Lisbon, Sept. 16, 2025 (Lusa) - The prime minister on Tuesday said that it was essential for Portugal to project its current context of credibility, with financial and social stability, and warned that the European Union must change quickly to stop its political withering away in the world.

Luís Montenegro defended these positions in his opening speech at a lecture on the ‘European Union and Portugal’ organised by the Catholic University's Institute of Political Studies.

In front of around a hundred students, with the former president of the European Commission José Manuel Durão Barroso, listening to him, the leader of the Portuguese government spoke about the ‘constraints’ that exist in the current international situation, namely the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, Germany's stagnation and France's economic weakness.

"In Portugal, there is a context of opportunity and credibility that we can't waste. We have an economy that is growing faster than the European Union average, and we have successive surpluses in the public accounts,‘ he pointed out, after referring to the country's trajectory in terms of reducing unemployment and interest rates on the international markets since the time of the ’troika'.

Luís Montenegro also pointed out that Portugal is recording these budget surpluses at a time when ‘it is also lowering taxes on labour income and on companies’.

"And it continues to increase incomes by raising the national minimum wage, the average wage and pensioners' wages. This is only possible with economic dynamism. The situation we find ourselves in today has very few parallels in Europe. There will be two or three countries with a situation similar to ours, but I doubt there will be any better," he concluded.

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