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Portugal’s economy and employment growth are the best-performing in Europe, according to the country’s Prime Minister Luís Montenegro. But how true is that?
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Montenegro made the comments while speaking to the Assembly of the Republic, Portugal’s parliament, on 8 September. Here, MPs were debating a motion of no confidence in the government put forward by the far-right Chega party.
The motion came about after Montenegro refused to sack Interior Minister Luís Neves over allegations of misconduct while he was head of Portugal’s Judiciary Police between 2018 and 2026.
Other opposition parties came together to support the centre-right minority government and vote down the motion, in an effort to avoid further political instability. The country has, after all, held three elections in three years.
During the debate, the prime minister told MPs that Portugal had the best economic performance and the top rate of employment growth in Europe.
To find out whether his claims held any weight, The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team, looked at the most recent Eurostat figures on member states’ GDP growth.
They reveal that the EU’s GDP as a whole was up by 0.7% in the second quarter of 2026, compared to the previous quarter.
Ireland was the main driver of this, with far and away the highest jump in GDP at +10.2%. Analysts say its strong growth, a sharp upward revision from previous estimates, was largely driven by major output surges from global firms, particularly in technology and pharmaceuticals. Because of this, economists view it as an unreliable metric.
Slovenia and Lithuania came in second and third place, with a growth of 1.8% and 1.7%, respectively.
Portugal came in joint seventh place with Cyprus, with both countries’ GDP’s rising by 0.8%.
So it’s fair to say Portugal is ranking among the best of the 27 member states, but it’s not the best, according to Eurostat data.
Austria was the only country that recorded a decline, with its GDP contracting by 0.1%.
When it comes to employment, the same Eurostat dataset shows that employment had gone up by 0.1% in both the Eurozone and the EU in the second quarter of 2026.
Around 221.4 million people were employed in the EU during that time.
In this case, Montenegro would be correct: When broken down by member state, Portugal came in first place with a 1% growth in employment in the second quarter of 2026.
It was followed by the Czech Republic and Malta in joint second place, at 0.9% growth.
Several countries saw a decrease in employment, notably Finland (-0.8%) and Greece (-0.4%).
