Babiš is pitching to keep defense spending above 2 percent in part by finishing the D11 highway linking Prague to the Polish border, which typically wouldn’t count as hard military spending.
It’s not the first time NATO countries have attempted budgetary gymnastics. Last year, Italy floated a new €13.5 billion bridge to Sicily as a way to meet the 5 percent target, 1.5 percent of which can be funnelled to “softer” dual-use military expenditures. Rome soon withdrew that idea after a telling off from the U.S.
Motivating Prague’s “creative accounting” is primarily a desire to spend more elsewhere, including on social welfare, as well as Babiš’s historically low interest in defense issues, said Petra Guasti, an associate professor of political science at Prague’s Charles University.
Another factor may be that the Defense Ministry is controlled by a junior coalition partner, the far-right, pro-Russian Freedom and Direct Democracy party, which is “interested in reducing defense spending” as part of its ideological aversion to NATO, she said. But broadly speaking, “this is not malevolence — this is incompetence,” Guasti said. And “they are hoping that with a bit of luck they will get away with it.”
But while Babiš may have a reputation as the “Czech Donald Trump,” that won’t be enough to win backing from Washington, predicted Tomáš Pojar, a former national security adviser to the Czech government who now works for the Republican-friendly Hudson Institute.
“They are ideologically in the same camp … and they think that this will be enough,” he said. “But in the end Trump wants to see money and weapons on the table … if we’re not serious here, there will be trouble.”
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