Spain wants a carve-out from NATO’s likely future defense spending goal of 5 percent of GDP, the country’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said ahead of next week’s high-stakes alliance summit in The Hague.

“Spain will continue to fulfil its duty in the years and decades ahead and will continue to actively contribute to the European security architecture. However, Spain cannot commit to a specific spending target in terms of GDP at this summit,” Sánchez told NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in a letter seen by POLITICO.

Spain has the lowest military spending of any NATO member, allocating just 1.3 percent of its GDP to defense in 2024. Sánchez said earlier this year that Russia didn’t pose an immediate security threat to Spain.

NATO countries meet next week for the first alliance summit since Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The U.S. president wants members to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense, a big jump from the current 2 percent target, which Madrid will reach only this year.

To placate Trump, Rutte has proposed that the 5 percent target should include 3.5 percent of GDP on purely military expenditures and 1.5 percent for defense-related items such as military mobility and cybersecurity.

NATO’s decision-making process is consensus-based, meaning one ally can block the other 31 with a veto. Earlier this month, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Madrid would not prevent NATO allies from agreeing to a new 5 percent target, but that her country would stick to 2 percent for now.

“Of course, it is not our intention to limit the spending ambitions of other allies or to obstruct the outcome of the upcoming summit,” the Sánchez letter reads, asking for either flexible wording that would make the target optional or a proper carve-out for Spain.

In contrast, Swedish political parties on Thursday agreed to meet the 5 percent target by 2032 and to borrow as much as 300 billion krona (€27 billion) to do so.

Sánchez argued that Spain doesn’t need to spend 5 percent of its GDP to fulfill its so-called capability targets, meaning new objectives of weapons inventory agreed by NATO defense ministers earlier this month.

He also wrote that a 5 percent defense spending goal would jeopardize the country’s welfare system, force the government to increase taxes on the middle class, scale back commitments to the green transition and curtail international development cooperation. 

“It is the legitimate right of every government to decide whether or not they are willing to make those sacrifices,” he wrote. 

Rushing to 5 percent would also force Madrid to buy off-the-shelf equipment instead of fostering its own industrial base, as well as take money away from welfare policies, Sánchez also wrote.

The Spanish Socialist party is in a coalition with the junior left-wing Sumar party, which opposes increased defense spending and whose members are expected to attend a counter-summit for peace in parallel to the NATO summit.

The letter was first reported by Spanish outlet El País.