Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, on Tuesday urged lawmakers to pass a large spending package for defense and infrastructure to strengthen the country in response to what he described as Russia’s “war of aggression against Europe.”
“It is a war against Europe and not just a war against the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” Merz told parliament ahead of a vote expected around 1330 GMT on what local media have labelled a fiscal “bazooka” worth many hundreds of billions of euros, News.Az reports citing foreign media.
Merz’s CDU/CSU and their likely future coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), plan to exempt defence spending from Germany’s strict debt rules and to set up a 500-billion-euro ($545-billion) fund for infrastructure investments over 12 years.
They hope to push the measures through the legislature at a time when US President Donald Trump’s outreach to Russia and hostility towards Ukraine have shaken Europe and cast doubt over the future strength of transatlantic ties.
Merz said transatlantic ties were “indispensable” but Europe needed to do more to ensure its own security and Germany should play a leading role.
The spending boost is “nothing less than the first major step towards a new European defence community” that could also include non-EU members like Britain and Norway, he added.
Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, from the SPD of outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz, justified the mega-spending by saying “we are facing a new era for Europe, for Germany, for NATO, and for future generations”.
He argued that boosting defence on the continent will strengthen the trans-Atlantic alliance in the long term “and place it on two legs, namely North America and Europe”.