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Money for the Bundeswehr: Scholz’ special assets in danger

Jung and left: This label was given to the newly elected factions of the SPD and the Greens after the federal elections. Even if that is not always the case, even if there are MPs who are less young and left-wing, a good six months ago many Social Democrats and Greens were elected to the highest German parliament who wanted to change the world by putting more into climate protection and less invested in weapons, which wanted to combine globalization with stricter respect for human rights and which certainly did not have a return to national strength in mind.

Who would have predicted that they would applaud just a few months later, on the last Sunday in February of this year, after the Social Democratic Chancellor had announced that he would be supplying German weapons to a war zone, investing a hundred billion euros in upgrading the Bundeswehr and, by the way to build two liquid gas terminals for importing the banned fossil fuels, he should have put up with the question of what he was smoking.

Majority wants to invest in Germany’s defense

On the one hand, it is easy to explain that the coalition partners are still working to make the announcements made by their Chancellor Olaf Scholz a reality. Just as the lockdown at the beginning of the corona pandemic in Germany was enforceable mainly because the pictures of the many corona deaths in Bergamo, Italy or later in Spain and New York had shocked people, Scholz can count on support hope of his demands in the spirit of the turning point, because the news and pictures from Ukraine shocked the traffic light actors as well as the rest of the country; the most recent Allensbach survey shows that large parts of the population consider military strength to be useful, at least for their own defense.




However, since the mechanisms of German party democracy do not change even under the impression of a war in Ukraine, Scholz and the leadership of the Greens and FDP must expect that the pandemic will happen. Eventually, people consider even the greatest horrors a part of their lives. And then they go back to their original beliefs.

There is still largely calm, including in the SPD

Christian Lindner, when he was not Finance Minister but in the opposition, demonstrated this impressively. After Corona broke out in Germany in mid-March 2020, he initially pushed the FDP closely to the side of the coalition to show that the well-being of the country was more important to him than that of the party in times of need.

But April wasn’t over yet when the FDP chairman announced in the Bundestag that the time of “great unanimity” was over. The restrictive measures against the pandemic were supported, but now the country is further along. Now we have to talk about how “health and freedom” can be better reconciled. This was a quick return to the primacy of partisan politics. The hardships of the pandemic had only just begun.

The speech that changed everything: Scholz on February 27 in the Bundestag.


The speech that changed everything: Scholz on February 27 in the Bundestag.
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Image: AFP

The shock caused by the war on European soil, especially in Germany, surpasses that caused by the pandemic. That’s why the left parts of the government factions have largely been quiet so far. Even in the parliamentary left, the largest structure in the SPD parliamentary group, the Scholz course is not fundamentally questioned.

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