The chancellor assures that he will modernize the armed forces to the maximum within a period of five years
After decades of austerity and massive disarmament in its armed forces, Germany is preparing to invest massively in re-equipping its army to make it the most powerful in the old continent. “Germany will soon have Europe’s largest conventional army under NATO,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten and Stuttgarter Zeitung newspapers today. After highlighting the extraordinary budget of 100,000 million euros approved by the three parties of the governing coalition – Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP) – after grueling negotiations with the conservative opposition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Bavarian Social Christians (CSU) Scholz stressed that this is a radical shift in German security policy, which will “significantly strengthen” the military might of its armed forces.
The head of the German government has indicated that he hopes that the Bundestag, the federal parliament, will vote this week with the necessary two-thirds majority thanks to the agreement with the conservatives on the constitutional reform that will allow this extraordinary expenditure to be made during the coming five years. The pact came about after negotiations that included the Secretary of the Treasury, the Liberal Christian Lindner, the Secretary of State, the environmentalist Annalena Baerbock and the Secretary of Defense, Christine Lambrecht, as well as some prominent opposition figures. the Inspector General of the Federal Army, General Eberhard Zorn. Scholz thus fulfills the promise made three days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, when he announced that the 2022 national budgets will include an extraordinary expenditure of 100,000 million euros for military purposes.
“These funds will be used for the necessary investments and the rearmament of the armed forces. From now on, we will be investing more than 2% of our GDP in our defense year-on-year,” the Chancellor said at the time. Lambrecht also stated on Monday that his ministry’s budget will increase by more than 7% this year to 50.3 billion euros. Olaf Scholz stressed that with the military-purpose financial package approved with the main opposition party, Germany “will be able to meet its defense obligations better than ever and make its contribution to the Atlantic Alliance so that we can defend ourselves.” against any external aggression.” His government’s initiative will help “increase the security of Germany and Europe and is the right response to the change of era begun with the Russian attack on Ukraine.”
The head of the federal government also rejected criticism of the country’s alleged insufficient military support to Ukraine. “We have supplied weapons and we will continue to supply weapons,” Scholz said in the interview with the two Stuttgart newspapers, recalling that fifty “Gepard” battle tanks will be delivered at the end of July and after their completion and that Ukrainian military personnel are currently trained in the German Palatinate in handling heavy self-propelled howitzers “Panzerhaubitze 2000”. He also stressed that Germany has agreed with several partners in Eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic or Slovenia, to supply Soviet “T72″ tanks to Ukraine, which will be replaced in those countries with German-developed tanks such as the ” Leopard”.
The chancellor stressed that Germany’s allies are well aware that “the federal army does not have a surplus of heavy military vehicles in operation that can be sent immediately” to Ukraine and admitted that it is “a major problem” that the army of this country “has been structurally underfunded since 2010”, which “still limits our defensive capacity”. That will change radically with the now approved extraordinary budget of 100,000 million euros, says Scholz.
Source: La Verdad
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