Angela Merkel is grovelling to President Trump and reviving the spectre of a militarist Germany by agreeing to meet Nato’s defence spending targets, the leaders of Germany’s Social Democratic Party have claimed.
Martin Schulz, chairman of the SPD, and Thomas Oppermann, who heads the party in parliament, have gone on the offensive as the party trails the chancellor’s Christian Democratic Union and its ally the Christian Social Union by 15 points in the latest opinion polls before elections next month.
Writing for the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper publisher, the Social Democrat leaders took their party sharply to the left in an effort to capitalise on popular German hostility to Mr Trump.
The US president has accused Germany, Europe’s largest and wealthiest country, of not paying its way for European defence by failing to reach a Nato target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on military budgets.
“We say a clear no to the ‘2 per cent target’,” Mr Schulz and Mr Oppermann wrote. “It’s not only unrealistic, it is simply the wrong goal.
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“Merkel and the CDU/CSU make themselves small vis-à-vis Donald Trump when they answer his provocations around the 2 per cent target by saying, ‘OK, we’ll put in more money’, as if we didn’t have any better ideas.”
The SPD leader warned that Germany would have to nearly double its defence spending to meet the Nato target, making the country the biggest military spender in Europe — a goal they said “no one could want” given its past.
Instead, they said, Germany should focus on building a strong European defence union and, ultimately, a European army.
The head of the liberal Free Democratic Party said yesterday that Germany may have to accept Russia’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014 to end European sanctions and build better links with Moscow.
“We have to get out of the dead-end situation,” Christian Lindner, whose party is polling at 8 per cent, said. “To break a taboo, I fear that we must see the Crimea as a permanent provisional arrangement, at least for now.”