Spain’s defence spending, at a mere 1.28 per cent of its GDP, lags behind all other Nato members. While most European Union countries have already reached the target of 2 per cent that was agreed back in 2014, at the present rate of progress Spain won’t get there until 2029.
Such a leisurely approach is no longer tenable. President Trump has proposed 5 per cent as the appropriate benchmark for defence expenditure, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, is demanding urgent rearmament in Europe and Nato is expected to raise the target to well above 3 per cent at its summit in June. Suddenly it looks as though Spain’s procrastination – what might be termed a ‘mañana’ approach to defence spending – risks exhausting the patience of Spain’s allies, especially since Spain currently has the EU’s best-performing economy. ‘Spain is very low,’ Trump said when discussing defence spending last month.
So left-wing Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is now facing mounting pressure to increase defence spending very significantly and extremely quickly. His problem is that his fragile minority coalition government depends on the support of hard left parties that are vociferously anti-American and anti-Nato. The leader of Podemos for example says that in proposing increased expenditure on defence Sánchez is simply ‘licking the boots’ of President Trump whom she likes to describe as ‘a dangerous fascist’.
Nor is the idea of increased defence spending any more popular with some of Sánchez’s other allies. The regional and separatist parties of Catalonia and the Basque Country for example have other agendas and intensely local priorities. Over the last three decades Spanish governments have frequently depended on the support of these parties and the result has been an inward-looking political culture increasingly focused on national rather than international issues.
Sánchez also has to contend with his country’s strong pacifist tradition; Spain has long prided itself on staying out of international conflicts, taking no part for example in either of the world wars. It’s true that in 2003 Spain briefly joined forces with the US and the UK to invade Iraq but that was hugely unpopular with the Spanish people – 90 per cent opposed the invasion. When the socialists regained power in March 2004 the troops were withdrawn immediately. While very popular at home, internationally that U-turn earned Spain a reputation as an unreliable ally.
In an attempt to placate the hard left and separatist parties that prop up his government, Sánchez has promised that the increase in defence spending will not cause the budget for social spending to be reduced by ‘a single cent’. He is also making a bold (and self-serving) attempt to redefine ‘defence spending’ as ‘security spending’. In what he terms his ‘360 degree’ vision, he argues that money spent preventing cyber attacks, countering terrorism and preparing to meet ‘the climate emergency in the Mediterranean’ should also count as defence-related expenditure. It is only the eastern European, the Nordic and Baltic countries, he has suggested, that need to spend more on defence in the traditional military sense. After all, he pointed out with just a hint of a smile, nobody seriously imagines that Russia will be marching its troops over the Pyrenees.
Sánchez also hopes that any defence spend above 2 per cent will be funded from EU sources – either in the form of additional debt issuance or perhaps via the repurposing of existing programmes. However, given the latest declarations from both the EU and Nato, it looks very much as if Spain itself is going to be asked to find most of the money required to more than double its defence spending.
After a brief meeting with Sánchez, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of Spain’s main opposition party, the right-wing Partido Popular, declared that the prime minister doesn’t have any coherent plan and called for parliamentary debate on these proposed increases. Sánchez, however, may be hoping that what would certainly be an extremely rowdy and unpredictable confrontation can be avoided.
Nato and European Economic Community membership in the 1980s marked Spain’s reintegration into the international community after decades of isolation during General Franco’s dictatorship. Now, Spain is facing the less palatable obligations that fully paid up membership of the western democratic ‘club’ entails.
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