Portugal will activate the safeguard clause of the European Union's budgetary rules, Euronews reports. The clause will allow Portugal to temporarily cover additional energy-related costs due to the current crisis without incurring a breach of regulations.

According to Lusa, the Minister of Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, announced that: "The Commission understands, and this is also requested in several countries, that it should now create an exception clause, as it did for the rules on defence spending. We support this decision, and we will activate this clause as we did for defence.”

During the Eurogroup meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday, 11 June, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento told journalists that, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission, Portugal is the fifth country in the European Union that provides the most aid as a proportion of its GDP.

The Minister of Finance argued that the current crisis is unlike the previous energy crisis in 2022, and that the interest rate hike back in 2022, which was announced by the European Central Bank following inflation caused by the war in the Middle East, was unwarranted: “I maintain my opinion that it [ECB] could have chosen not to give this signal and it was absolutely unnecessary.”

"The European Central Bank, in any case, decided to raise interest rates, but we are in a very different situation, both from the point of view of inflation and from the point of view of the Central Bank's interest rates," Lusa quotes the minister saying.