Poland wants to exclude defense investments from the public deficit count in the European Union

Committed to an unprecedented defense effort, Poland wants to put pressure on the European Union so that defense investments are no longer taken into account in the calculation of the public deficit.

On July 11 and 12 will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, the next NATO summit which will, unsurprisingly, be largely dedicated to supporting Alliance members in Ukraine, as well as modernizing and strengthening the defensive posture against the Russian threat.

If, at previous summits, the United States and the countries of Western Europe had above all a voice in the chapter, the Eastern Europeans, today, are in a position of strength, in particular because of their role key in the direct control of Russia, but also by the support they have provided so far to Ukraine.

Among them, Poland acts not only as a spokesperson, but now as a representative playing on par with the best-endowed European nations such as Germany, Great Britain or France, as a result of an unprecedented effort and without equivalent to equip itself with a defense tool capable of containing the Russian threat.

In an interview given to the Defense24.pl website, the now well-known Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak, specified the ambitions that Warsaw intends to carry during this summit, so as to respond to the evolution of the threat.

Although most of the interview concerns the measures taken in Poland to strengthen the armies, whether in terms of the acquisition of equipment, industrial partnerships, but also recruitment and the increase in power of the reserve, the minister also presented two measures that he intends to propose at the summit: to bring the floor for defense investments to 2,5% of GDP against 2% today, and above all to obtain from the European Union that it does not count, at the less for a time, defense expenditure from the calculation of the public deficit of the member countries.

To support these measures, and contrary for example to the French posture which, for years, has been essentially declarative, Poland intends to put forward its own example, the country having undertaken to bring its own budget to 4% of its GDP, the most important defense effort of the alliance, with a level which had not been reached since the Cold War.

However, Warsaw is perfectly aware that its own economic situation, with a debt of less than 50% of GDP, allows it certain latitudes inaccessible to many other European countries whose debt is more than twice as high, in particular after the Covid crisis.

In addition, the country still uses the Zloty as its national currency, and finds itself, in fact, less affected by European constraints in terms of respecting deficits, the country having in 2022 a public deficit of $26 billion, or 3,5% of its GDP and above all roughly the same amount as its defense investments ($22,3 billion).

In fact, Warsaw is naturally pleading here for its own parish, since to join the Euro zone, the country must respect the Maastricht criteria and therefore a public deficit of less than 3%. But there is no doubt that these two proposals could appeal to many European chancelleries, well beyond the countries of Eastern Europe alone.

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