Changing the constitution because of the war in Ukraine?

The president proposed the idea of ​​changing the constitution in March. The bill has now gone to the Sejm. It is short. The idea is to include the following provision in Article 219 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland: "In the budget act, annual expenditures from the state budget of no less than 4% of the annual gross domestic product are allocated for financing the defense needs of the Republic of Poland."

Why? This is a fragment of the project's justification: "The aggressive international policy pursued by the Russian Federation for many years has resulted in a significant change in the security environment of Poland and other European countries and justifies the need to conduct a continuous process of strengthening the security system of the Republic of Poland and Europe, both in the military and non-military dimension."

What are the chances that the Sejm will adopt this draft amendment to the constitution? Law and Justice MPs will vote in favor. "This is a presidential draft, it is hard to imagine that we would vote differently," Bartosz Kownacki, a PiS MP who sits on the Sejm's Defense Committee, tells "Rzeczpospolita." We also asked Deputy Defense Minister Paweł Bejda about the matter. "I am absolutely in favor," the Polish People's Party politician replies.

But that doesn't mean that the entire PSL or the MPs of Poland 2050 will vote that way. There is no decision at the club level yet. - The problem is that such an obligation written into the constitution may be valid for 20 or 30 years. Now we spend more than 4% of GDP, and later it may limit budget movements and be difficult to reverse - says one of the MPs of the Civic Coalition.

According to our information, on Tuesday afternoon, there was no decision yet on how the KO Club would proceed with this vote – there has been no internal discussion on the subject so far. However, considering the record budget deficit, which is expected to amount to almost PLN 300 billion in 2025, it is easy to imagine a situation in which the Minister of Finance will not look favorably on such a solution.

Defense spending from 2.2 to 4.7 percent of GDP in five years

How does it look now? According to the government's plan, in 2025 we are to spend just over PLN 186 billion on defense. This amount comes from two main sources - the state budget and the extra-budgetary Armed Forces Support Fund. The budget for 2025 includes PLN 124.3 billion, which according to the government's announcement is 3.1 percent of the GDP expected for the current year. In turn, PLN 62.3 billion are funds from the FWSZ, which, in addition to receiving money from the Ministry of National Defense, is mainly involved in obtaining it on the debt market. In recent years, when buying weapons abroad, we somehow automatically expect help in obtaining financing - this is the case when purchasing equipment in the United States, South Korea, Sweden or Great Britain.

The law states that we are to spend at least 3% of GDP on defense from the budget. This regulation is included in the Homeland Defense Act, which came into force in 2022. It is worth recalling that in recent years we have made a big leap - in 2020 we were spending just over PLN 50 billion (2.2% of GDP), and in 2024, according to "Rzeczpospolita" estimates, it was already around PLN 140 billion, or slightly less than 4%. In 2025, it is to be over PLN 180 billion, or 4.7% of GDP.

Although it is hard to believe today, because large expenditures on defense are supported by all major political options, the situation was completely different six or seven years ago. In 2017, the Sejm adopted an act amending the act on the reconstruction and technical modernization and financing of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Poland, which assumed that 2.5 percent of GDP would be spent on defense from... 2030. "At that time, it was the first big step forward, and it was not at all obvious that the opposition would support the project," recalls Bartosz Kownacki, then deputy minister of defense, who was behind the bill.

So what is the point of applying for 4% in the constitution, since we are already spending more? The problem is that one third of current defense spending is financed by debt, which will soon have to be repaid from... the Ministry of National Defense budget. This means that if nothing changes, in a few years the Ministry of Defense budget will be largely allocated to repaying loan installments. Greater financing from the state budget, and not from debt mechanisms, means greater stability in financing the army. On the other hand, for the Ministry of Finance it means another fixed expense, no longer 3, but 4% of GDP annually - i.e. another few dozen billion złoty, which must definitely be included in the budget.

The Hague: commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP

Compared to our NATO allies, Polish defense spending is high. According to the alliance's estimates, in terms of spending per GDP in 2024, we spent the most of all 32 member states. The current guidelines from 2014 are that states should spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. But this is changing due to Russia's aggression against Ukraine and strong American pressure for Europeans to finally take matters into their own hands. President Donald Trump has spoken of states spending as much as 5 percent of GDP for this purpose.

At the end of June, a NATO summit will be held in The Hague, where a decision is to be made to increase this threshold of minimum spending from 2 to most likely 3.5 percent of GDP, probably by 2035. An additional obligation may be that appropriate funds must also be allocated to infrastructure – probably dual-use, meaning that it can be used by both civilians and the military.

Currently, the vast majority of countries already meet the 2% GDP requirement, and even those that have “traditionally” spent the least in recent years, such as Spain, Portugal and Belgium, have announced increases in their budgets in this area. The countries of the eastern flank, such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, spend the most. In these countries, reaching the 3.5% threshold in the coming years should not be a problem. Germany (a special Fund of EUR 500 billion for the next ten years) and Great Britain, which plans to reach 3% of GDP in the early 2030s, have also announced a large increase in spending.