Costa laid out these positions in his speech opening the fortnightly debate in parliament, in which he also warned that the longer European economic and monetary union "remains incomplete, the greater the risks of fresh crises".

His comments came the day after France's president, Emmanuel Macron, and Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, at a meeting outside Berlin to prepare for an EU summit on June 28-29 said they had agreed on the need to create a budget for the euro zone, hailing this as a “new chapter” for the bloc. They left details to be hashed out later with the other 17 members, of which Portugal is one.

"Any mature monetary union has a budgetary capacity available," Costa told deputies, expressing his satisfaction at the consensus reached on this priority by the euro zone's two largest member state. He noted that "the proposal presented yesterday by France and Germany ... contemplates at the same time mechanisms of stabilisation and support for convergence" - that is, measures taken by member states to bring their economies more into line with each other.

"In the same way, we support the Commission proposal for the creation, in the ambit of the Multi-year Financial Framework, of a Reform Delivery Tool," he went on. "The proposal is in the right direction, although its amount falls short of what is necessary and the [way it is] divided up is totally inadequate."

Portugal, which is a net beneficiary of EU funds and an advocate of greater European integration, has long called for a larger EU budget.