ATHENS

Greece will ask the EU for fiscal flexibility on defense spending, the country’s finance minister announced Tuesday.

Speaking to public broadcaster ERT News, Kyriakos Pierrakakis said Athens will be asking to exempt some €500 million ($569.6 million) in earmarked defense spending.

“The planned increase from 2025 to 2026 is approximately half a billion euros, which has been planned, and this also concerns the following years. There is a very specific defense spending program that we have presented as a government,” he said.

Excluding this spending from the budget would create more space for expenses for other domains, including development and social cohesion, he added.

Greece recently announced Agenda 2030, under which the armed forces will go through an extensive restructuring, with some €25 billion spent on armaments for the next 10 years, including new warships, armored vehicles, military cargo planes, various type of rockets and missiles systems, and strengthening of air-defense capabilities against drones and ballistic missiles.