The government’s primary goal includes advancing a new cultural patronage status, expanding dance, theater, music, cinema, and visual arts education to early school years, and promoting the preservation, conservation, and rehabilitation of heritage, mirroring objectives from the previous administration led by Luís Montenegro.
The specific objective to amend the Cultural Professionals Statute for improvement and dignity, present in the previous government’s agenda, is absent from the current text. Instead, it advocates valuing creators and various cultural actors, supporting the dignity of programming structures and independent artists, and upholding the principle of free artistic creation.
In terms of budget, the government acknowledges, as in last year’s program, the cultural sector in Portugal faces longstanding underfunding issues, centralist views, and low cultural participation rates. Despite a significant budget increase in 2025, efforts will be made to address these factors.
An increase of 50% in the Culture budget by 2028 would entail an additional boost of over 200 million euros by the end of this period, based on reference values.
In 2024, the Culture allocation stood at 518.3 million euros, with actual expenditures of 450.9 million, according to figures published by the Budgetary Entity.
The current government’s program emphasizes that the increase in allocation is “a process already initiated” in the 2025 State Budget.
For this year, the Culture program’s total consolidated expenditure allocation was 597.3 million euros.
The XXV Constitutional Government Program, approved by the Council of Ministers last Thursday, was delivered to the Assembly of the Republic today and will be debated in plenary on June 17 and 18.
