German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends the cabinet meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025. [AP Photo\/Markus Schreiber]<\/p>\n
The continuation of the budget debate on Wednesday underscored not only the insane war and brutal austerity policies of the Christian Democrat (CDU\/CSU)-Social Democrat (SPD) coalition government, but above all showed that within the Bundestag (federal parliament) there is no serious opposition to them.<\/p>\n
Even if he struck a somewhat more restrained tone than in his\u00a0notorious budget speech<\/a>\u00a0before the summer recess, Merz once again made the extreme right-wing agenda of his government crystal clear. Once again, he painted the absurd picture of an imminent Russian attack on Germany in order to justify the deranged rearmament and war preparations against the country. \u201cPutin has long been testing the limits,\u201d he declared.<\/p>\n On the Ukraine war, Merz threatened that for his government, no peace could be considered \u201cat the expense of the political sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.\u201d In other words, the government intends to continue and escalate the war until NATO itself has seized Crimea\u2014a goal that makes a nuclear confrontation not just possible, but likely.<\/p>\n To implement this insanity, the government is planning the largest rearmament programme since Hitler. For next year alone, military spending of \u20ac128 billion is planned, rising to \u20ac153 billion by 2029, to be financed entirely from the regular budget. Added to this are numerous infrastructure projects intended to make the entire country \u201cfit for war.\u201d<\/p>\n Alongside these horrendous war expenditures, the rich are once again being showered with tens of billions. Two-thirds of the planned \u20ac46 billion in tax cuts are earmarked for individuals earning over \u20ac180,000 a year, the top 1 percent of society.<\/p>\n The government intends to claw back these astronomical sums from working people. Amid rising unemployment and mass layoffs in industry, spending on\u00a0B\u00fcrgergeld\u00a0(welfare) is to be\u00a0cut by around \u20ac5 billion<\/a>. \u201cBut we want everyone who can work to actually work,\u201d Merz declared, rambling on about \u201cabuse of the system\u201d that had to be curtailed.<\/p>\n On pensions, education and healthcare, Merz limited himself to pointing to commissions of inquiry supposedly working out ways to cut spending, and otherwise resorted to flowery phrases about justice and the welfare state. All the concrete measures his government is already preparing, such as the introduction of co-payments for doctor visits, he deliberately skirted.<\/p>\n This was possible because the opposition parties put up no serious opposition to the sweeping cuts the government is driving forward. For all the theatrics of the debate, government and opposition were united on the essentials. Merz used his speech to call for an alliance of \u201call constructive forces in our country\u201d to push through the government\u2019s war policies\u2014and the opposition accepted the offer.<\/p>\n The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) regards itself as the driver of this. The government\u2019s cuts do not go far enough, they argue. The AfD parliamentary faction submitted around a thousand amendments ahead of the debate. In them, it defended the massive spending on the armed forces and the state apparatus, as well as the tax gifts to the rich, but demanded far deeper social cuts to reduce new borrowing. B\u00fcrgergeld\u00a0should not be cut by \u20ac5 billion, but by at least \u20ac14 billion, according to the AfD.<\/p>\n All the establishment parties have deliberately built up and integrated the AfD into parliamentary work because it is needed to push through this programme against growing resistance.<\/p>\n It is therefore no surprise that AfD leader Alice Weidel opened the debate with an undisguised threat to all political opponents. She picked up on the Trump administration\u2019s campaign in the US following the killing of fascist Charlie Kirk, which terrorises and silences anyone daring to criticise Kirk\u2019s positions or Trump. Weidel hailed Kirk as a \u201cconservative, devout Christian\u201d and \u201cstaunch advocate of free speech,\u201d before demanding a similar approach be applied in Germany. She branded the Left Party and the Greens as \u201cradical left-wing parties\u201d who supposedly wanted to \u201cshoot the rich or put them in labour camps.\u201d<\/p>\n While the AfD\u00a0drives the government before it<\/a>\u00a0and the latter implements much of the fascists\u2019 programme, the Greens and the Left Party trail behind Merz\u2019s government. The Greens had already helped secure a majority for the one trillion euros in war credits and now criticise the government from the right. Green parliamentary group leader Katharina Dr\u00f6ge addressed Merz directly: \u201cYou can\u2019t help Donald Trump. You can\u2019t help a difficult global economy.\u201d But what the government was doing for business in this situation, \u201cis not nearly enough,\u201d Dr\u00f6ge insisted. In particular, electricity tax must be cut for all companies.<\/p>\n Besides a few empty phrases about social improvements for families, tenants and children\u2014none of which the Greens implemented during their own time in government\u2014Dr\u00f6ge concentrated on criticising the government for not pushing forward the war against Russia with enough aggression. She demanded an additional \u20ac10 billion in weapons for Ukraine and more sanctions against Russia.<\/p>\n The Left Party had also\u00a0voted for the war credits<\/a>\u00a0in the Bundesrat (upper chamber of parliament) and paved the way for Merz\u2019s rapid election as chancellor. In the budget debate, too, frontwoman Heidi Reichineck avoided directly addressing the war course against Russia and the rearmament plans. After a couple of jokes about rearmament in general, she spoke almost exclusively about social issues, without addressing the government\u2019s massive cuts. With her ostentatious lack of seriousness, she essentially presented a social wish list.<\/p>\n Far from mobilising resistance against austerity, she instead appealed to the conscience of former Blackrock manager and current chancellor Merz: \u201cLook people in the face and tell them they\u2019re living beyond their means! If you can\u2019t bring yourself to say that because you still have a shred of decency left, then maybe we can still save something in the next budget.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr\u00f6ge\u2019s entire speech was one long trivialisation of the acute danger of war and the impending social devastation. In the end, Reichineck even stressed her fundamental agreement with the war policy: \u201cI can assure you: My party stands in solidarity with Ukraine, even if our paths may differ.\u201d The \u201cdifferent path\u201d consists in cloaking the war course in a little more diplomacy in order to more effectively enforce the interests of NATO and the EU.<\/p>\n Particularly cynical was her call at the end of her speech: \u201cAll eyes on Gaza! You must no longer oppose sanctions. No one here may remain silent about what is happening there.\u201d Reichineck has previously denied the brutal genocide by Israel and repeatedly stressed the \u201cright of Israel to self-defence.\u201d At a time when the far-right Netanyahu government is driving forward the genocide of Palestinians, the ruling class as a whole is seeking to cover its tracks. Merz himself recently tried to provide himself with an alibi with the purely symbolic announcement of a \u201cpartial stop<\/a>\u201d to arms exports to Israel. In reality, German support for Israel continues unabated.<\/p>\n The debate made it abundantly clear: Workers and young people who want to fight against genocide and war, against rearmament and conscription, and against social devastation, cannot rely on any Bundestag party. The only way to stop the drive to war and avert catastrophe is the independent mobilisation of the working class on the basis of a socialist programme.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German Chancellor Friedrich Merz attends the cabinet meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":435159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[62193,2000,299,2194,1824,49378,24861,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-435158","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-conscription","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-gaza","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-imperialism","14":"tag-militarism","15":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115228909597919844","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/435159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n