Portugal invests 1.3 billion in defence this year

Portugal will invest over 1.3 billion euros in defence by the end of the year, claimed Prime Minister Luís Montenegro at the "Our New Defence" conference hosted by SIC Notícias in Oeiras, adding that this implies a strategy agreed on by the opposition that "will be more credible internally and externally, the more political support it garners".

"We brought forward to 2025 an ambitious target of having 2% of GDP in Defence, which represents additional expenditure of around 1.3 billion euros", he said.

This target will be met on three lines, the first one being "maintaining and reinforcing assistance to Ukraine".

"A second line is boosting our capabilities, bringing forward some of the goals we’d set for the coming years, basically speed up the procurement of equipment and reach the targets on investment in infrastructure", using monies from the Military Programming Law (LPM).

The third line is to "reclassify and reassess some of the investments under way and others to be made" "of a dual type", that is, for both military and civilian use.

Luís Montenegro claimed that the country should look at this new cycle "not as one where we will spend more money and write more cheques, rather one where will invest to have a return, to make the most of it".

As for the 5% of GDP target by 2035 agreed on at the NATO summit in June, the Government intends to meet it through "small annual increases" on an "escalating and growing trajectory," adding that all the allies committed to this target.

The Prime Minister said that the goal "is more ambitious from its material execution perspective than its financial one", noting the difficulty in quickly procuring material equipment that hasn’t been ordered in advance.

Since Portugal will have a budget surplus at the end of the year, in the future, the Government "will follow a fiscal management that will allocate more investment in defence than has been traditionally done over the last few years", which is done by "prioritising investments" and not "cutting on others" and looking towards the financial return the defence sector may generate.

The State reform will free up financial resources to invest in areas such as health, education, or housing. "It is this plan that, from a transversal perspective, will free up sufficient resources for us to invest in defence", he concluded.