Portuguese retirees who earn less than 1,527 euros per month will have an additional increase of 1.25% next year, after Parliament has approved an increase proposed by the Socialist Party (PS), the main opposition, against of the will of the conservative Government of Luís Montenegro. The precarious victory of the Democratic Alliance coalition in the elections last March is causing numerous initiatives proposed by the opposition to go ahead and force the Executive to put them into practice, even if they disagree with them.
Pensions are a sensitive topic. The main parties fighting for power know this and try to ingratiate themselves with the group. The socialists do not want to lose their good image among retirees, built thanks to successive increases during the years of António Costa’s Government, which tried to alleviate the miserable amounts of most pensions.
The Government of Luís Montenegro, for its part, wants to repair the bad memory left among the elderly by the cuts they suffered during the time of the troika, when the country was intervened by international institutions and the conservative cabinet of Pedro Passos Coelho applied the scissors to the pensioners. At the closing of the processing of the State Budgets for 2025, the two parties of the Government coalition voted against the socialist proposal, but approved another, which would contemplate the payment of an extraordinary supplement next year if the budget scenario and economic evolution allows it.
The Socialist Party and all left-wing groups voted in favor of the structural increase in pensions, which will have an impact on the budget of 270 million euros, but if it went ahead it was thanks to the abstention of Chega, the far-right party that André Ventura leads. Months ago, other opposition measures were also approved, such as the end of tolls on some highways, which the Government resisted, and other fiscal measures.
The government coalition, however, did find the alliance of the socialists to reverse the 5% cut in the salaries of public officials, which had been in force since the days of the troika. A measure that was disfigured by André Ventura, who immediately announced that his deputies will give up that money.
The approval of the 2025 Budget was the great frontier that the Government of Montenegro had to overcome to avoid new early elections in a few months. The socialist decision to abstain facilitated its processing and closed the door to the political crisis. Today the project has received the green light in the Assembly of the Republic, although the accounts do not fully comply with what the government coalition would have wanted because they have been imposed by the opposition. This has not only happened with pensions, but also with the obligation to maintain advertising on the public channel RTP, an initiative of the Portuguese Communist Party supported by the entire opposition, right and left. Weeks ago, the Government presented a media action plan that included the disappearance of public television advertising.
Among the fundamental measures approved, and designed by the Government, are the decrease from 21% to 20% of the corporate tax and a tax reform for those under 35 years of age. The reduction in the tax burden is one of the flags of the government coalition, which has also reduced the VAT on bullfighting from 23% to 6%.
