NATO allies will meet in The Hague next week and are expected to agree to significantly boost military expenditure, but Madrid is reluctant.
Spain wants a carve-out from NATO’s likely future defense spending goal of 5 percent of GDP, the country’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said ahead of next week’s high-stakes alliance summit in The Hague.
“Spain will continue to fulfil its duty in the years and decades ahead and will continue to actively contribute to the European security architecture. However, Spain cannot commit to a specific spending target in terms of GDP at this summit,” Sánchez told NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in a letter seen by POLITICO.
Spain has the lowest military spending of any NATO member, allocating just 1.3 percent of its GDP to defense in 2024. Sánchez said earlier this year that Russia didn’t pose an immediate security threat to Spain.
(hey Portugal, this is your chance, take what you want)
Why so high a demand!? Even the US only spent 3.38% last year, and Poland spent 4.12%:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/nato-spending-by-country
A lot of knee-jerk reactions here so to provide some context:
The government will not do it because they are simply unable to. They were barely able to reach 3%. The ruling party and the PM do want to increase the spending but their minor, far-left coalition partner is against it. They would rather spend the money on social programs. The far-left party even voted to exit NATO altogether. They are simply not serious people. The PM finally managed to increase spending to 3% by using executive orders. They simply don’t have a path to pass a new budget and increase the spending to 5%. So yeah, it’s not the ruling party that’s shortsighted, it’s their progressive coalition partner who is against any spending on the military.
Spain used to have a budget of around 1% of their GDP for the military. It was so much that they actually could not spend it. Now that the budget has tripled almost overnight, they are having an internal crisis because there is no way they can use up all that money, even if they overbought 200% of supplies and overpaid for them.
Increasing military budget is useless, because the service will not improve with it, just the useless spending and inefficiency. And because of the rushed spending, I’m sure the move will increase corruption.
What chicken shit reasoning they’re using here.
It’s an absolutely massive amount of money. And it’s not temporary while there’s a war in Ukraine, it’s indefinitely. All because Trump pressured the rest of NATO and wants more money going to his buddies in the weapons industry.
Even without the US, European NATO countries already spend more than Russia and China (sources from 2024 and 2025). Just how much more should it get?
They don’t need a reason, really. 5% of GDP is moronic, the number alone is reason enough to pass. Not 5% of the national budget. 5% of GDP. Insane.
“It doesn’t impact us”. The most shortsighted, idiotic reason possible.
That is not the argument stated in the article
Sánchez argued that Spain doesn’t need to spend 5 percent of its GDP to fulfill its so-called capability targets, meaning new objectives of weapons inventory agreed by NATO defense ministers earlier this month.
He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system, force the government to increase taxes on the middle class, scale back commitments to the green transition and curtail international development cooperation.
“It is the legitimate right of every government to decide whether or not they are willing to make those sacrifices,” he wrote.
Rushing to 5 percent would also force Madrid to buy off-the-shelf equipment instead of fostering its own industrial base, as well as take money away from welfare policies, Sánchez also wrote.
The Spanish Socialist party is in a coalition with the junior left-wing Sumar party, which opposes increased defense spending and whose members are expected to attend a counter-summit for peace in parallel to the NATO summit.
