PRAGUE, June 19 (Reuters) – The Czech Republic will not meet NATO’s minimum defence spending target again this year, but \u200cwill aim to meet it from 2027,<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Andrej Babis \u200csaid on Friday.<\/p>\n
While many allies have raised defence spending significantly in light of \u200bRussia’s war against Ukraine, the Czech Republic spent less than 2% of gross domestic product under a previous government last year, despite aiming to hit the target.<\/p>\n
Babis’s government cut this year’s original defence spending plan \u200cto around 1.7-1.8% of \u2060GDP but Babis had been saying he was looking for ways to meet the target. This is \u2060no longer the case, he said.<\/p>\n
“Our government will not meet 2% of GDP for defence either,” Babis said in a post on Facebook. “We \u200bhave to \u200bput public finances in order first.”<\/p>\n
While \u200bcutting defence, Babis’s cabinet raised \u200cspending to subsidise energy prices and to fund road building, increasing the overall budget deficit for this year from levels proposed by the previous outgoing government.<\/p>\n
In the face of new security threats and U.S. demands for Europe to bear a larger share of responsibility \u200cfor its defence, NATO has agreed \u200bto raise its minimum spending target to \u200b5% of GDP by \u200b2035, including 3.5% on core military spending.<\/p>\n
“I am convinced that \u200cwe will manage the 2% \u200bof GDP boundary \u200bnext year. Not as a one-off and window dressing, but as part of a long-term plan,” Babis said. “In the following years, \u200bwe will increase \u200cdefence spending responsibly and in a way that corresponds to \u200bthe security situation and our commitments to allies.”<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bJan Lopatka; Editing by Susan Fenton)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PRAGUE, June 19 (Reuters) – The Czech Republic will not meet NATO’s minimum defence spending target again this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2308,56,2309,7,126,2307],"class_list":["post-2771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-andrej-babis","tag-defence-spending","tag-defence-spending-plan","tag-nato","tag-target","tag-the-czech-republic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/nato\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}