Germany’s centre-left government and conservative opposition have agreed to a deal that will release 100 billion euros ($107 billion) to modernize and rearm the German military in the face of a looming Russian threat. This agreement was reportedly reached late Sunday. It will create a special fund for military procurement that will also allow Berlin to achieve NATO’s target of spending two percent of GDP on defense.
The deal, which involves amending budgetary rules in the national constitution, was struck after weeks of difficult negotiations between the parties in the governing coalition and the conservatives of former chancellor Angela Merkel, representatives of these groups told the Associated Foreign Press. The exceptional fund will be financed by additional debt. For this, it was reportedly necessary to circumvent the “debt brake” rule enshrined in the constitution, which caps government borrowing. This was why the government needed the support of the conservative opposition to muster the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to pass the constitutional amendment. The modernization was first announced only three days after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. Some critics have since then accused Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany of a lack of strong support for Ukraine against Russia and failing to secure arms shipments to the nation. Berlin says it can reportedly deliver the first anti-air Gepard tanks in July to Ukraine, as it had promised earlier.
This type of military funding is not a common move for Germany, which in recent years has been slow and non-cooperative in complying with its NATO spending commitments, drawing criticism from Washington in particular for its lack of compliance. German military spending in general has significantly decreased from the days of Nazi Germany and WWII. Since the end of the Cold War, Germany has significantly reduced the size of its army, from around 500,000 in 1990 to just 200,000 today. According to a report published in December on the state of the military, fewer than 30 percent of German naval ships were “fully operational.” Many of the country’s fighter aircraft are unfit to fly.
