Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced on April 22 a 10.5 billion euro (about $12 billion) plan to bring his country in line with a NATO alliance military spending target by the end of 2025.
In 2014, NATO set a goal for each member nation to contribute at least 2 percent of its gross domestic product to its military.
Many alliance members have lagged behind the spending goal over the past decade, including Spain.
A majority of the 32 NATO member nations only met the alliance’s military spending target in the past year, as Russian forces continue to fight in Ukraine along Europe’s eastern flank.
Spain was one of the eight nations still falling short of the spending goal, contributing about 1.3 percent of its GDP to its military in 2024.
“With the plan that we are presenting today, Spain will meet, this year 2025, 2 percent of its gross domestic product budget for security and defense,” Sanchez said in an address following his meeting with Spain’s Council of Ministers on April 22.
Sanchez offered the defense spending commitment as U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed for the NATO members, particularly in Europe, to boost their military budgets.
Sanchez’s plan to meet the NATO spending target comes just days after Italian Economic Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti announced that his country is also preparing a plan to pass the alliance spending benchmark this year.
The Spanish prime minister said his plan would allow his country to reach its NATO spending obligation in record time, without increasing taxes or deficit spending.
Despite his assurances, Sanchez’s plan has already divided members of his governing coalition.
Sanchez leads a socialist coalition government that has been reluctant to expand its military.
Leaders of the Sumar group of legislators, which helped form Sanchez’s governing coalition, issued an April 22 statement criticizing his NATO spending plan.
Sanchez said that while he had been reluctant to focus as much on defense spending, recent world events such as the Russian war in Ukraine had driven him to change his priorities.
“If you had asked me years ago about my government’s investment priorities for security and defense, my answer would obviously have been different from the one I’ve just outlined. But that’s not because our values and our goals have changed; it’s because the world has,” he said.
The Spanish prime minister said he believed he could advance his defense spending plan without going through parliament.
While many NATO members are just now catching up to their 2014 spending benchmark, Trump had issued calls for the alliance to lift its military spending target even further, to 5 percent of GDP.
