A German Union faction is open to introducing a new special assets of the German Federal Armed Forces or significantly increasing the existing 100 billion-euro assets in the Basic Law, according to the chief of the faction’s budget department, Christian Haase of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
The faction is willing in principle to consider a new or significantly higher special assets of the Federal Armed Forces, Haase told the Rheinische Post, a German newspaper. He stated that the security political coordinates for Germany and Europe have completely changed due to the new US administration and the faction must be able to defend itself more quickly.
Haase suggested that the faction could use its two-thirds majority in the old Bundestag to pass a bill on the special assets in the short term, if an agreement can be reached with the Social Democratic Party, the Free Democratic Party and the Greens.
However, the CDU is not willing to pay a political price for the agreement of the SPD and the Greens. Haase said that the faction would be fulfilling a long-standing demand of the SPD’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, by increasing the special assets and therefore, rumors of a political price are unfounded.
The CDU politician also criticized the Greens for demanding a reform of the debt brake as a condition for their agreement, saying that the faction does not want to discuss a reform of the debt brake at the moment, as it needs to first get a clear picture of the federal budget through the presentation of up-to-date figures from the Federal Ministry of Finance. The budget, he said, will then determine the financial framework for the next years.