Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the NATO Public Forum that it wasn’t “fair” for leaders whose country is further from Russia to seek exemptions. “It\u2019s a question of being united, of defending Europe, not Poland or the Czech Republic. I disagree with the idea of an opt-out for a country,” she said, without specifically naming Spain<\/p>\n
Poland, which this year aims to spend 4.7 percent of GDP on defense, the highest in NATO, also isn\u2019t thrilled with Spain trying to get out of the alliance\u2019s spending boost.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that any deviation from this principle by any member country is a bad example,\u201d said Polish Defense Minister W\u0142adys\u0142aw Kosiniak-Kamysz before flying to the summit.<\/p>\n
He called Poland a \u201cmodel member\u201d of the alliance and warned against countries such as Spain trying to broaden NATO\u2019s definition of defense spending to include things that are not strictly tied to the military.<\/p>\n
Domestic troubles<\/p>\n
But the political headwinds in Madrid are only getting worse. Some in S\u00e1nchez\u2019s left-wing coalition are opposed to shifting cash from social welfare programs to the military. And the prime minister was further wounded after investigators said they had evidence showing that senior figures within his party have taken bribes<\/a> for public works projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s difficult to get 32 nations to do anything together, but the whole point of being an alliance is to be a good ally,\u201d said one NATO diplomat. \u201cSpain has always honored its commitments but we don\u2019t understand why\u201d Madrid can\u2019t agree now and spend the next decade building a plan for getting there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the NATO Public Forum that it wasn’t “fair” for leaders whose country…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[943,7057,365,32,2000,299,2129,2992,48802,2821,32949,5338,770,2558,104,812,41982,49,84196],"class_list":{"0":"post-210981","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-canada","9":"tag-defense-budgets","10":"tag-denmark","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-mark-carney","15":"tag-mark-rutte","16":"tag-mette-frederiksen","17":"tag-nato","18":"tag-nato-summit","19":"tag-pedro-sanchez","20":"tag-poland","21":"tag-slovakia","22":"tag-spain","23":"tag-sweden","24":"tag-ulf-kristersson","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-wladyslaw-kosiniak-kamysz"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114739600160982485","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}