Left Bloc wants the state bank to hold mortgage payments flat for a year (and double the AIMI)
José Manuel Pureza closed his party's autumn forum with two ideas: Caixa Geral de Depósitos cutting its spread to absorb the ECB's 2026 rate rises, and doubling the property surcharge that funds Social Security.
Portugal’s Left Bloc wrapped up its autumn forum in Setúbal with two proposals aimed at the same group of people: anyone paying a mortgage, and anyone relying on Social Security.
The first has a name, the Caixa Brake. National coordinator José Manuel Pureza proposed that Caixa Geral de Depósitos spend twelve months absorbing the European Central Bank’s 2026 rate rises rather than passing them through to payments on a borrower’s own permanent home. The state-owned bank would trim its spread by exactly the amount the reference rate rose, and the monthly payment would not move.
What it would cost the shareholder
That is where the argument sits. By Pureza’s reckoning the measure amounts to between 6% and 8% of the dividend Caixa hands its sole shareholder, the state, this year. The bank would not lose money. It would make slightly less of it.
The backdrop is a year in which the ECB has been moving its key rates again after a long stretch of cuts, with the bill reaching indexed borrowers on a lag. Anyone who signed this summer already knows the shape of it: new borrowers are paying far above the average of older contracts.
The other half: the property surcharge
The second proposal is to double the AIMI, the surcharge on municipal property tax introduced in 2017 and known in Portuguese political shorthand as the Mortágua tax. Its revenue is earmarked for Social Security, and the Bloc counts roughly 1.2 billion euros delivered that way since the tax was created. Doubling the rate, on the party’s argument, strengthens the pension system without touching what workers contribute.
None of this is law. These are opposition proposals, floated outside the budget calendar, and the government has already signalled it does not intend to reopen the Social Security file this parliament. What the forum did was mark out the ground the Bloc wants the next budget fought on, and that ground is housing — the same terrain where the price of renting a room still separates Lisbon from everywhere else.
Image: Wilson Dias/ABr / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 BR)
