The world is moving toward scenarios in which wars are real possibilities, and toward a renewed push for the defense industry. Companies do not want to miss the opportunity that this new reality can provide them. The Catalan employers’ association, Foment del Tribal, has promoted meetings in Brussels these days with the European Parliament and the European Commission, as well as with NATO, to showcase Catalonia’s existing commercial and industrial capabilities in the face of European and Spanish defense plans. The President of the Employers’ Association, Josep Sánchez Libre, led the meetings so that Catalonia has an important role in European investment programs that want to provide the European Union with strategic autonomy with regard to security. To this end, Foment announced on Wednesday that it will consolidate a corporate center that can absorb 20% of the annual investment that Spain plans to disburse, or in other words, 2,000 million euros annually.
Foment’s visit to Brussels had several objectives, one of which was the meeting with the former president of the state, Carles Puigdemont, in the context of Juntes’ decision to obstruct the legislature of Pedro Sánchez.
In addition to this meeting, Foment’s meetings with European organizations and with NATO, according to the employers’ association in a statement, helped to present the potential of the Catalan industry “with high and innovative technical and technological capacity and highly qualified technical staff to take advantage of dual-use technology in areas such as communications and navigation systems, unmanned vehicles or the manufacture of automotive components to provide transport and intervention vehicles for the defense industry.”
This movement comes from two sources: on the one hand, from the desire of the European Commission to develop a more robust defense industry that would allow it to have greater independence with regard to security, which was imposed as an urgent necessity especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine due to the Russian invasion; On the other hand, the pressure exerted by US President Donald Trump on his NATO partners to invest more in defense. In the latter case, Trump rebukes the government of Pedro Sanchez for being the only one that refused to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP at the request of the President of the United States.
Overall, the government has committed to increasing defense spending – it sees it as capable of meeting the 2% targets set by NATO and Brussels – and this implies public investments and contracts that a series of companies will have to fulfill. Last March, the government approved the Industrial and Technological Action Plan for Security and Defense, which, as Foment recalls, foresees annual investments of 10,000 million euros. Employers are demanding that 20% of this investment – roughly equivalent to the weight of Spain’s autonomous community in terms of population and GDP – be made in Catalonia, i.e. 2,000 million euros annually. The center promoted by Foment will be a way to direct these investments towards Catalan companies in this sector. The entity says: “We want Catalonia to be an active part in building a safer, more innovative and industrially stronger Europe.”
Fomint took advantage of its visit to Brussels these days to demand that Brussels not apply customs duties to Bangladesh, because this would affect Catalan textile companies that have production centers in this Asian country.
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