City of Arts and Sciences in the city of Valencia, Spain - Photo: Olivia Fernández Sosa
Spain - Global Development
Spain refuses NATO’s 5% spending target as corruption scandals engulf Sanchez and wildfires burn the most land since 1994
Spain enters the second half of this decade as NATO’s most openly defiant member, a government fighting for survival against a widening corruption scandal, and a country that just endured its worst wildfire season since 1994. This article covers aid, tax, climate, and trade, the same four threads RYB tracks across every country page, against a backdrop of genuine political turbulence.
ODA: Growing, But Falling Short of Its Own Legal Target
Spain provided $5.1 billion in ODA in 2025, an increase of 10.7% in real terms and representing 0.27% of GNI, still well short of the 0.7% target Spain’s own 2023 Law on Cooperation for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity legally commits it to reaching by 2030. The OECD’s own assessment is blunt: current trends make that legal target unlikely to be met.
Spain ranks 12th among DAC donors by ODA volume but only 19th by GNI share, a gap reflecting genuine, but insufficient growth rather than stagnation. Its aid remains overwhelmingly grant-based, 99.6% in 2024, and concentrated regionally: Spain provides the largest share of any DAC donor’s bilateral aid to Latin America and the Caribbean, 23% of its gross bilateral total, a reflection of colonial-era ties RYB’s country pages elsewhere note complicate as much as they enable genuine partnership. Aid to Ukraine rose 356.5% in real terms in 2025, reaching $87.4 million, part of the broader European reallocation toward the war RYB has tracked across multiple donor pages.
Tax: Progressive Rates, Persistent Leakage
Spain’s progressive income tax runs from 19% to 47%, alongside a digital services tax targeting large technology companies and a 0.2% Financial Transaction Tax on qualifying stock trades. Despite this structure, Spain loses an estimated €80 billion annually to tax avoidance and evasion, a leakage that directly constrains the same ODA budget currently falling short of its legal 0.7% commitment.
Climate: Spain’s Worst Wildfire Season Since 1994
Spain endured its most destructive wildfire season in three decades in 2025, with 382,000 hectares burned, according to the European Forest Fire Information System, part of a wider Iberian Peninsula catastrophe that made 2025 the EU’s worst wildfire year on record. Spain and Portugal together accounted for 43% of the 1.08 million hectares burned across the EU that year, with a prolonged mid-August heatwave triggering 22 very large fires across both countries almost simultaneously.
The Uña de Quintana fire alone burned over 40,000 hectares, becoming the largest single fire in Spain since ministerial statistics began in 1968. Researchers attribute the intensity, not just the scale, of 2025’s fires to a genuine structural shift: increased vegetation connectivity between forest areas combined with climate change drying out fuel loads faster than firefighting capacity has improved since the 1990s. Nearly 40% of the burned area within the EU fell inside protected Natura 2000 sites, disproportionate to their 19% share of total land area.
Spain’s political response has become entangled with its domestic corruption crisis: opposition-controlled regional administrations, particularly in areas hit by the 2024 Valencia floods and the 2025 wildfires, have faced allegations of disaster mismanagement, adding environmental governance to the list of issues eroding public trust in Spanish institutions at every level.
Trade and NATO: Spain’s Lone Stand Against the 5% Target
Spain’s most consequential 2025-26 international story may be diplomatic rather than commercial. At NATO’s June 2025 summit in The Hague, all 31 other member states committed to raising defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, split between 3.5% on core military needs and 1.5% on broader resilience. Spain alone refused, securing a formal exemption after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the target “unreasonable and counterproductive,” insisting Spain would cap spending at roughly 2.1% of GDP, current spending sits at just 1.28%, the lowest in the alliance.
The dispute triggered direct friction with Washington. President Trump called Spain a “very low payer,” suggested in October 2025 that NATO should consider expelling Spain, and explicitly threatened trade retaliation, tariffs, in place of the defence spending Spain would not commit to. Analysts note real domestic constraints behind Spain’s position: only around 14% of Spaniards support significantly increasing military spending, a legacy partly rooted in scepticism toward the armed forces dating to the Franco dictatorship, and Sánchez’s own coalition partners, including Podemos and Catalan and Basque nationalist parties, remain firmly opposed to a larger military budget.
Spain’s foreign policy carries its own internal tension worth noting directly: its vocal criticism of the Gaza war, including formal recognition of Palestine and a suspension of arms exports to Israel, sits alongside continued Spanish arms sales to other conflict-adjacent markets, a familiar pattern RYB has documented among several donor countries whose humanitarian rhetoric does not always extend evenly across their full defence trade relationships.
A Corruption Crisis Reshaping Spanish Politics
Spain’s most consequential domestic story is arguably its least related to any single policy area: a widening set of corruption investigations now threatening the stability of Sánchez’s own government. The “Koldo case,” involving alleged kickbacks tied to pandemic-era procurement, led to the June 2025 resignation of PSOE organisational secretary Santos Cerdán. Investigators raided PSOE party headquarters in 2026 as part of a separate probe into alleged misuse of party funds, and a judge has separately accused former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of leading a network that arranged a €53 million pandemic-era bailout for the Plus Ultra airline.
Sánchez, who first came to power in 2018 by ousting a corruption-mired conservative government, now faces the same charge from critics across the political spectrum, even as allies acknowledge his genuine policy achievements: labour market reforms, minimum wage increases, and the regularisation of more than 500,000 undocumented migrants. Whether Spain’s constitution permits any path to elections before 2027 remains a live legal and political question as the scandals continue accumulating.
What Spain Still Contributes
Spain’s water management expertise remains genuinely valuable to drought-affected regions worldwide, and its feminist co-operation strategy, embedded in its 2023 development law, represents a substantive policy commitment rather than symbolic branding. Spanish civil society organisations maintain deep, longstanding partnerships across Latin America in healthcare and education, built on a regional relationship considerably more collaborative than the “neo-colonial” framing some recipient countries have applied to it historically.
How This Connects to the SDGs
Spain’s shortfall against its own legal 0.7% ODA target threatens SDG 17, global partnerships, directly, an unusual case of a country failing a domestically legislated commitment rather than a purely international one. The record 2025 wildfires connect directly to SDG 13, climate action, and SDG 15, life on land, with nearly 40% of burned area falling within supposedly protected sites.
The corruption crisis engulfing Sánchez’s government strikes at SDG 16, strong institutions, at the highest level of Spanish politics, while the NATO spending dispute raises real questions about SDG 17’s call for global partnerships when a member state’s domestic welfare priorities collide directly with alliance-wide defence commitments.
Looking Forward
Whether Sánchez’s government survives its accumulating corruption scandals through to the constitutionally required 2027 election, or falls sooner, will shape Spanish politics and its international commitments alike. The NATO spending dispute remains genuinely unresolved beyond its formal 2025 exemption: a 2029 review of the alliance-wide target leaves Spain’s outlier status a recurring point of friction rather than a settled matter.
Spain’s wildfire trajectory deserves particular attention heading into future summers: 2025’s combination of record intensity and near-record scale, occurring despite decades of improved firefighting capacity, suggests the underlying climate drivers are now outpacing institutional adaptation. RYB will track how Spain’s ODA trajectory evolves against its 2030 legal deadline, whether the corruption investigations reach a political resolution, and how Spain’s NATO position holds through the alliance’s 2029 review. This page will be updated as new data and developments emerge.
Sources
- OECD, Development Co-operation Profiles: Spain — oecd.org
- Atlantic Council, “Why Spain is not meeting NATO spending targets” — atlanticcouncil.org
- Wikipedia, “Agreement on 5% NATO defence spending by 2035” — en.wikipedia.org
- France 24, “Spain strikes deal with NATO to be exempt from 5 percent defence spending target” — france24.com
- European Commission Joint Research Centre, “2025 was EU’s most destructive wildfire season on record” — joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu
- Euronews, “Spain’s sees worst wildfire season since 1994 with 382,000 hectares burned so far in 2025” — euronews.com
- Reuters via US News, “Spain’s Sanchez Running Out of Road as Corruption Probes Stack Up” — usnews.com
- The Conversation, “Pedro Sánchez: how a string of corruption allegations could make Spain’s Socialist party a threat to its own coalition” — theconversation.com
- Wikipedia, “Next Spanish general election” — en.wikipedia.org
- RYB, Official Development Assistance (ODA) — redyellowblue.org/finance/oda/
Spain
Kingdom of Spain
España
Population
47,222,613 (2023 est.)
47,260,584 (2021)
50,015,792 (2020)
48,958,159 (2017)
Capital: Madrid
Internet country code: .es
Government
Official website: exteriores.gob.es
Ministry of Industry and Tourism: turismo.gob.es
Background
Spain’s powerful world empire of the 16th and 17th centuries ultimately yielded command of the seas to England. Subsequent failure to embrace the mercantile and industrial revolutions caused the country to fall behind Britain, France, and Germany in economic and political power. Spain remained neutral in World War I and II but suffered through a devastating civil war (1936-39). A peaceful transition to democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, and rapid economic modernisation, Spain joined the EU in 1986, gave Spain a dynamic, rapidly growing economy and made it a global champion of freedom and human rights. More recently the government has focused on measures to reverse a severe economic recession that began in mid-2008, with austerity measures leading to one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.
Fifty years after Franco’s death, the same public scepticism toward military spending his dictatorship left behind now shapes Spain’s lone stand against NATO’s 5% target, even as a widening corruption crisis tests whether the democratic institutions built in the years after his rule can withstand the pressure now bearing down on them.