Belgium today spends only 1.1% of its GDP on defense. This makes our country the worst student in the NATO class after Luxembourg. By 2035, the aim is to allocate 2% of GDP to defense – which requires an effort of more than five billion. But our country will also have to make savings. Belgium has a deficit of 4.9% of GDP, which makes us the worst performer of all EU member states after Slovakia. According to European budget rules, we must save an additional 27 billion over the next seven years.
In an interview with ‘De Tijd’, Minister of Defense Ludivine Dedonder (PS) makes some proposals to find extra money for defense, despite the heavy budgetary effort. According to Dedonder, we should get the money from “large assets or from capital gains or dividends from shares.” She also proposes to keep defense efforts “outside Europe’s strict budgetary rules”. “We also did this with the security measures after the 2016 attacks,” it said.