The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has rejected the demands of the elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, that Germany and other NATO allies accumulate defense expenses to 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 reached the existing objective of 2% of GDP last year, the first time it had done so since the end of the Cold War, and Scholz promised that the country would do so with this level.
“I make sure we will continue to spend 2% of our economic production for defense,” he said. “Anyone who says that it is not the way to stay will have to say where the [additional] cash comes from. “
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During his famous “Zeitenwende” (historical turning point) speech to the German parliament in February 2022 in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Scholz announced a €100bn special fund for Germany’s own underfunded and underequipped armed forces, known as the Bundeswehr.
But German defense spending remains limited through strict constitutional budget regulations on deficit spending.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, however, contradicts Scholz by saying that army spending deserves to increase.
“Increasing the Bundeswehr War Capato in the coming years is the main precedence of the time,” he said in the German central city of Kassel, where he put the first of the dozens of complex compensation for new German compensations German to Ukraine.
Pistorius, of Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), topped the polls as one of Germany’s top popular politicians and recently designed to update Scholz as the party’s candidate for the early February election, but withdrew.
“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 percent can only be the beginning. It will have to be significantly more if we want to continue at the pace and to the extent that we have to.”
Other key NATO figures have also expressed tacit help for Trump’s suggestion, even though 5% would not be imaginable in the fast term.
In an interview with the British Financial Times newspaper, in Mondy, Defense Minister Poland Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamsz said Trump’s requests were “important” alarm clock “for NATO members.
“He should not be criticized for setting a really ambitious target because otherwise there will be some countries that will continue to debate whether more spending is really needed,” he said.
Poland is NATO’s largest contributor in terms of relative defense spending, committing around 4. 2% of GDP to its military in 2024, a Warsaw figure intends to build up to 4. 7% in 2026. The United States itself spends “3. 37% of GDP on defense.
The other important participants come with states of Baltic Estonia (3. 43%), Latvia (3. 15%) and Lithuania (2. 85%) and Finland (2. 41%) which, as Poland, percentage borders with Russia, the Russian excavator Kalininrad, the Allière Russian bélarus.
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Mf / lo (dpa, AFP)