Greece will ask the European Commission to exempt its 2026 defense spending from the EU’s budget rules as part of the so-called fiscal escape clause, the Greek Finance Minister said Tuesday.
Speaking to public broadcaster ERT, Kyriakos Pierrakakis said the country will submit a request later on Tuesday, seeking to exempt 500 million euros ($586 million) in defense spending from Greece’s 2026 budget. That’s less than 0.3 percent of Greece’s GDP.
The European Commission has proposed allowing its 27-member states to raise defense spending by 1.5 percent of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) each year for four years, without any of the disciplinary steps that would normally kick in after a member’s deficit rises above 3 percent.
Greece, also a NATO member, already spends about 3 percent of its GDP on defense. That is nearly double the EU average, which is under pressure to boost its defense spending after its decades-long alliance with the United States has come under strain.
After a crippling economic crisis between 2009 to 2018 that cut a quarter of its economic output, Greece’s economy has bounced back and the country plans to allocate 25 billion euros ($26.99 billion) as part of a 12-year defense strategy.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told the Greek parliament during the announcement in early April, adding, “There can be no progress without security.”
However, Mitsotakis stressed that fiscal flexibility must not—and will not—lead to excesses.
“Not only because the markets are closely monitoring and assessing us, but also because the overall performance of the economy is a vital factor for security and stability.”
Alongside Poland, Estonia and Latvia, Greece is one of the few NATO member states that allocates more than 3 percent of its output to defense. And this year the nation of 10.5 million has doubled its military budget to 6.13 billion euros ($6.6 billion).
A few days later, Greece’s Defense Minister Nikos Dendias Greece’s Defense Minister Nikos Dendias on Wednesday called on the EU to invest in building anew a basic defense industry during a public discussion at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Dendias pointed out that European autonomy does not mean a European force will not act as a supplementary one to NATO, but Europe has lived in a manner that allowed defense to take a second seat to other priorities for years, and is now a decade behind.
Funding such autonomy, Dendias said, would cost a lot more than 150 billion euros, but even if the funding were in place, the infrastructure is missing; therefore, Europe needs to work a lot more effectively to create autonomy within a decade.
Independently of what today’s choices of the United States are, that country is a functional democracy and a country that has saved Europe twice, in two World Wars, the minister said, adding that he is entirely against writing the transatlantic partner off.
