Paris: France will accelerate a hike in defence spending to reach €64 billion (US$75 billion) in 2027, three years earlier than planned, President Emmanuel Macron told troops and military brass ahead of Bastille Day celebrations on July 14.
In the face of the greatest threat to freedom since 1945, France needs to step up, the president said in his traditional speech at the Armed Forces Ministry in Paris the evening before the national holiday. Macron said Europe must be ready to face a permanent Russian threat on its borders, from the Caucasus to the Arctic.
“Across Europe, nations are rearming, and France cannot leave its European allies on the front line in the face of very short-term threats,” Macron said.
France will add €3.5 billion to the 2026 defence budget on top of a planned increase, and €3 billion to the 2027 budget, the French president said. With that, the country will have doubled its defence budget from when Macron took office in 2017, ahead of a plan to reach that level by the end of the current 2024-2030 military planning law.
The planned increase comes after NATO members agreed to raise core defence spending to 3.5% of GDP, at a June meeting in The Hague, Netherlands. While a number of allies, including Germany, Sweden and Norway, in recent weeks announced plans to meet the target within the next five years, France has yet to say whether and when it will meet the spending goal.
While “certainly appreciable,” Macron’s announcement for an additional €6.5 billion spending over two years amounts to little less than 0.2% of additional GDP at the end of 2027, from a level of defence spending of 2.3% of GDP in 2025, Francois Heisbourg, senior adviser for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in a social media post.
“The target of 3.5% is a long way off, while Germany plans to reach it in 2029,” Heisbourg said.
