You seem to be learning that the portuguese do not take your last sentence as an insult but as a rule of life.
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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.
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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.
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