You seem to be learning that the portuguese do not take your last sentence as an insult but as a rule of life.
1 Like
Perhaps the government is just leaning on them to throttle naturalizations. Suppose the government’s goal is to stop the wave of 500k Manifestation of Interest people (who applied 2021) from becoming citizens.
They can change the law with no grandfathering (still in progress, faced constitutional challenges, could face additional challenges from a PS president).
But in parallel they can just tell IRN to limit naturalizations to say 50k per year, which spreads out the MI wave over 10 years, and works even if the law they wanted (no grandfathering) doesn’t pass soon.
Doing both is the belts-and-braces approach where each acts as insurance for the other.
Taiwan is totally different because they actually want you to be a citizen.
2 Likes
Yeah, but the incentives are different. There isn’t huge demand for Taiwanese citizenship, especially now with PLA sabre-rattling across the strait. And except in limited cases, Taiwan requires that you renounce other citizenships.
The unfortunate truth is Portugal is doing this because it can.
This is 100% it. The mechanism of the impartial parts of government are not in-fact impartial.
To be fair, I am not expecting processes to be concluded in 7-8 years; that seems like a very crude extrapolation of what’s happening now assuming that things stay in the current extra-slow motion mode forever; which in my opinion is not really practical. Currently Porto IRN seems to be processing a month in 4 months. e.g. they were finalizing August 2023 applications back in last year August 2025, and now in Feb 2026 they are still finalizing October (and there are many pending applications from September and before) What keeps applications from getting approved is said to be the AIMA feedback, which should be an automated process, but if one wants to slow down or almost halt the process, then this step seems like a great excuse.
In my opinion, once the new nationality is finally published in the official gazette, I expect the pending feedback from AIMA will be provided (released) swiftly to those pending applications. My previous entry was providing the reason why behind the current extreme slow motion processing.
In the past I’ve seen staff from the same IRN providing different “thoughts” to the same person who visited the office on different dates; I’ve read some just playing back the response in the automatic emails, some just saying wait, and some trying to shed more light into what’s happening; so I wouldn’t take that 7-8 years literally.
Hope I’m not proven wrong..
Cheers
Anyway I hope that once the new legislation is published, within a week or so, we will have a good understanding of whether things will speed up or not.. and this won’t happen anytime before the new president starts his presidency. It is also likely that he might take time to approve and even a bit of back-door negotiations on how to amend the law as per the constitutional court feedback.
Hello @Mr.E . Why did you say the new legislation will be published “within a week or so”…? Has there been some timeline for this?
That’s not what @Mr.E said. Rather that once it is published, we should have a better understanding.
Thanks, that’s exactly what I meant! Right now many people believe that till the new legislation is out, there will be this arbitrary slow-motion processing..
So we will be able to “test” this thinking only when the legislation is published.. and even then we’ll have to wait for some time to see if the “process mechanism” is getting into action.
Ah okay. I misunderstood.
In fact it is plain mathematics. 2022 had 2.0x the applications of previous or subsequent years if one goes by sequential numbering. But remove the 85K birth number and you go from about 75K other applications to 165, or about 2.4x. Once the constrictor has swallowed that fat bunny (happpening as we write) the pipeline should normalize at about 1 month to 1 month.
2 Likes
I have to disagree with this - what we have been observing is more like a stop-go type of a process. Till Jun 2025, within a month there would be a month worth approval. Porto more or less attained a consistent pace of approving around 24 months and this was the case for at least a year. Ever since we have seen the discussions about the nationality law, there had been radio silence sometimes months if not weeks. To be more specific, when the law was taken to constitutional court, there was a complete silence for a month. It wasn’t like, the applications continued with their regular pace, but as there were let’s say double the amount of applications vs last year, it took twice as long to process a month… No no no… Suddenly we stopped hearing ANY approvals when there was a development on the nationality law.
Since September 2025, there has been perhaps 1.5 months worth of processing. During regular times we should have seen 5-6 months of progress.
What happened is several people have raised this concern, either to their lawyers, on this forum or elsewhere citing that there should have been no legal reason to pause the existing applications.
What seems to have happened is, the system started to function but only in extra slow mode.. If you just check the approvals that people are sharing with regards to their process, it is hard to not to see what I’ve written - and that is an arbitrary slowing down of the existing applications.
I agree that the process is stop-go and also that the current slow down on naturalisation approvals coincides with the nationality law debate. I have a different view on the reason for this, which is that IRN has reallocated its (very scarce) resources from naturalisations to the registration of original Portuguese citizens. At the same time we were lobbying about issues of concern to us, there was a lot of media about the ridiculous delays that angry Portuguese citizens living outside Portugal were experiencing in registering their children. Politically it made sense to focus resources there, and those processing times have now come way down. I have less faith than @kewalramanibharat that things will stabilise. One reason is the many dependents that will apply once this “fat bunny” has been eaten. Another is that they seem to be failing to attract sufficient Conservadors, which is a very specialised position. And then there’s the fact that their systems just don’t seem to be fit for purpose. Consider, for example, that they have never finalised the online submission system and are still running on the glitchy pilot system, which is apparently a big reason for delays in applications submitted online.
2 Likes
I heard about this too - and it makes sense to a degree; and I can understand the prioritization; still the inverse correlation between ongoing debate & process vs approvals is almost too perfect to be explained otherwise.
As I’ve written above some people stated that this is all done so that maximum number of applications based on expression of interest can be turned down - once the new legislation comes to life.
I think we’ll test the hypothesis within 1-2 months. The new president will assume his role on March 8th and then within 1-2 weeks we might hear more about his stance on this and the calendar around the law.
Once the law comes into effect, we’ll be able to see more progress.
e.g. with regards to lack of human resources, when there was initial outcry about the slowness of the IRNs, there were multiple articles which stated 150 staff has been recruited and have completed their practical training. There were multiple articles from credible sources - a google search can quickly reveal them.
That makes me think the staffing issue should be in theory over (if what has been shared is true) and is used as an excuse. Right now people going to Porto IRN are told, that only the final AIMA feedback is awaited for most of the queries.
This why I think there is arbitrary slowing down of the approvals..
I agree there seems to be a deliberate slow-down around ARI citizenship approvals, but it also seems to be a pattern where the government gets a lot of criticism around one group/issue, so they throw all their resources at it, neglecting everything else. Then, because things are falling apart elsewhere due to neglect, they throw all their resources at what seems to be the next most pressing problem. I’m not confident they will ever start processing applications at a smooth and predictable pace, given this history.
2 Likes
@FuvD Classic “Whack-A-Mole”… 
2 Likes
I think so too, remember the first proposed version of the nationality law they tried to backdate it to people who already applied. Constitutionally, they couldn’t.
But that is evidence the government wants you (yes you who already applied!) to have 10 years residence before you get citizenship. They can’t explicitly make that law, but if they just slow down processing to take 5+ years, they can get what they want in practice!
3 Likes
If they slow it down THAT much, they are going to get a whole 'nother flood of lawsuits, but I doubt they are looking far enough down the road to worry about that.
If people wait until their application is pending 3 years to file a lawsuit, then the lawsuit sits on a pile for 2 years before a judge sends a notice to IRN, the government has already accomplished its 10 years goal.
1 Like
Good point.
I only see the slow down in Porto and Lisbon. However, at the same time, I see a significant progress from other IRNs (IRN Guimarãe transferred to Porto; IRN Amadora transferred to Lisboa; IRN Odivelas transferred to Porto; IRN Vila Nova de Gaia ; IRN Braga; and IRN Espinho). These IRNs have zero stalling issue since March 2025 and they all continue issue approvals at normal pace. The most recent one I saw was about 2-3 days ago from IRN Guimarãe (applied in 03/2024 and got concluded in 02/2026). The most impressive approval of February 2026 was from IRN Espinho - applied in 09/2024 and concluded in 02/2026.
2 Likes