“TRUMP SAYS defence spending has to go up, and the European Union jumps through the hoop. €800bn ($871bn), whoopee!” Wendela de Vries, a campaigner against the arms trade, is denouncing the EU’s new defence-financing initiative before a few hundred activists at a community centre in Amsterdam. The ReArm Europe credit scheme, announced at a summit on March 6th, was hailed by many as a sign that Europe is getting serious about paying for its security. But to peace activists like Ms de Vries it is greedy militarism, an attempt “to pump up military spending and cut social benefits”.
For European governments, Donald Trump’s temporary cut-off of aid to Ukraine and threats to renege on defending America’s allies have created a terrifying sense of clarity. Defence budgets are going up fast. Countries that meet the NATO baseline of spending 2% of GDP on defence are aiming at over 3%; those that spend 4% are heading for 5%. At the summit Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, exhorted Europeans to “spend, spend, spend on defence”. But that requires sustained political will, and not all countries or voters feel the same urgency.
Countries that border Russia, of course, need little convincing. In the Baltic states, where left-wing parties are small and social spending is low, defence budgets generate no serious dissent. Hanno Pevkur, Estonia’s defence minister, is planning for a military budget of around 5% of GDP. “All the parties are supporting it,” he says. Poland launched a huge build-up under its previous hard-right government, and the centrist government of Donald Tusk has continued it. This year it will spend 4.7% of GDP on defence, the most in NATO. A poll in September by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German foundation, found 75% of Poles wanted to spend even more.
Another region with strong support for defence is one long associated with peaceniks: the Nordic countries. Besides being within sabotage range of Russia, they have solid national finances and high willingness to sacrifice for the common good. Enthusiasm for defence is not confined to the right: Ms Frederiksen is a Social Democrat.
In Sweden all eight parties in parliament, including the hard left, agreed in a recent debate to raise spending above the currently planned 2.6% of GDP in 2028. The war in Ukraine has “sharpened the will to co-operate across the aisle”, says Pal Jonson, the defence minister. Finland, with its long border with Russia, is similar. In December the government said it will raise spending to 3.3% of GDP by the early 2030s. “There is not a single party who is against it,” says Pauli Aalto-Sepala, an MP for the governing National Coalition party.
Farther from Russia, things get complicated. Germany’s conflicted attitudes towards military force and Russia stem partly from guilt over the second world war, and partly from nostalgia for its bridge-building foreign policy during the cold war. Rearmament creates splits both between and within parties. The Left party and the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) oppose it, the one because it is ideologically anti-military, the other because they oppose taking on debt (and think the Russian threat overblown). There are doveish factions in the Social Democrats (SPD), too.
Because a defence-spending push requires Germany to ease its constitutional debt brake and borrow money, these splits spell trouble. After an election last month, the Left and AfD will have enough seats in the next parliament to block constitutional changes. So Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democratic chancellor-in-waiting, is trying in effect to remove the brake for defence spending (and create a €500bn special fund for infrastructure) in the current lame-duck parliament. Negotiations are proving tricky.
Exempting defence costs from the debt brake is crucial, says Ralf Stegner, an MP who hails from the SPD’s peace wing yet backs rearmament. Otherwise there will “always be tension between spending for defence and social policies” that will benefit populists like the AfD. In the Netherlands too, the guns-versus-butter framing is seen as political poison. The Dutch anti-war left is a tiny minority, but the hard-right Party for Freedom, the biggest in government, is ambivalent. Geert Wilders, its leader, insists that defence rises be accompanied by higher social benefits.
The toughest problems are in countries that lack fiscal headroom. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has championed European strategic autonomy for years, but his country only just meets NATO’s old 2% threshold, is deeply in debt and already has the highest tax burden in Europe. His government barely managed to pass a budget in a National Assembly split between three irreconcilable factions. Little wonder that he presses for the EU to issue bonds to finance defence spending: it may be the only way France can afford a big increase.
Italy spends just 1.5% of GDP on defence, but outside the populist Five Star Movement and far-left groups there is little outspoken opposition to spending more. That is because the issue is scarcely on the agenda, says Alessandro Marrone of the Institute of International Affairs, a think-tank in Rome. The focus has been on the successful attempt to persuade the EU not to count defence spending towards its 3% budget-deficit limit for member states. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, is a firm supporter of Ukraine, and Italians rate their armed forces highly. But a YouGov poll in February found that 41% think the defence budget too big; just 11% think it too small. Indeed, in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, YouGov found voters do not want governments to finance higher defence budgets by taxing more, borrowing more, or cutting public services.
That will leave politicians scratching their heads. And spending money is only part of what European countries must do to defend themselves. They must also recruit soldiers—and in most countries few young people are interested. (The Nordics are in better shape: they conscript.) Countries must consolidate their fragmented defence industries, though perhaps not too much: research in Romania by Eoin Power of the University of Texas at Austin shows that voters are more likely to support defence spending that creates jobs in their own country. Above all, they have to convince their citizens they need stronger armed forces. Many Europeans accept that message; fewer are willing to pay for it. ■
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