorly qualified,” according to Diário de Notícias.
Spain and Switzerland remained the top destinations for Portuguese looking for a new start, CIES says.
Those with higher education head mostly to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, according to the report.
