Delayed Military Spending Package Approved; Citizens Note It Has Always Been Possible to Have Opinions About Defence
PARIS — France adopted its long-delayed 2026 budget this week, clearing the way for the increased military spending that President Emmanuel Macron has promised since Russia’s war in Ukraine raised the European defence conversation from a recurring diplomatic concern to an urgent logistical one. The budget passed with the specific parliamentary arithmetic that French politics currently produces: narrowly, loudly, and with everyone claiming victory for different reasons.
The Budget: Its Numbers
The defence allocation represents the largest year-on-year increase in French military spending since NATO’s post-Cold War targets became the subject of actual enforcement rather than gentlemanly suggestion. France is now spending above two percent of GDP on defence, a threshold that NATO has requested for years and that France has now reached via a budget process that took significantly longer than the threshold required, which is perhaps appropriate given France’s relationship with externally imposed schedules.
The Elysee presented the budget as evidence that France is “assuming its full responsibilities in the collective security architecture of Europe,” which is the kind of sentence that sounds better in French and that the opposition parties received with the polite skepticism that French opposition parties apply to everything the Elysee presents, on the principle that unreflective agreement would set a troubling precedent. The National Assembly’s arithmetic required several rounds of procedural maneuvering before producing a majority, which French political commentators described as “normal for this parliament” and which the government described as “a demonstration of democratic process,” and both descriptions are accurate.
Public Reception: Characteristically Nuanced
French public opinion on defence spending shows majority support for maintaining strong defence capacity and majority opposition to any specific measure required to fund it, which is not a contradiction but a sophisticated position that the French political system has been accommodating for decades. The streets of Paris were quiet on the day of the budget’s passage, which in France means either that the public approves, disapproves without sufficient intensity to demonstrate, or is saving energy for something they care about more, and all three interpretations are simultaneously credible. A philosopher in a Saint-Germain-des-Pres cafe, asked for his view, said the budget was “necessary but insufficient,” which is also his view of most things and which he confirmed was accurate in this context.
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The French parliament’s protracted budget debate reflected the fragmented National Assembly where no single bloc holds a majority. Prime Minister Bayrou navigated coalition arithmetic requiring concessions on spending timelines before reaching the votes needed. The defence provisions cleared more easily than domestic spending elements, reflecting a European security consensus building since 2022. The budget also commits France to sustaining its nuclear deterrent modernisation programme, which accounts for a substantial share of the defence increase and which all major parliamentary blocs support on the grounds that French strategic autonomy is a cross-party commitment rather than a partisan position. The Elysee expressed satisfaction. The opposition expressed reservations. The budget is law. The spending begins.
