José Luís Carneiro wants the Government to permanently increase the lowest pensions in 2026. The plan is to distribute 40% of the expected increases in Social Security revenue for this purpose.
The measure could be worth 400 million euros, but the PS secretary general calculates the billion euros in increase in Social Security revenue. The PS characterized the Government’s measure of distributing extraordinary increases in 2024 and 2025 as electoralist and, therefore, argues that the State Budget can accommodate the measure, especially because in August the positive Social Security balance would be 1069 billion euros, which Carneiro, like Rui Tavares, attributed to the strong component of discounts coming from Immigration.
In the case of Social Security, the socialist general secretary states that, “at the very least, there is a hidden cat with its tail hanging out”, saying that it would be “expected that the Government would foresee a much higher Social Security balance”, although it states in the State Budget a balance of “positive 99 million euros.”
I had already criticized it and said again that the Budget “is not very credible because it underbudgets expenses and inflates revenue compared to the sale of State real estate assets.”
José Luís Carneiro also addresses the tax on petroleum products, where it differs from Chega, for example. It intends that the “forwarding of revenue, if it is higher than the increase foreseen in the State Budget of 4.6%, should be applied to the reduction of VAT on the most basic food items.”
The announcements were made by José Luís Carneiro this Tuesday in Penafiel, at the end of the PS parliamentary days. The proposed State Budget law for 2026 will be discussed and voted on next week, with the socialist bench validating the abstention vote. As such, the document will be made viable.
Remember that for the PS it was essential that the package of labor measures and the Basic Health Law did not enter the vote, in order to make it viable via abstention.
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