Members of German army Bundeswehr conduct a military exercise during a presentation to Defence Minister Boris Pistorius in 2024. The country is ramping up spending to rebuild its military and be ‘fit for war by 2029.’Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters
A generation ago, the idea of German rearmament was unthinkable, even morally repulsive to most of the country’s citizens and political parties. The wounds of the Second World War were still raw and bleeding. Germany would pursue capitalism, not militarism, and its role as an international peacekeeper.
Today, Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is embarking on a spending spree that could top €1-trillion to rebuild its ailing military and improve the country’s infrastructure. The focus will be on tanks, not BMWs.
“I would say that President Donald Trump and the largest land war on the continent since the Second World War, in Ukraine, has dragged Germany out of its comfort zone,” said Sudha David-Wilp, vice-president of external relations of the German Marshall Fund.
“The majority of Germans say they need a stronger military. I think the signs are loud and clear that, to preserve democracy, Germany needs to spend a lot more.”
The signs of Germany’s new militarism are everywhere. On the stock market, the German pride and joy is Rheinmetall, the country’s biggest defence company and maker of everything from artillery shells and attack drones to main battle tanks and armoured fighting vehicles. In the past year, its shares have climbed 230 per cent, giving it a market value of €81-billion – far more than Volkswagen, the biggest industrial employer.
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At the same time, Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has ended the range restrictions on missiles it sends to Ukraine. It is set to receive Germany’s Taurus cruise missiles, which can fly for 500 kilometres, allowing Ukraine to hit targets deep inside Russia. Germany’s civil-protection agency is preparing to rebuild hundreds of Cold War-era underground bunkers and shelters in case Russia attacks.
From the image-making point of view, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius is fond of posing for photos wearing military gear. One showed him aiming a pistol. He has said that Germany’s army must be “fit for war by 2029,” the year that the country’s top generals think Russia would be ready to attack NATO’s Baltic countries.
The same message is being used by NATO to push for massive increases in military spending among member states. The military alliance is proposing outlays equivalent to 5 per cent of GDP, up from the current threshold of 2 per cent.
Even the Green party, which was founded as an anti-war, anti-nuclear and pro-environment party, has undergone a Jekyll and Hyde change. As late as 1998, its election manifesto called for a “pan-European order of peace and security.” It wanted “complete disarmament” to the point that NATO would be dismantled. In the 2021 election, the Greens, which joined the government coalition, were vowing never to deliver weapons to any belligerents in a war, even to allies.
A year later, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that position was buried. Since then, the Greens have become advocates of German rearmament, including weapons sales to Ukraine and Israel.
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Germans in general are not bitterly divided about the new zeitgeist, even though it could make a mockery of the country’s traditional fiscal rectitude.
Germany’s constitutional “debt brake,” which came into effect in 2009, allowed the government to run only the smallest budget deficits at the expense of modernizing the military and the country’s infrastructure. The restriction was scrapped by parliament in March, just before Mr. Merz formed a coalition government and became Chancellor.
With the debt brake gone, there are essentially no restrictions on military procurement. The fiscal freedom will also allow the government to launch a €500-billion fund for infrastructure and climate-related investments.
Various estimates say the spending will push up Germany’s debt-to-GDP ratio to 90 per cent or more from last year’s 62 per cent, which was unusually low by Western standards (in the United States, it’s 124 per cent).
“The taboo for spending on the military and infrastructure has been eliminated,” said Ms. David-Wilp. “But expectations will be high that all this extra spending will kickstart the economy.”
The prospect of the wave of spending triggering greater economic growth seems to have overcome Germans’ historic aversion to debt. Germany’s GDP contracted slightly in 2023 and 2024 as cheap Russian gas vanished, pushing energy prices up to the point that some factories closed. Growth forecasts for 2025 and 2026 are now being restored.
Germans seem happy to go on a war footing as long as GDP picks up momentum.