The Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, and the 17 ministers of the XXIV Constitutional Government will be sworn in today at 18:00, at the Ajuda National Palace, less than a month after AD’s victory in the March 10 legislative elections.
This will be the third executive that the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, will swear in – but the first led by the PSD, the party he once presided over – and neither of the previous two served their term to the end.
In the Hall of Ambassadors, the head of state will swear in the prime minister and then the 17 ministers, who will be called one by one, in hierarchical order, to take the oath and sign the instrument of swearing in.
The Secretaries of State of the XXIV Constitutional Government, who are not yet known, will only take office on Friday.
The swearing-in ceremony was followed by speeches from the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and the Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro. Both have maintained an almost total public silence in recent days.
The XXIV Constitutional Government will have two ministers of state – Foreign Affairs Minister Paulo Rangel, who will be the government’s “number two”, and Finance Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento – and Montenegro will also have a deputy minister, Manuel Castro Almeida, with the portfolio of Territorial Cohesion and the management of EU funds.
More than 60% of the ministerial line-up belongs to the PSD’s Standing Committee – the hard core of the leadership – and there are four names put forward as independents, all of them ministers.
In total, the XXIV government will have seven female ministers, two fewer than the last PS executive led by António Costa.
Apart from Luís Montenegro, who has never held an executive post, there is only one repeat minister among the 17 – Maria da Graça Carvalho was Minister for Science and Higher Education in the PSD/CDS-PP governments of Durão Barroso and Santana Lopes – and six others have held secretariats of state in the past (Paulo Rangel, António Leitão Amaro, Manuel Castro Almeida, Pedro Duarte, Fernando Alexandre and Miguel Pinto Luz).
The first executive that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa swore in, on October 26, 2019, was the second government led by António Costa, a minority PS executive that, unlike the first (still sworn in by Cavaco Silva), was not supported by written agreements with the parties to the left of the Socialists – a condition that the head of state himself considered unnecessary and that the PCP rejected.
Following the “rejection” of the State Budget for 2022, the head of state dissolved parliament and called early elections for January 30, which resulted in an absolute majority for the PS.
On March 30, 2022, the swearing-in of the XXIII Constitutional Government – Costa’s third – was marked by Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s warning to the Prime Minister that it would be difficult to replace him in the middle of the legislature, arguing that the Portuguese “gave an absolute majority to a party, but also to a man”.
However, despite having taken office with a horizon of four and a half years – until September/October 2026 – António Costa resigned as Prime Minister on November 7 last year, after it became public that he was the target of a judicial inquiry launched by the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Supreme Court of Justice as a result of Operation Influencer.
The President of the Republic immediately accepted the Prime Minister’s resignation and decided to dissolve parliament, scheduling early parliamentary elections for March 10.
These legislative elections resulted in the victory of AD (the pre-election coalition formed by PSD, CDS-PP and PPM) by around 54,000 votes and 0.85% more than PS, the narrowest margin in the history of democracy.
The two PSD-led coalitions – AD, in mainland Portugal and the Azores, and Madeira Primeiro (PSD/CDS) – won 28.83% of the votes and 80 MPs (78 from the PSD and two from the CDS-PP), according to the official results.
The PS was the second most voted party with 27.98% and 78 MPs.