A budget is supposedly a technical document. Revenues. Expenditures. Deficits. Debt servicing. Growth assumptions.
But a budget is also a map of desire. It tells us what a society considers urgent, what it is prepared to postpone, and – perhaps most revealingly – what it is willing to go into debt for.
Poland’s draft budget for 2027, approved by the government on Friday, provides an unusually clear example.
The government plans expenditure of 977.6 billion złotys (€225 billion) against revenues of 695 billion, producing a record nominal state-budget deficit of 282.6 billion złotys. On the broader general-government measure used by the EU, the deficit is forecast to remain at 7.1% of GDP. Defence spending will reach around 198.1 billion złotys, more than 4.5% of GDP, while healthcare spending rises to 274.1 billion złotys, 26.3 billion more than this year.
So defence is not literally receiving more money than health. That would be the wrong argument.
Something perhaps more interesting is happening.
Defence possesses greater political permission.
Health spending has to be negotiated against questions of affordability, efficiency, staffing, waiting lists and fiscal restraint. Defence increasingly inhabits another register: necessity, survival, sovereignty. Poland can borrow for tanks, aircraft and missile systems on a scale that would provoke immediate questions of fiscal sustainability if attached to almost any other area of government.
And in fairness, there is an obvious material reason. Russia is fighting a major war across Poland’s eastern frontier. Poland is a NATO border state. Military preparedness is not imaginary.
But material necessity does not eliminate the libidinal dimension of politics.
It may actually intensify it.
The European Union itself has recognised this distinction. Poland remains under the excessive deficit procedure, but the EU activated a national escape clause allowing Warsaw to deviate from its normal expenditure path in order to facilitate greater defence spending. The original Polish fiscal plan envisaged a general-government deficit of around 3.7% of GDP in 2027 and below 3% by 2028. Instead the government now expects 7.1%.
In other words, when defence became urgent, the fiscal rules became negotiable.
That tells us something.
The language of public spending is rarely neutral.
Healthcare is usually described as a cost.
Pensions are a burden.
Benefits are expenditure.
Teachers demand money.
Nurses want rises.
Hospitals need rescuing.
Defence, by contrast, is investment.
We invest in security.
We strengthen capabilities.
We modernise.
We build resilience.
We acquire deterrence.
The distinction is partly legitimate. A tank is a capital asset. But a trained surgeon is also an extraordinarily expensive piece of human capital. A healthy child produces economic returns for decades. Preventive medicine can save future expenditure.
Yet the emotional registers remain different.
Defence produces objects.
A missile system has range, speed and destructive capacity that can be quantified.
Healthcare mostly produces something much less spectacular: people continuing to be alive.
Often quietly. There is no parade for a functioning colonoscopy service.
Care is repetitive, dispersed and profoundly uncinematic.
Defence is theatre.
There is also a deeply gendered political vocabulary operating underneath this distinction.
Defence is coded as hard.
Healthcare and welfare are coded as soft.
Defence protects the body politic from penetration.
It guards borders.
It demonstrates strength.
It prevents humiliation.
Its preferred objects – tanks, missiles, aircraft, ships – are almost comically available for psychoanalytic interpretation, although perhaps we should spare the Leopard tank that indignity.
Healthcare deals in dependency.
Illness. Ageing. Frailty. Bodies leaking, failing and requiring somebody else to wash them.
One political sphere promises sovereignty over the body.
The other confronts us with the fact that sovereignty over the body is largely a fantasy.
This may help explain why societies can tolerate extraordinary expenditure on the first while treating expenditure on the second as something forever requiring reform.
The soldier embodies autonomy and defence.
The patient embodies dependence.
Politically, we prefer being the soldier.
Poland provides an especially strong version of this economy because the country’s security imagination is historically saturated.
Partitions.
Occupation.
Warsaw 1944.
Soviet domination.
Russia.
Abandonment by allies.
These are not invented memories. They form part of the historical experience through which contemporary Polish politics understands vulnerability.
Security spending therefore purchases more than equipment.
It purchases an answer to an old psychic injunction: Never again be defenceless.
Four-and-a-half percent of GDP on defence is consequently doing symbolic as well as military work.
The budget says Poland will not be weak.
Poland will not wait for somebody else.
Poland will have weapons.
The fiscal consequences can be dealt with later.
And later is becoming expensive.
Poland expects gross borrowing needs of around 565 billion złotys next year, while debt-servicing costs are projected to rise to 107 billion złotys, around 17 billion more than in 2026. Public debt is also rising rapidly; the European Commission projected earlier this year that it could reach around 68% of GDP in 2027.
Debt itself is a claim upon the future. The state spends today and asks future taxpayers to complete the transaction.
Which makes the underlying question sharper: Which present desires are powerful enough to command future labour?
Defence clearly is.
This is not an argument against defence. That point matters.
Poland has strong reasons to spend heavily on security.
Nor is healthcare actually being cut. The government plans 274.1 billion złotys for it in 2027, substantially more than this year. Polish law also requires health expenditure to reach at least 7% of the relevant GDP measure from 2027.
The interesting question is therefore not whether Poland should spend 198 billion on defence instead of 274 billion on healthcare.
It is why the two expenditures occupy such different imaginative positions.
If a government announced that it was borrowing an additional hundred billion złotys because Polish hospitals required an unprecedented mobilisation of resources, the immediate question would be:
Can we afford it?
With defence, the response is increasingly:
Can we afford not to?
That difference is the libidinal economy. Fear reorganises fiscal rationality. Threat alters what counts as prudent.
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