A spouse of a portuguese citizen can naturalize without residency, so sponsorship not required! No need to involve AIMA at all. You’d just have to stay married for some number of years.
There were hearings held today in the Commission on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees with regards to proposed amendments to the nationality law, however that matters discussed were nothing of interest it was about requesting opinions. The parliament’s agenda for the whole of September is devoid of any upcoming showdowns concerning a little red booklet that Portugal makes.
However, it’s quite possible that on September 25 there will be a debate on this subject, as that day is reserved to Chega.
17th seems to be a day to watch…
the choice of [September] 17th is due to the fact that on that date “plenary work resumes in the Assembly of the Republic,” and on the deputies’ agenda is the resumption of “the debate on the immigration law and the nationality law,” two bills “returned to the Assembly of the Republic due to the Constitutional Court’s rejection.”
(NB. 5/7ths of the Immigration Law amendments were declared unconstitutional on August 8–9 by the Constitutional Court. This article suggests the Nationality Law proposals were also rejected - but they haven’t even got to the Constitutional Court yet.)
For those of you within sight of 5 Portuguese resident years (sadly, not me 
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…also obviously the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees regarding the new nationality law has been meeting this week, because today we have reports of this fellow addressing it.
Speaking at a hearing before the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, Rights, Freedoms and Guarantees regarding the new nationality law, Jorge Rodrigues da Ponte admitted that legal changes always create a greater demand for services.
Therefore, to avoid an “avalanche of nationality requests under the current legislation,” the president of the IRN has asked that the law come into effect “the day immediately following its publication” or as soon as possible.
This has been a concern of the executive branch, which has already sought to provide for the nationality law to be retroactive to June 19 (the date of approval of the government program), a move that has been criticized by the opposition and constitutionalists.
… “Between 2018 and 2024, the IRN received an average of 277,000 nationality applications per year,” with 2022 being the year with the highest volume (367,000) of such applications.
The majority of cases (62%) concern children of Portuguese parents born outside the country, followed by naturalisations by length of residence (16%), by marriage (6%), grandchildren of Portuguese citizens (4%), and citizens born in the country but children of foreigners (4%).
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Ok, I took a few deep breaths (the therapy is working 
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The consensus seems to be that retroactive application to June 19 is not constitutional (knock on wood). The fight now is really over how soon after publication the new regime kicks in, and what carve outs there will be, if any.
By default, laws in Portugal already take effect five days after publication unless noted otherwise, so cutting it to one day only shortens the window by four days.
What “avalanche” could possibly be squeezed into 96 hours? Anyone serious about applying under old rules has already done it, or (like me) is preparing for the first day they’re eligible. The number of people who would react to the new law passing and try to submit immediately is minimal, and even if they did it would be impossible. After 5 years of this bureaucratic tango, I’m pretty good at getting submissions ready quickly, but not even I can conjure up fresh birth certificates, police checks, translations, and apostilles in four days.
The real issue for IRN is the existing backlog, and an extra few days of applications isn’t going to change that. That statement feels to me like a government official trying to signal to his staff (and their union) that at least he tried to lighten their load but the overtime will continue for the foreseeable future.
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Exactly, I’ll only be eligible in 2026, how could I “rush to apply” if the cutoff is Dec 2025? I assume applying before 5 years isn’t going to benefit one at all.
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Could be the Portuguese version of CYA, yes 
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I’ve read some lawyers arguing that to be constitutional there must be some “transitional period” in the law to protect “legitimate expectations” and ensure people already in the process aren’t negatively affected. I don’t know what that means, but surely 1 or 5 days is not adequate transitional period. But what is? 3 months, 6 months, 1 year?
Here’s my perspective on the recent changes to Portugal’s citizenship law as someone who has already applied for the Golden Visa and is waiting for pre-approval.
If the law changes and the waiting period for citizenship increases to 10 years, the entire process could take around 17 years in total: roughly 4 years from application submission to receiving the first residence card (based on what I’ve gathered here), plus another 10 years of residency before being eligible to apply for citizenship, and then an additional 3 years to finalize the citizenship process.
When you add in the costs — the initial application, lawyer fees, residency card renewals (I’m still not sure if these will need to be renewed every two years), travel expenses to Portugal every couple of years, and eventually the citizenship application itself — it all starts to look like a very long and very expensive journey.
Unless someone is in younger side and committed to living in Portugal long-term, or is particularly eager to relocate from their home country, I’m not sure it’s worth all the time, effort, and cost involved.
So if the Portuguese government moves forward with extending the citizenship timeline to 10 years without grandfathering those who have already submitted their applications, then the process becomes even less appealing. For these reasons, I will step away from the process and simply enjoy the remaining of my time in my home country…
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Correct, plus the IRN queue is likely to grow, so the time to obtain citizenship after application would lengthen from roughly three years now to between three and five years, making the total 17 to 19 years.
Other EU countries have much quicker paths to citizenship than this.
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If the initial period is increased from 5 to 10 years, a few years from now, the queue will shrink, the waiting time may drop to around 6-8 months (pre-2020 levels)
For five years there’ll be no eligible applicants so the queue will shrink and they will lay off IRN staff.
After those five years everyone will start applying again and with reduced IRN staff the queue will grow faster than ever.
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The queue can never get shorter, only longer. It’s the law.
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Or - there won’t be as many new applicants for 5 years so they’ll have time to finally get on top of the backlog. After 2 years applications will start to come in again (as certain nationalities only need 7 years residence). Hopefully after 5 years they’ll be well and truly on top of it. Although more applications will come in again, they won’t be as numerous as before, as many immigrants will have given up in the interim.
According to Schrödinger’s Equation, the queue is short only until it is observed, then it is really long.
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Article below (in Portuguese) says a body called the Conselho Superior da Magistratura has weighed in on the nationality law changes and basically fired a legal warning shot. Their opinion says there are two big constitutional red flags, making the law retroactive to June 19 and allowing citizenship to be taken away as a criminal penalty. They say either one could get the whole thing knocked down by the Constitutional Court.
I hadn’t heard of the CSM, but apparently it’s the body that runs the judiciary. When they say “this looks unconstitutional” I would guess the parliament and president will take notice.
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For those thinking about length of application queues, actually the queue gets shorter with every year added to the requirement and the reduction is not proportional it is actually cumulative. This is because, from a demographic perspective, the population of foreign nationals who cumulatively and continuously resided for X number of years shrinks rapidly the higher X goes.
This is the objective of the Chega party. By increasing the required number of years from 5 to 10, the pool of eligible applicants will drop from hundreds of thousands up to a million to just tens of thousands or even less than that if additional residency requirements are imposed before then.
The permanent residency option at 5 years can also change, and this has been the case with EU countries that changed their nationality laws they have followed this with legislation to affect permanent residency a few years later. An example of this is Finland who increased the waiting time from 4 years to 6 years a couple years after they increased the nationality waiting time from 5 years to 8 years. They have also restricted residency requirements and all these changes applied retroactively to all foreigners in Finland who have not yet applied for permanent residency or citizenship.
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That’s good to know, but please note Finland did not have a Golden Visa program, which explicitly advertizes (to this date!) 5 years to citizenship through their government’s agency website.
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When are they going to discuss and vote on this change ?
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I do want to bring one new perspective to this.
Whenever there is a debate on nationality law, there seems to be a pause on processing on existing applications for residency (those applications as per article 6.1) which are already submitted. This was the case when the initial discussion took place in June.
As there is a unanimous view with regards to already submitted cases; they being grand fathered by the current law, it is difficult to understand the motive behind this, as no matter how the new law is shaped, they should be grand fathered, and there should not be a need to pause the already submitted cases.
This might seem an irrelevant topic for many, but this type of arbitrary pauses just make the already huge backlog worse.. The process time was said to be 8-10 months few years ago, then 18 months became the norm, then this has increased to 24 months (from the actual submission date shown on the system), I now see several people quoting 3 years for the newcomers. If I am not mistaken in the current law, it is said that decision has to be made in 3 months, not years.
I hope that once they resume the approvals, we see the pending approvals coming in at least equaling the amount of months the process has been stopped so that the backlog does not get any worse.
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