During a press conference at the party headquarters in Lisbon, André Ventura expressed surprise that only today, a few days after the elections, the Bank of Portugal (BdP) revised downwards its forecast for economic growth for the next year.
The Chega leader accused the BdP of attempting to “hide the reality from the Portuguese during the election campaign,” arguing that this data “was important for the choice of the Portuguese people.”
“We conducted the campaign, proposals, and debates based on a growth model that was not real, and on economic forecasts that were not real. If this is not being a crutch of the system, then I don’t know what is. The Bank of Portugal must be an independent institution, financial institutions must be independent,” he argued, suggesting that if they are not capable of this, changes must be made.
André Ventura suggested that the BdP wanted to “do a favor to the government,” carrying the government along, and “concealing the reality from the Portuguese people,” despite the governor being a former minister of a socialist government, and considered it a “fraud.”
Asked about the fact that Mário Centeno was the Minister of Finance of a government led by the PS, Ventura responded: “I think he wanted to do a favor to the system, because PS and PSD are the same thing.”
The president of Chega indicated that the party will summon Mário Centeno to the Assembly of the Republic to “explain why the numbers changed and what happened that led to such a drastic change in these numbers.”
André Ventura said the party will also “question the Government about the numbers it has, because no one understands” the forecasts “for the next year.”
“We are going to question the Minister of Finance today about the real values of the government’s growth forecast for next year, because no policy can be made without having coherent and serious numbers in terms of economic growth. The country needs to grow economically,” he stated.
The Bank of Portugal (BdP) sharply revised its estimate for Portuguese economic growth this year from 2.3% to 1.6%, according to the June Economic Bulletin released today.
This revision from the last bulletin, in March, followed the contraction of activity in the first quarter of the year, with a 0.5% quarter-on-quarter reduction in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that, according to the BdP document, “was not anticipated.”
These forecasts are therefore more pessimistic than those of the executive, as in the State Budget for 2025, the Government had projected a GDP growth of 2.1%, but revised this projection upward in the Annual Progress Report submitted to Brussels to 2.4%.
The BdP also continues to predict a return to negative budget balances this year, having worsened the deficit forecast for 2026 to 1.3% of GDP.
In the December bulletin, the last to include budget projections, the central bank had predicted a deficit of 0.1% of GDP this year, a forecast it maintains, but now worsens the outlook for the negative budget balance in 2026 from 1% to 1.3%.
