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French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to increase military spending by €6.5bn over the next two years, saying the effort was urgent and necessary in the face of mounting threats, including from Russia.
In a speech to military officials on the eve of Bastille Day, Macron argued that France still had the means to bolster defence spending, despite the pressing need to repair its degraded public finances.
Macron said the 2026 defence budget would be raised by €3.5bn, and another €3bn in 2027. This would represent a roughly 6 per cent increase over the total €110bn that has already been planned for 2026 and 2027 combined.
“This new historic [spending] effort is proportional, credible and indispensable,” Macron said on Sunday. “It is just what is needed.”
“Since 1945, freedom has never been so threatened, and never so seriously,” the French president said of both the conventional military and cyber threats now facing Europe. “To be free in this world, we must be feared. To be feared, we must be powerful.”
Defence looks set to be the only area to get additional resources when prime minister François Bayrou unveils a plan for the 2026 budget on Tuesday.
To begin to narrow wide deficits, the government is working on a fiscal package of as much as €40bn in spending cuts and tax hikes, and has warned the public that everyone will have to contribute to the effort. Without a working majority in parliament, Bayrou’s government remains vulnerable to being toppled over the budget.
But most opposition parties have supported higher defence spending in recent years and are expected to do so again.
European countries have been under pressure from US President Donald Trump to do more to ensure their own security, leading to a landmark agreement in June among Nato countries to raise core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP.
This represents a big increase from the historical 2 per cent target, which about three-quarters of the 32 Nato members now meet, including France.
It will be difficult for Paris to meet the new Nato goal given its stretched public finances, according to lawmakers and analysts.
Macron has argued that the EU should embark on joint borrowing to boost regional defence, but other member states, including Germany, remain against it.
Instead, Germany has embarked on a massive wave of defence spending that it will finance by taking on additional debt.
Berlin has room to do so given that its debt-to-GDP ratio stood at 62.5 per cent at the end of 2024, according to Eurostat, while France’s was at 113 per cent, behind only Greece and Italy.
Since Macron was first elected in 2017, he has made it a priority to rebuild the military following decades of cuts after the cold war. France has passed successive multiyear military budgets that aim to repair its degraded forces and double the annual defence budget from 2017 levels by 2030.
The French leader said the newly announced spending bump would mean the defence budget would instead be doubled to reach €64bn by the end of 2027, his last year in office.
The annual military budget would need to increase to about €100bn just to reach a target of spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence, according to a recent France Strategie report.
France has one of Europe’s strongest armies with a wide range of capabilities, including nuclear weapons that can be carried on submarines and on fighter jets. The nuclear capability accounts for around 13 per cent of the overall equipment budget. It also maintains an aircraft carrier and has roughly 200,000 personnel.
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