Friedrich Merz’s ambition for Germany to build the strongest conventional army in Europe marks a historic break after decades of post-war restraint. Achieving it will depend on whether he can keep the country — and his governing coalition — on board.
Merz took office earlier this month, bringing his centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) into coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). But while this coalition appears more stable than the three-way split that collapsed last year, tensions could still emerge as the chancellor tries to unwind decades of post-war pacifism.
Whether or not he succeeds could have implications far beyond Germany: as Europe’s biggest economy and a political heavyweight in the EU, Berlin could lead a continent-wide rearmament to confront Russian belligerence, or else fall behind and serve as an excuse for others to scrimp on their military spending.
On Tuesday, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius signalled that Germany could gradually raise its defence spending to 5% of GDP — a significant leap from the current level just above 2%. His remarks came a week after Merz’s address to the Bundestag and Foreign Minister Johan Wadephul’s promise to "follow" US President's Trump's demand for increased defence spending. NATO’s current guideline is for members to spend at least 2% of GDP.
German coalition tensions
Some observers view the sequence of those announcements — with the SPD’s Pistorius letting the CDU’s Merz and Wadephul take the lead — as an indication that the junior coalition partner is still hesitant about the rearmament push.
“The fact that the Pistorius’s announcement came after Wadephul’s has everything to do with the SPD not wanting to be seen as the party of war,” Aylin Matlé, a senior research fellow in the Center for Security and Defense at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin, told The Parliament.
Some in the SPD are tentatively supportive of the policy. “In an ideal world, I would prefer to spend the money on other issues. But Germany’s defence investment is a necessary step forward,” said Tobias Cremer, a member of the European Parliament who hails from the party. “We don’t know how reliable our American allies are under the Trump administration. We have to be capable of defending ourselves.”
But others still hew to Ostpolitik, the SPD’s longstanding policy of engagement with Russia. In April, Ralf Stegner, an SPD member of the Bundestag, travelled to Baku to meet with a Russian delegation that included Former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, drawing a mix of criticism and support from within his own ranks.
The country at large is no less divided. Even though a recent poll found that 79% of Germans view Russian President Vladimir Putin as a serious threat to European peace, support for rearmament is uneven across Germany. In the east of the country, the territory of the former communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), public opinion remains more sceptical of NATO and military escalation.
“This east-west divide is not disappearing, as many expected in the past decades. On the contrary, it’s exacerbating,” said Roland Freudenstein, senior associate fellow at think tank Globsec. Three political parties critical of rearmament — the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), the Left Party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — all enjoy strong support in eastern Germany.
Even within the political mainstream, Germany has a culture of fiscal restraint and many are hesitant about the cost. Reaching 5% of GDP would mean an annual expenditure of €225 billion, roughly half of the country’s federal budget last year. “That carries some political weight,” said Matlé.
Germany’s push for rearmament
Large amounts of money have already been committed. Three days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then-chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr in his landmark Zeitenwende speech.
In March of this year, the Bundestag passed a constitutional reform enabling significantly higher defence spending. Germany is now set to spend around €1 trillion over the coming decade on defence and infrastructure, including hundreds of billions earmarked for military modernisation.
And in order to reach 5% of GDP for its defence budget, Germany has asked the European Commission for an exemption from EU borrowing limits.
In spite of all that, there’s a huge amount of work to be done in limited time. Germany’s armed forces have suffered from decades of neglect and will need to be rebuilt almost from the ground up.
A break with German post-war restraint
Following World War II, Germany was barred from rearming until 1955, and even then, under strict conditions. “Of course, historical memory played a role, which made rearmament a very sensitive issue,” said Dirk Rochtus, a professor of international politics and German history at Belgium’s Catholic University of Louvain.
After reunification in 1990, Germany pursued a strategy that prioritised economic influence and diplomacy over hard power. The country maintained only limited capabilities, reducing its tank fleet from 4,000 in 1992 to just 340 by 2021.
“The state of the Bundeswehr — which is lamented everywhere today — was the result of decades of avidly cashing in the peace dividend,” Klaus Wittman, a retired German brigadier general, told The Parliament.
A recent report by Eva Högl, the Bundestag’s armed forces commissioner, concluded that the military suffers from “too little of everything,” from ammunition to personnel to functioning infrastructure.
General Carsten Breuer, chief of the German army, has called for 100,000 additional troops “as quickly as possible.” An additional 20,000 troops are already planned, in part to staff a new German brigade to be stationed in Lithuania — a move welcomed by the EU’s Baltic countries.
While the CDU had hoped to reintroduce mandatory military service, this proposal was blocked by the SPD. Instead, the government is pursuing an “attractive new voluntary military service” model.
All of this needs to happen quickly, to avoid losing momentum and to be ready to repel Russian aggression beyond Ukraine at any moment. Even if the billions of euros flow as planned, it won’t be an easy task,
“The available resources are only one important prerequisite. Time is the real challenge,” said Wittman. “Expansion of the arms industry, acceleration of procurement procedures, coordination in NATO and the EU — all this must happen simultaneously.”
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