Presidential candidate Luís Marques Mendes congratulated himself on the approval of the State Budget and the Nationality Law on Tuesday, although he was sorry that the latter had not received the favorable votes of the PS. Mendes thinks that the final version is better than the Government’s initial proposal and that “There are no reasons to send this law to the Constitutional Court.”
“We must value the positive moments: there is a viable State Budget, on the left, and a Nationality Law which was made possible, on the right. In any circumstance, dialogue works. Dialogue has made final versions better than initial versions. This has also happened in foreigners’ law”, said Marques Mendes, in Leiria, where he participated in the NEXXT event dedicated to artificial intelligence and creativity.
The approval of the nationality law and also the State Budget (OE) for 2026 make the candidate consider “yesterday [terça-feira] a very positive moment.”
The presidential candidate supported by the PSD considers the new nationality law “balanced in the final version” and said it was a pity “that the law did not have a broader consensus when approved, and could also involve the PS, because it is a founding party of democracy”. “It didn’t happen… I’m sorry,” said Marques Mendes.
“The initial version was very controversial, very controversial and even raised problems of compliance with the Constitution. The version now approved seems balanced, less controversial and probably without constitutional problems.“, he said in Leiria, after speaking at NEXXT, where he spoke about education and economics. For Marques Mendes, “there are no reasons to send this law to the Constitutional Court”.
“It doesn’t seem to me that there are suspicions of unconstitutionality here”, he insisted, but, he added, “on this matter, the President of the Republic in office will decide”. The changes deserve your agreement because they result from “an effort to make the law better”, defending the need to clarify the population. “People don’t even know exactly what the law says,” he declared.
“The law has improved because the retroactive effects, which were very controversial, have disappeared. The law is better because the treatment between citizens of the European Union and the PALOP [Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa] became the same. The law is also balanced, because its most delicate matter, an additional penalty, disappeared from the nationality law and was transferred to the Penal Code. Whether or not it will pass the Penal Code is another question, but it no longer undermines the nationality law”, he detailed.
Marques Mendes believes that “the Government understood the signal given in the law on foreigners”. “It wasn’t really worth insisting on the first version, because it then ended up in the TC. It’s preferable to dialogue, it’s preferable to improve, to prevent the law from having controversial aspects and ending up in the TC”, he said.
Speaking about the difficulties in passing the previous OE – “a year ago it was a nightmare” – Marques Mendes highlighted what he considers to have been “the sense of responsibility” in the discussion of nationality, arguing that it is “a law that is not controversial, it is balanced”.
“There was an effort to make the law [da nacionalidade] better and this also happened in last year’s OE: after negotiation it became better; It also happened in the foreigners law this year, the second version better than the first. I draw a conclusion, very important for a President of the Republic: working dialogue is always better than the lack of dialogue”
The post “There are no reasons to send this law to the Constitutional Court”: Marques Mendes satisfied with the Nationality Law appeared first on Veritas News.
