German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has rebuffed the demand of Economics Minister and Green party’s top candidate Robert Habeck for a drastic increase in defense spending to 3.5 percent of the economic output.
“The idea seems a bit unripe to me” Scholz told the “Stern”. “Doubling the defense budget from nearly 80 billion euros to almost 140 billion euros without saying where the money will be spent and where it will come from, that’s a big question mark. Who’s going to pay the bill? The citizens?”
Habeck had called for a 3.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) defense budget for the coming years in the “Spiegel”. Currently, all NATO alliance partners are expected to invest at least 2 percent of their GDP in defense. Germany has just reached this goal for the first time in decades, by 2024.
Scholz also expressed criticism in the “Stern” over Habeck’s heating law. “It was wrong to break the exchange of heating systems in private homes over the knee” the Chancellor said. “I believe the responsible minister has understood that his plans were not good back then.” For him, the key principle in climate protection is: “less ideology, more pragmatism”.