Chancellor Friedrich Merz is leading Germany's significant military rearmament, aiming for a 5% GDP defence spending target. Photo / Getty Images
When Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited the Oval Office this month, US President Donald Trump unwittingly channelled the psyche of a German public that is deeply conflicted over plans for a huge increase in defence spending and military capabilities.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Trump said of the giant ramp-up in military spending, which he demanded from Nato allies.
“But, you know, at least to a certain point,” Trump added. “There’ll be a point when I’ll say, ‘Please don’t arm anymore.’”
Facing Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine and Trump’s repeated intimations that the US can no longer be relied upon to defend Europe, Merz has led a broad push to rearm a country that for 80 years had been allergic to anything resembling militarism, following the horrific destruction Nazi Germany caused during World War II.
This includes not just plans to acquire new, advanced weapons but also to increase the ranks of the military by 60,000 and potentially a return to conscription of young people for mandatory service.
At a summit in The Hague, Nato leaders formally approved a plan to lift their annual military spending target to 5% of GDP.
For Germany, Europe’s largest economy, that will mean a massive increase – to US$177 billion ($292.1b) in 2029 from US$100b ($165b) in 2025, to meet Nato’s target of 3.5% on “core” military expenditures like troops and weapons, and the need for a further $76b in related spending, such as on upgrading roads and bridges to support armoured convoys.
Taken together, the increases will mark the country’s most significant rearmament initiative since the end of the Cold War.
But all this talk of militarisation – of Germany once again rising as Europe’s strongest power – and especially of using debt to pay for it, is causing serious consternation including among some officials in Merz’s governing coalition, who worry things are going too far.
To accommodate the military push, Germany’s Parliament in March approved a constitutional amendment to relax the country’s strict debt brake and created a US$585b ($965.5b) special fund.
Some of the gravest misgivings are among prominent members of the centre-left Social Democratic Party, which is a junior partner to Merz’s Christian Democrats in the Government.
Several prominent Social Democrats this month signed a controversial manifesto declaring that there was “no security policy justification for a fixed annual increase in the defence budget to 3.5 or 5% of gross domestic product”.
“Military alarm rhetoric and massive rearmament programmes do not create greater security for Germany and Europe, but rather lead to destabilisation and strengthening of the mutual threat perception between Nato and Russia,” the manifesto declared.
Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, a Social Democrat and architect of the military ramp-up, denounced the “peace circles” rebellion in his own party as a “denial of reality”. Merz has insisted the coalition is unified in its defence of Ukraine.
Stefan Meister, a senior political scientist at the German Council on Foreign Relations, said some spheres of German society still confuse modern-day Russia with the former Soviet Union – a misconception rooted in historical memory and national identity.
“It’s always about history, it’s always about guilt in World War II and thankfulness with the German unification,” Meister said, pointing to the lingering gratitude towards the former Soviet Union for its role in defeating Nazi Germany and the close ties to Russia in eastern Germany.
“They just will not understand [the Russian threat] because they’re projecting their own history and the past onto the present and the future,” Meister said, adding that disarmament and re-education of Germans after World War II also made segments of society more pacifist than other neighbouring European powers.
In any case, the build-up won’t come easily.
One of the greatest challenges will be recruitment to a military that is not held universally in high esteem in German society.
Pistorius has said Germany needs up to 60,000 more active troops, and Carsten Breuer, the German Army’s inspector general, sees the need for 100,000 more reservists by the end of the decade.
The German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, now has about 182,000 troops.
As a result, leading German politicians have begun speaking seriously about the potential need for a return to conscription and compulsory service.
Conscription was a cornerstone of Germany’s post-war defence, introduced in 1956 during the Cold War.
German men were required to serve six months in the military or opt for civilian service. But shrinking defence budgets and changing threat perceptions led compulsory service to be suspended in 2011, under Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Reinstituting conscription would mark a significant reversal after more than a decade of an all-volunteer force.
Public opinion is mixed, with polls showing rising support for some form of compulsory service, particularly among older generations, but scepticism among the young.
At its party conference in May, Merz’s Christian Democratic Union voted for a gradual return to conscription.
Pistorius told the German broadcaster ARD this week that he was preparing legislation to boost military service, including provisions to reintroduce a draft if voluntary recruitment falls short of targets.
The Social Democrats, however, are warier.
“We don’t categorically rule out the reintroduction of conscription,” Falko Drossmann, the party’s defence policy spokesman in Parliament, told German daily Tagesspiegel last week.
“But the SPD will not agree to such a serious intervention in the life plans of this country’s young men until everything has been done to create a more attractive military force that we don’t have to force people into.”
The left-wing Die Linke, a traditionally pacifist party, accused Pistorius of breaking his word on military service.
“He and his party assured Germany’s children and young people that military service would remain voluntary under this Government; this is even stated in the coalition agreement,” Left Party lawmaker Desiree Becker said last week.
“Now, however, Boris Pistorius wants to initiate compulsory military service and is rightly encountering resistance not only from us, but also within his own party.
“Military service is always associated with violence, and obliging our young people to do so is by no means the solution,” Becker added.
The German Greens also argue that a modern, professional military should be built through voluntary enlistment, not coercion.
Merz said that building up the number of troops “probably” would not happen on a voluntary basis alone.
“Money is not the key problem we have for the Bundeswehr,” he said. “The key problem is qualified personnel.”
In an effort to boost enthusiasm for the military, Germany celebrated its first official nationwide Veterans Day last week. Merz marked the occasion with a statement on X declaring: “Service to our country belongs at the heart of our society”.
The event attracted protests, including a fake ad campaign for the Bundeswehr inviting would-be recruits to “hang out with Nazi preppers”, a reference to scandals involving far-right extremists.
Merz has said he wants to make the Bundeswehr the strongest conventional military force in Europe. Already, it is making its presence felt on the continent.
Last month, Merz travelled to Lithuania to celebrate Germany’s deployment there of its first permanent military force on foreign soil since World War II – a brigade that is intended to grow to 5000 troops.
It is a remarkable development for a country that last had a military presence in Lithuania as occupiers more than eight decades ago.
“For a very long time, the German mantra was: Where German troops have been, German troops should never be again,” said Claudia Major, a senior vice-president and international security expert in Berlin at the German Marshall Fund, a policy institute that focuses on transatlantic affairs.
Now, Major said, the Lithuanians are “over the moon” about the German presence there – to the occasional befuddlement of German soldiers who sometimes encounter hostility at home when wearing their uniforms in public.
“Lithuanians approach them and say, ‘Thank you for serving’ – and they don’t know what to do,” she said.
At the Nato summit, Europeans sought to project unity, sidestepping thorny questions around US support for Ukraine and instead focusing on the increased spending targets.
Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron co-wrote a Financial Times op-ed before the summit calling for a European defence build-up and also portraying it as an economic opportunity for European industry.
“Showing unity against all threats, providing support to Ukraine and stating our determination to develop European defence capabilities and our industrial base through increased defence spending and investment are all part of the same equation,” they wrote.
“We unambiguously reaffirm allied unity, allied solidarity and a commitment to the freedom, peace and security of our continent.”
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