President Emmanuel Macron on Friday announced plans to increase France’s defence budget by a third for the next seven years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year rattled Europe.<\/p>\n
The announcement came a day after more than a million people protested in France against a proposed reform to cut pensions deficits.
\nMacron said he would ask parliament to approve a new budget of more than \u20ac400 billion ($430 billion) for 2024-2030, up from \u20ac295 billion for the 2019-2025 period.<\/p>\n
“After repairing the armed forces, we are going to transform them,” he told soldiers at the southwestern air base of Mont-de-Marsan.<\/p>\n
“We need to do better and do it differently,” Macron added.<\/p>\n
We need to “privilege rapid action and increasing power because we won’t choose the conflicts we will have to wage.”<\/p>\n
Macron also said the budget for military intelligence would be increased by 60% for the same period, and he hoped to double the country’s ability to respond to major cyber attacks.<\/p>\n
The presidency has also said France wanted to increase its air defences by 50%.<\/p>\n
The new defence bill for 2024-2030, which still requires a parliamentary vote, also hoped to boost military equipment production “to respond to the needs of the armed forces” but also “to the expectations of a partner” like Ukraine, the Elysee has said.<\/p>\n
Paris has boosted defence spending in recent years, but its military capacities have come under scrutiny since Russia in February last year invaded pro-western Ukraine.<\/p>\n
France has delivered weapons to Ukraine since the invasion, but less than some of Kyiv’s other Western allies.<\/p>\n
It has provided weaponry like the Caesar howitzer artillery system and created a fund of \u20ac200 million for Ukraine to buy equipment directly from French manufacturers.<\/p>\n
It has also pledged to hand over highly-mobile AMX-10 RC light tanks, which are wheeled rather than tracked but have a much heavier cannon typical of a tank.<\/p>\n
France’s needs are not the same as Ukraine’s, the French presidency has said.<\/p>\n
“France is not Ukraine. It doesn’t have the same security interests, and doesn’t have a border with Russia,” it has said.<\/p>\n
“We have nuclear weapons and we belong to the European Union and NATO.”<\/p>\n
But it does need to be able to respond rapidly within a European framework, with or without NATO, which would mean deploying 20,000 troops at short notice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Emmanuel Macron on Friday announced plans to increase France’s defence budget by a third for the next seven years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year rattled Europe. The announcement came a day after more than a million people protested in France against a proposed reform to cut pensions deficits. Macron said he would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":112295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-112294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=112294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112296,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112294\/revisions\/112296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/112295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=112294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=112294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tns.world\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=112294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}