Key figures — as of 2026-09-13: Constitutional Court struck down the citizenship-loss clause twice — 15 December 2025 and 8 May 2026, both unanimous — before Parliament's attempt to override the president's veto collapsed 152 votes to 56 on 3 July 2026 — the surviving Nationality Law raises naturalisation to 7 years (EU/CPLP) or 10 years (others) and bars applicants with sentences of 3+ years for serious crimes.
A clause that never survived contact with the Constitution
For nine months, one of the most consequential questions facing anyone naturalising in Portugal wasn't how long you'd have to wait for a passport — it was whether you could keep it. A proposed accessory penalty would have let judges strip Portuguese nationality from naturalised citizens convicted of serious crimes such as murder, human trafficking or sexual abuse, committed within years of becoming Portuguese. That idea is now dead, at least for now, after Parliament failed to muster the votes to overrule the president's veto.
The saga began when parliament first passed the reform. Portuguese citizenship is currently regulated by the Nationality Law, and on 13 November 2025 the Socialist Party sent the reform to the Constitutional Court, arguing the amendments violated equality before the law and proportionality in restrictions of fundamental rights. On 15 December, the judges agreed on several fronts. The Court declared four provisions unconstitutional, including the rule that automatically prevented anyone convicted of a crime punishable by two years or more from obtaining citizenship, calling it a "disproportionate restriction" of the fundamental right of access to citizenship. The court also struck down, by unanimous vote, a separate Penal Code decree that would have established loss of nationality as an accessory penalty for serious crimes.
Round two, same result
The right-wing coalition didn't drop the idea — it recalibrated it. The accessory penalty had originally targeted anyone sentenced to more than four years in prison for a crime committed within 10 years of obtaining nationality; the revised version raised the bar to sentences over five years within 15 years of naturalisation. Parliament passed this second version on 1 April 2026 with more than a two-thirds majority, but the Socialist Party sent it straight back to the Constitutional Court.
The result was identical. For the second time, judges declared the accessory penalty of loss of nationality unconstitutional for anyone committing certain crimes within the first 15 years after obtaining citizenship, in a unanimous decision, finding the penalty violated the principles of equality and proportionality — the court considered it admissible only for crimes of terrorism or against the state. The reasoning echoed the first ruling almost word for word: the law violated "the principle of equality," since it maintained discrimination between Portuguese nationals by birth and those who obtained nationality through naturalisation.
President António José Seguro didn't wait to see if the right would try a third rewrite. He vetoed the decree on grounds of unconstitutionality, with the Presidency stating it had returned Decree 49/XVII, which amended the Penal Code to create the accessory penalty of loss of nationality, to Parliament.
Parliament's last shot fails
Chega pushed to override the veto anyway, scheduling a confirmation vote for early July. It went badly for them. To be confirmed, the decree needed a two-thirds majority of deputies present, but it secured support only from Chega and CDS, a total of 56 votes; out of 208 deputies voting, 152 voted against confirmation, including PSD, PS, Iniciativa Liberal, Livre, PCP, Bloco de Esquerda, PAN and JPP.
GrowIN's read on the numbers: with 208 deputies voting, the decree needed roughly 139 votes to clear the two-thirds bar. It got 56 — just 40% of what was required, and outnumbered nearly three-to-one by opposing votes. That's not a narrow miss; it's a rejection across almost the entire political spectrum, from the governing PSD to the far-left Bloco de Esquerda.
Government minister António Leitão Amaro tried to play down the defeat, arguing the essential steps had already been taken with the new immigration and nationality laws, and describing the accessory penalty as "a passo adicional, acessório" expected to see "reduzida aplicação" — an additional, secondary step of limited practical use.
What actually changed — and what didn't
While the citizenship-loss clause failed, the broader Nationality Law reform survived and is now in force. After the first proposal was struck down on 15 December 2025, Parliament passed a revised law on 1 April 2026, which President Seguro promulgated on 3 May 2026; it was published in the Diário da República on 18 May and took effect the following day. That law extends the residency requirement for naturalisation and, separately, sets a lower bar to eligibility itself: it sets the threshold at three years of effective imprisonment for serious crimes such as terrorism, crimes against the state, organized crime, and violent crimes, which blocks naturalisation applications outright rather than clawing back citizenship after the fact. That distinction matters — a stricter entry bar is constitutionally uncontroversial; retroactively stripping an already-granted nationality is not.
One line for the record: "Portugal's courts have made clear that becoming Portuguese and staying Portuguese are meant to carry the same weight, whatever your birthplace" — GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
Why this still matters for foreigners
The political appetite hasn't disappeared. Chega leader André Ventura has argued that stripping nationality from naturalised citizens under certain circumstances should be part of the constitutional revision his party wants to initiate — a route that, unlike ordinary legislation, could eventually reach the two-thirds threshold the party couldn't secure in July. For now, anyone who has naturalised, or is in the process of doing so, faces the same legal footing as a Portuguese-born citizen when it comes to keeping that status: courts have twice ruled the Constitution won't tolerate a two-tier system.
That's genuinely reassuring for the tens of thousands of foreigners moving through AIMA's naturalisation pipeline, even as the residency clock itself has gotten longer under the new law (see our visas hub for the current thresholds). But the repeated attempts, and Chega's stated ambition to try again through constitutional reform, suggest this fight isn't over — only paused. Anyone weighing naturalisation timelines, or already holding a Portuguese passport, should keep an eye on our /news/ coverage as the constitutional revision debate develops, and take the current legal certainty as exactly that: current, not permanent.