Turkey presses to join the EU's €150 billion rearmament drive, dividing the bloc

Turkey is mounting its most determined push yet to be let inside the European Union's new defence-spending machinery, testing how far a rearming Europe is prepared to open its industrial base to a powerful but politically awkward NATO ally. At the centre of the dispute sits SAFE — Security Action for Europe — the EU's €150 billion fund of cut-price loans for joint weapons buying, and the question of whether Ankara's drone-makers and shipyards can plug into it.

The stakes reach well beyond the eastern Mediterranean. SAFE is the first time the bloc has used its collective borrowing power to underwrite military spending, and the rules governing who may supply its procurement pipelines are becoming a defining test of Europe's post-Ukraine security strategy. Whether a non-EU NATO member such as Turkey can tap that money bears directly on how the continent — including small states like Luxembourg now ramping up their own defence budgets — organises a rearmament drive worth, on paper, more than €800 billion.

What Ankara is asking for

Turkish leaders have made the case repeatedly and in public. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has argued that European security is unthinkable without his country, while Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in November 2025 that Turkey, as a NATO ally, "provides critical contribution to Europe's security" and should be included in EU defence initiatives, "including the SAFE mechanism."

The time has long come for Europe to include Türkiye in its existing defense and security mechanism.

Concretely, Ankara wants two things: access to SAFE-financed joint procurement so Turkish firms can sell into the EU's new buying pipelines, and a broader seat in the bloc's defence planning. Turkey is no longer merely a buyer of weapons. Its industry has become a serious exporter of armed drones, armoured vehicles and warships, and several EU governments increasingly see it as a source of capability they cannot quickly build themselves.

How the EU's defence fund actually works

SAFE, adopted on 27 May 2025, lets the European Commission raise up to €150 billion on capital markets against the EU budget and re-lend it to governments for joint defence projects. The mechanics, however, are restrictive by design:

• Only EU member states can borrow under SAFE. Nineteen have requested loans, and on 11 February 2026 the Council cleared a first wave of roughly €38 billion for eight of them — Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Cyprus, Portugal and Romania.
• Equipment bought with the loans must be largely European: no more than 35% of a product's component costs may come from outside the EU, the EEA-EFTA states or Ukraine.
• Firms from other non-EU countries can take part on equal terms only if their government concludes a bilateral participation agreement with the EU — and that requires both a security and defence partnership and the unanimous backing of all 27 member states.

That last hurdle is where Turkey's bid has stalled. Canada became the first non-EU country to clear it: member states endorsed its agreement in December 2025 and the Council concluded it on 15 June 2026. Turkey, by contrast, applied for enhanced access but the Commission said it could not process Ankara's request — alongside South Korea's — before the relevant deadline, and Turkey was never invited to negotiate. Analysts at the IISS and the Greek think-tank ELIAMEP note that, rather than force a divisive vote, Brussels effectively chose not to put Turkey's case forward at all, preserving unity at SAFE's launch.

A bloc that cannot agree

The deadlock is, at root, about the EU's unanimity rule, which hands Greece and Cyprus an effective veto over any Turkish deal. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has linked any access to Ankara first withdrawing the 1995 parliamentary resolution threatening war should Greece extend its Aegean territorial waters.

"If Turkey wishes to join the EU's funding instruments, the concerns of Greece and Cyprus should be taken into account," Mitsotakis said. "Thirty years on, the casus belli must be taken off the table."

Cyprus, which says its position was formally adopted by the EU in October 2025, frames the objection around Turkey's continued military presence in the island's north. President Nikos Christodoulides argued that no "third country, which occupies territories or threatens the security of member states, can under any circumstances participate in" the EU's defence instruments. France has also been wary.

Other capitals pull the opposite way. Germany, Italy, Spain and Finland favour deeper industrial cooperation, and where SAFE is blocked, governments are simply going around it. Britain agreed in late 2025 to sell Turkey 20 Eurofighter Typhoons; in April 2026 Airbus and Turkish Aerospace Industries signed a deal to supply Hürjet jet trainers to Spain. Turkey also participates in the German-led European Sky Shield Initiative — leaving it functionally woven into Europe's rearmament even as it is shut out of the financing.

Ankara, for its part, has begun playing down the snub. Defence Minister Yaşar Güler told an evaluation meeting in December 2025 that Turkey did not "attach much importance" to whether it joined SAFE, predicting that ammunition-short European states would come knocking regardless.

Why it matters beyond Brussels

For smaller members, the row is not abstract. Luxembourg has committed to lifting defence spending to 2% of gross national income by 2030 — from €696 million in 2024 to about €1.46 billion — and was not among the first eight SAFE borrowers. Like its peers, it must decide where the equipment it buys will come from, and whether "Buy European" should mean Europe alone or a wider circle of trusted suppliers.

That is the deeper question SAFE has forced into the open. A rearming Europe needs scale, speed and industrial depth it does not yet possess. Turkey offers some of that — but on terms a divided bloc has so far been unable to agree. How Brussels resolves the tension between strategic need and political grievance will shape not only its relationship with Ankara, but the architecture of European defence for years to come.