Slovakia ready to reach 2% of GDP for military

At the end of the two-day NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday, Slovak President Andrej Kiska commented on US President Donald Trump's call for member states to increase defence spending immediately to 2 percent of GDP. Kiska stated that "although it's a duty, it's a long-distance run". Meanwhile, when it came to Trump's proposal to increase defence spending to 4 percent of GDP, Kiska said that no other leader had reacted to it, even though several countries had already been spending more than 2 percent of their GDP for the military. According to Kiska, governments of individual member states need to communicate a lot with their people, using much empathy to attune the public to the 2-percent commitment.
Kiska claimed that he told Trump that if current leaders immediately put into effect the 2-percent rule, they would most probably lose their posts and be replaced by anti-NATO populists. "We need to work more and explain, in order to achieve an agreement among the public that this is our duty," said Kiska. He added that when it comes to Slovakia, there is a broad consensus on the commitment to increase the country's defence spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2024, supported by both the Government and Opposition, with the exception of "extremists and fascists", who are unlikely to be part of the government in the future, however.