'Rearm Europe' is dead, long live 'Readiness2030'

The EU executive has ditched the name of its military build-up plan after complaints from the Spanish and Italian prime ministers that their citizens do not support such militaristic language.

Coming into the European Council summit on Thursday, centre-left Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told reporters that his biggest problem with President von der Leyen’s Rearm Europe plan for an EU military funding surge was its name. "I don't like the term rearm - I think the EU is a political project of soft power,” he said. He has said the threats Spain faces are different than the EU countries of the East, noting, “our threat is not Russia bringing its troops across the Pyrenees.” He has been pushing for the €150 billion EU defence fund, and an accompanying relaxation of EU debt rules for national investments in defence, to be open to spending on broader issues of security like combating climate change and illegal immigration. “Defence can be explained under a much broader umbrella, which is security,” he said.

His comments almost exactly mirrored those of far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni standing in the same spot at the Council’s red carpet two weeks earlier after the emergency summit. Meloni said Italian citizens wouldn’t support a plan with such a name that implied just buying weapons, comments she repeated to the Italian Senate last week. The EU plan should encompass all elements of security, not just weapons, including, "operability, essential services, energy infrastructures, supply chains: all things that are not simply done with weapons,” she said.