NATO report: Last year, the government allocated only 1.6% of GDP to defense

The Romanian government spent less money on defense in 2023, only 1.6% of GDP (and not 2% or 2.5% as President Klaus Iohannis wants), according to the data contained in the official NATO report on last year (presented last Thursday by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg), after spending 1.75% of GDP in 2022 and 1.88% of GDP in 2021. The only year in the last four in which military spending reached 2% of GDP was the first pandemic year - 2020, when the Orban government gave 2.01% of GDP to defense.

With this level of spending, Romania is below the NATO average of 1.73% of GDP and below the minimum threshold of 2% of GDP. It should be noted that Romania spent, as a percentage of GDP, less than the Netherlands (1.63% of GDP).

We remind you that President Klaus Iohannis entered the race for NATO leadership against Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and one of Iohannis' campaign promises, as an article published in Politico.eu shows, is precisely the defense budget.

"We must all do everything we can to reach the minimum of 2% of GDP for defense spending and to invest at least 20% in major equipment as soon as possible," Iohannis wrote in the electoral article entitled " A vision for the future of NATO".

When it comes to the actual investment in equipment, Romania is even worse than the total budget: it is among NATO's cogs, the 5th place from the bottom of the ranking, with 21.9% of the total defense budget. The detached leader of spending on new weapons is Poland (53.6% of the total defense budget goes to the endowment), followed by Finland, Luxembourg, Hungary and Greece. The Netherlands is also ahead of Romania in this chapter, with 25.5% of the total Defense budget. In absolute figures, in 2023 Romania had a defense budget of 5.6 billion dollars, compared to the Netherlands - 16.5 billion dollars.

Although the figures from the NATO reports for the last four years are eloquent, the former prime minister and minister of defense Nicolae Ciucă, the current president of the Senate and head of the PNL, claims that our country respects its commitment made within NATO and currently allocates 2.5% of GDP for defense.

Nicolae Ciucă declared, at the end of last week: "We can say that until 2015, when the decision was made for Romania to allocate 2% of GDP according to a commitment at the level of the Alliance, this sector was somewhat estranged from what financial allocation means . But, starting from 2016, more precisely with 2017, this allocation of 2% was entered, and starting from last year, Romania was among the few NATO countries that allocated 2.5% for Defense. (...) Romania managed in a short period of time to realize the priority military capabilities it needed and continues at this moment the endowment programs, so that the Romanian Army together with the other structures of NATO can make a contribution consistent with this decision to strengthen deterrence and defense on the Eastern Flank".

No one disputes the statements of the PNL president, but one thing is the allocation made by Parliament through the state budget law and another is the actual spending of that percentage of 2% or 2.5%. In reality, NATO data shows that last year our country spent only 1.6% of GDP on defense.

We remind Reserve General Nicolae Ciucă that last year his party colleagues, members of the PSD-PNL Government led by Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, agreed to cut 7.2 billion lei from the amount allocated for endowment of the Army, money that he transferred to the Government's Reserve Fund, a fund from which, in the fall of last year, 31.9 billion lei were additionally allocated, discretionarily, to ministries and other public institutions, including for the payment of salaries, the respective allocations being made because last year the Executive did not operate no budget correction.