German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has announced that he will increase military spending by 28% by 2027 just as the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has declared that he will withdraw 5,000 soldiers from the German country. In this way, Defense spending will go from 82.7 billion euros to 105.8 billion euros.
At the same time, the German Executive has presented a health reform with which it hopes to save 16.3 billion euros. “It took Germany a long time to become Germany,” said Fernando Arancón, journalist from The world order in Julia on the wave. Furthermore, he has indicated that the objective is to exceed 180 billion euros in Defense in 2030, that is, almost quadruple the current budget.
Specifically, the German Executive’s roadmap is to spend 149,000 million euros on Defense in 2028, increase it to 158,900 in 2029 to meet the 3.5% of GDP and try to reach 179,900 million in 2030. In this way, Germany abandons its decades of military moderation and begins a radical transformation in which it aspires to become the leading military power in Europe.
The victim is the Welfare State
Who is harmed? The Welfare State. “Merz has proposed that what comes into Defense has to come from somewhere else,” Arancón indicated. Taking advantage of the withdrawal of United States troops, Germany sends its citizens a message warning that the Americans are leaving: “We have no alternative to defend ourselves alone,” is the message that comes out between the lines of Merz’s speech.
Thus, the case of Germany according to The World Order is something that will possibly be seen in other countries in the coming years and that is why Pedro Sánchez expressed his refusal to reach 5% in defense spending and look for other alternatives to increase spending and not have to cut back on goods and services.
To justify this, Merz has stressed the importance of continuing to “spend a lot of money” because defense capacity and the Atlantic Alliance are priority issues. As things stand, he has spoken about the need to defend against Russian aggression and for Europe and Germany to have deterrence capabilities.
After the war in Ukraine, Berlin has already activated a fund of 100 billion euros
He has also spoken about the economic consequences that the war in Iran is producing and how increasingly disastrous conflicts are taking place around the world, so the objective is “to be able to defend ourselves so as not to have to defend ourselves.”
This increase in defense spending already comes a long time ago. In 2022, with the start of the war in Ukraine, it caused Berlin to activate a fund of 100 billion euros to reinforce its Armed Forces. The 27.5 billion euros for the 2027 budget come from that same fund.
