The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz rejected the requests of the American official Donald Trump that Germany and other NATO allies accumulate defense expenses at least 5% of the gross domestic product (GDP).
“Five percent would be over €200 billion ($204 billion) per year — the federal budget is not even €500 billion,” Scholz said at a campaign event in the western German city of Bielefeld on Monday.
“This would only be imaginable with large tax increases or large cuts to many things that are vital for us,” he said, insisting that he would not decrease pensions, local government or shipping infrastructure.
Germany only met NATO’s existing target of 2% of GDP last year, the first time it had done so since the end of the Cold War, and Scholz promised the country would do so at that level.
“I guarantee that we will continue to spend 2% of our economic output on defense,” he said. “Anyone who says that’s not the way to go must also say where the [extra] money will come from.”
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During his remarkable “Zeitenende” (historic turning point) speech in the German parliament in February 2022, following the giant-scale invasion of Ukraine via Russia, Scholz announced a special fund of one hundred billion euros for the underfunded and underfunded and underfunded. Financial Armed Forces of Germany, known as the Bundeswehr.
But German defense spending remains limited through strict fiscal and strict constitutional regulations on deficit spending.
However, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius contradicts Scholz by saying that army spending deserves to increase.
“Increasing the Bundeswehr War in the coming years is the main precedence of the hour,” he said in the central German city of Kassel, where he put the first of dozens of complex offsets of new German reparations to Ukraine.
Pistorius, of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Scholz, is the maximum sensible of surveys as one of the popular maximum German politicians and recently expected to update Scholz as a candidate for the Chancellery of the Party for the elections early by February, but retired . .
“We will continue on this path in 2025,” he continued. “And we know that in the following years, we will have to invest even more in our security. Two % can only be the beginning. Being much more property. “
Other key NATO figures have also expressed tacit support for Trump’s suggestion, even if 5% may not be feasible in the immediate term.
In an interview with the British Financial Times newspaper, in Mondy, Polish Defense Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamsz said Trump’s requests were “important ‘wake-up’ for NATO members.
“It deserves not to be criticized for setting a really ambitious target, in a different way there will be countries that will continue to find out if more spending is really needed,” he said.
Poland is NATO’s biggest contributor in terms of relative defense spending, committing around 4.2% of GDP to its military in 2024, a figure which Warsaw intends to increase to 4.7% in 2026. The United States itself “only” spends around 3.37% of GDP on defense.
Other leading contributors include the Baltic States Estonia (3.43%), Latvia (3.15%) and Lithuania (2.85%) and Finland (2.41%) which, like Poland, share borders either with Russia, Russian exclave Kaliningrad or Russian ally Belarus.
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Mf / lo (dpa, AFP)