…Over the weekend, local media here reported that the CDU’s Bavarian offspring, the CSU, plans to approve an internal position paper for the upcoming coalition talks this week that explicitly couples Berlin’s defense spending with the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP per year by 2024. In Germany’s case, the increase would mean going from roughly €37 billion today to about €72 billion.
While the SPD agrees in principle that the armed forces must be sufficiently funded and modernized, its leaders have rejected the 2 percent target as unrealistic. Hans-Peter Bartels, member of the SPD and the Bundestag’s commissioner for the armed forces, argued in an interview with the Schwaebische Zeitung that 1.5 percent of GDP would suffice, up from 1.2 percent, in part because the Bundeswehr couldn’t absorb a quicker budget increase anyway.
Henning Otte, the CDU/CSU defense policy lead in the Bundestag, said in a statement to Defense News that his party views the goal of increasing defense spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2024 as an expression of “reliability” within NATO. Läs artikel