Portugal's on its third attempt to write a law that lets judges strip nationality from naturalized citizens convicted of serious crimes, and the two failed attempts so far weren't close calls.
The measure, an accessory penalty tied to the broader Nationality Law overhaul, first passed parliament in October 2025 with PSD, Chega, Iniciativa Liberal, and CDS-PP votes. The Constitutional Court struck it down that December, unanimously, ruling that applying it only to naturalized citizens within a fixed window after obtaining citizenship violated the constitutional equality principle, and that the list of qualifying crimes was too broad for such a severe sanction.
PSD and CDS-PP came back with a revised version in the spring, dropping the distinction between original and acquired nationality and raising the minimum sentence threshold that could trigger the penalty. Parliament approved it April 1. The Constitutional Court rejected that version too, in May, again unanimously, again citing equality and proportionality problems. Court president José João Abrantes was specific about which crimes could clear the constitutional bar: only offenses tied to state security, terrorism, and terrorist financing showed a strong enough connection to national belonging to justify losing citizenship over them. Crimes the revised bill had also included, aggravated homicide, slavery, human trafficking, rape, and sexual abuse, didn't meet that bar, regardless of severity.
Two different responses to the same defeat
That's where the coalition split. Chega leader André Ventura called for parliament to simply reconfirm the twice-rejected decree using its constitutional override power, available because the bill originally passed with a supermajority. He's floated a referendum if that fails. PSD publicly distanced itself from that approach, with parliamentary leader Hugo Soares saying the party wouldn't provoke an institutional standoff over it, and noting the core achievement, the Nationality Law itself, had already been signed into force separately.
Chega scheduled a floor vote for July 3 to pursue the reconfirmation path regardless, without PSD or IL's backing.
Separately, and more quietly, AD (PSD/CDS) has signaled it will draft yet another version of the accessory penalty, its third, again narrowing the crime list and raising the sentencing threshold further.
Addressing a proportionality objection the Court didn't actually make the crux of its ruling.
The catch
Here's the tension worth watching: the Constitutional Court's May ruling wasn't really about sentence length. It drew a categorical line, terrorism and state-security offenses connect to the idea of national belonging in a way the Court accepts; violent crimes like homicide and sexual assault, however serious, don't meet that specific legal test in the Court's view. If AD's third draft keeps those same crime categories and simply raises the minimum sentence again, it risks a third unanimous rejection rather than a fix.
For anyone holding dual nationality via naturalization, this remains mostly a background story rather than an urgent one. The penalty would apply only after conviction for the narrow category of crimes ultimately upheld, decided case-by-case by a judge. But it's a useful signal for how durable the PSD-Chega governing alignment actually is on immigration-adjacent policy, and it's the same fault line that showed up in this week's statelessness vote: PSD choosing institutional caution over Chega's harder line, again.