Friedrich Merz, who may be Germany's next prime minister, announced Friday that he had received a vote to allow a large number of new government spending, including defense, cleared the way for a stunning turnaround in Germany's strategy and fiscal policy, even before he took office.
Now, the deal should allow Mr. Melz to pass a series of measures next week in parliament, saying he has called it a response to President Trump's move to withdraw U.S. security assurance Europe.
It includes important investments called by the party’s leaders as Germany’s competitiveness, as well as efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions to combat global warming. It made a new life a coalition of centre-left and centre-right parties that had long ruled in Germany, but withered in recent years in a new era of populism, losing votes on the far left and the far right.
These measures will increase Germany's holiness restrictions on government lending because they apply to military spending. It exempts all expenditures on defense from over 1% of the above GDP and broadly defines it as including intelligence expenditures, information security, etc.
Effectively, this would allow Germany to spend as much money as possible to rebuild the army.
““There is no longer a lack of financial resources to defend freedom and peace on our continent,” Melz said, adding: “Germany is back. Germany has made a significant contribution to defending freedom and peace in Europe.”
The deal is the product of the era of negotiations between Mr. Meiers Central Christian Democrats, Center-Left Social Democrats and Center-Left Greens. The Greens are the last reservation, their support announced on Friday.
Lars Klingbeil, one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Party, called the agreement “an important signal to Ukraine. It is an important signal to Vladimir Putin and a significant signal to Donald Trump.”
The Greens released on X will immediately provide Ukraine with 3 billion euros in support and “ultimately take the challenges of the future seriously”.
After the 2008 financial crisis, a long-standing disgust of large-scale government lending became the country's iconic economic policy. But years of spending restrictions have led to a long-term decline in the quality of infrastructure in the country and delayed economic growth.
Equally important, Germany’s limits that cannot be spent, inhibited its stronger leadership role in a new era of security challenges to Europe, including aggression and expansionist Russia’s threat to European doorsteps, and the U.S.’s backtracking in its military commitments on the African continent.
All of this can be changed now-as Mr. Meers and others have said.
“The next federal government has no choice but to make large-scale public investments in defense capabilities,” economists at the Deutsche Bank Institute wrote this week. “In addition to increasing traditional defense spending, this requires investment in the country's critical infrastructure.”
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, current Social Democratic Prime Minister Olaf Scholz called for a strategic focus on military spending. The country borrowed more defenses, but its progress was still relatively slow. During the February campaign, Mr. Meers and his Central Christian Democrats called for more defense money, but said they would find other savings in their budget to offset it.
Mr. Meles broke down the promises immediately after his party first ended in the vote, citing the threat from President Trump and his administration to withdraw the U.S. security umbrella for Europe. He participated in the negotiations to form a government with the Social Democrats, who soon agreed to a deal to significantly increase borrowing and spending.
But in the end, he also needs to win the support of the Greens to consolidate the two-thirds majority needed to change Germany's debt restrictions. The negotiations were held in swift fragments, especially by German standards, as Mr. Meers and his partners had only the right to vote to approve the measures in the current parliament, which were dissolved by the end of this month.
To win support from the Greens and Social Democrats, the agreement includes a large domestic spending fund.
The fund will spend €500 billion (about $544 billion) in the next few years to improve dilapidated infrastructure, an economist who has long been required to kick off a shrinking economy last year.
Legislators will decide how to spend that money accurately, but according to Mr. Meers and the Greens, the 100 billion euro will be defined as the second existing fund to address climate change.
That was the main requirement of the Greens, which threatened earlier this week to stop Mr. Meiers from taking measures without them. The Greens also obtained a deal to strengthen the economy and climate from the infrastructure fund only for new projects, not existing ones.
Mr. Meiers called the agreement a “good result acceptable to all parties concerned”.
Both he and Mr. Clinbel suggest that their full party members will support the measures after they arrive on the federal floor next week.
These moves may still face legal challenges from the leftmost and rightmost parties that question the constitutionality of the deal so quickly through the lascivious duck meeting.
But on Friday, negotiators all sounded relieved. Mr. Clinbel said negotiations with the Greens boosted the deal from the original form between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, and the ultimate agreement empowered the strength of the German center.
“We show that to the government and the opposition, maybe the future government, maybe the future opposition, we are acting together responsibly, we are uniting,” he said.
