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.
Spain has to deal with millions of pensioners from across Europe retiring there. Germany was complaining anout the drag on it’s economy when hundreds of thousands of working age Syrians came into the county during the 2010’s. Spain has to spend billions of euros every year caring for residents who don’t work, need extra medical care, and displace actual working people. Their economy is incredibly weak as is, they can’t justify spending 3x what they currently are on their military.
Every European nation has to deal with waves of retirees leaving the work force. It’s no excuse. The general solution is increasing retirement age & per capita productivity whilst cutting down on government spending in other areas unless they fancy debt financing. Different GDP strengths is exactly why it’s a % goal rather than an absolute amount to keep things fair.
I’m not talking about Spanish workers retiring. I’m talking about English and German pensioners moving to Spain to retire. Spain and Greece have become to Florida and Arizona of Europe where they are stuck picking up the tab for people who never contributed to the local economy and are now draining it of resources. The only reason Greece meets their NATO obligations is because they are in an arms race with Turkey. It’s one thing to care for your elderly parents when they start to get older. It’s an entirely different matter when all of a sudden you are expected to care for some elderly couple that you have never met before.
Pensions in the EU are entirely different from how it works in the US. I don’t know how it is there, but here it is the nation you worked in that coughs up the pension money. Additionally, from what I’ve heard from retirees who did move to Spain, they have to pay income tax on their pensions to the Spanish government which means that these people would actually be contributing to the state coffers similarly to someone who was working. So, in other words you have money coming in from abroad, being contributed in taxes and spent on goods & services locally, boosting the economy.
Besides, the people who can afford to move abroad for retirement usually are the wealthier sort, so not the burden you make it out to be.