MADRID – Just days ahead of the NATO summit, Spain reached an agreement with the alliance to be exempt from the 5% GDP defense spending target, as announced by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Sunday.
“Thus, Spain will not allocate 5% of its GDP to defense, yet its role, influence, and standing within NATO remain unchanged,” Sánchez revealed in a broadcast speech.
Sánchez said that Spain would be able to keep its commitments to the 32-nation military alliance by spending 2.1% of GDP on defense needs.
Sánchez indicated that in correspondence exchanged on Sunday with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Spain secured the exemption, altering the phrasing related to the spending target so it no longer applies to “all allies.”
On Thursday, Sánchez told Rutte in a separate letter that Spain could not commit to the spending target. The move threatened to derail the upcoming summit at The Hague, which U.S. President Donald Trump is due to attend, since any new spending guidelines have to made with the consensus of all 32 NATO member states.
Last year, Spain spent 1.28% per NATO estimates on military expenditure, making it the alliance’s lowest spender. In April, Sánchez announced that the government would raise defense spending to 2% this year, a move that he received pushback for at home including from some allies.
On Friday, Trump said Spain “has to pay what everybody else has to pay,” calling the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy “a very low payer.”
“They were either good negotiators or they weren’t doing the right thing,” Trump told reporters.
On Sunday, Sánchez said Spain “believes that Europe should take charge of its own defense, an idea aligned with opinions such as those expressed by President Trump.”
But he called reaching a 5% spending target “incompatible with our worldview.”
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