Thousands protest housing crisis outside Portugal's parliament as budget debate continues inside
Lisbon rents hit 1 500 euros against a 920-euro minimum wage, Portugal posts EU's third-largest housing cost rise since 2015
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Thousands of Portuguese gather outside Parliament as housing protests swell
independent.co.uk
Several thousand mostly young protesters gathered outside Portugal's Republican Assembly in Lisbon on Tuesday, chanting and banging drums while lawmakers inside debated the centre-right government's spending plans for next year. Police in previous days had used batons and dogs to clear similar protests from the capital's main squares, and authorities are now reviewing whether that response was excessive.
The numbers explain the anger. One-bedroom apartments in Lisbon routinely rent for 1,500 euros a month; the minimum wage, earned by hundreds of thousands of Portuguese, is 920 euros before tax. An EU report published late last year found housing costs across Europe rose an average of 60.5 percent between 2015 and 2025 — and Portugal's 147 percent increase was the third highest in the bloc, after Hungary and Lithuania. The national statistics institute says prices rose almost 20 percent in the past year alone; the government itself puts the rental increase since 2020 at 68 percent.
The government has answered with lower taxes on new construction, restrictions on short-term rentals and a promise of 145,000 new homes — while acknowledging the effects will not be immediate. Infrastructure funds will be scarcer from 2027, as the EU's post-Covid recovery financing ends this year. Foreign buyers, investment funds, digital nomads and tourism have all bid up the stock of housing; some Portuguese sellers have done well out of the same market that locks their children out.
The protests took their cue from demonstrations that began in neighbouring Spain last month, and unrest has spread across Europe this autumn. Portugal's president, António José Seguro — a mostly ceremonial office that still carries political weight — has convened the Council of State, an advisory body, to discuss the protests next week. Portugal has so far avoided the arson and looting seen elsewhere, but protesters complain of heavy-handed policing when tents were removed from city squares.
A 20-year-old Lisbon student named Laura Andre, living with her parents, said she wants a home and a family: "It's getting harder and harder to build a life in Portugal."