Portugal's GNR will protest alongside the PSP from late September
The 2024 agreement delivered a risk supplement worth more than 300 euros a month. Two years on, the pay regime, the career structure and the appraisal system are still unrevised, and the Guard's professional association is calling protests through mid-October.
The secretariat of the Associação dos Profissionais da Guarda met on Friday at its national headquarters in Lisbon and left with a decision. The GNR is going out. The actions start at the end of this month, run through the middle of October, and finish in what the association describes as a major national protest.
The arithmetic behind it is two years old. A 2024 agreement with the ministry raised the service and risk supplement by more than 300 euros a month across Portugal’s security forces. That part was paid. Everything else, the association says, stayed on paper: the pay regime, the career structure and the new appraisal system are all still waiting.
The demand that belongs only to the Guard
One grievance is specific to GNR personnel, and the association calls it absolutely imperative: pension cuts. It wants the government to restore the previous calculation formula, arguing that the current one punishes people leaving a job that wears them out early.
The protests will not happen in isolation. The association is coordinating with the largest union representing the PSP, on the view that the two forces are asking for essentially the same things. In practice that means police officers and Guard personnel on the street at the same time, in an autumn that already had a general public-sector strike booked for 2 October.
Where the association points
The APG/GNR does not aim its complaint at the ministry that oversees the Guard. It aims higher, at the finance ministry and at the political weight it would take to unlock the money. The distinction matters, because it says where this gets settled, if it gets settled.
And the door is left open. In the same statement announcing the protests, the association says it is not closing off negotiations and hopes they happen soon. That is also the sober reading: a protest cycle with an end date built into it is usually designed to force a meeting rather than replace one.
Timing counts for both forces. October is when the state budget reaches parliament, and that is where September’s promises either acquire a line of their own or quietly do not. The PSP had already done its summer sums, moving 367 officers to the airports to hold the queues together.
Image: APG/GNR
