Berlin (dts) – Leading politicians from the CDU and CSU are considering financing expenditure for the Bundeswehr and Ukraine aid in the future through loans.
They include the deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, Johan Wadephul (CDU), the parliamentary group’s specialist spokesman for transatlantic relations, Thomas Silberhorn, and the Union’s chairman in the Human Rights Committee, Knut Abraham. Roderich Kiesewetter, the group’s first man on the control committee for the secret services, had previously made corresponding considerations. The Union parties have actually decided to respect the debt brake of the Basic Law.
Silberhorn said in an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” (FAS) that the “special fund” of 100 billion euros for the Bundeswehr approved in 2022 is now “almost completely planned”. If NATO’s two percent target is to be achieved, the defense budget will have to be “increased by ten billion euros annually” for several years starting in 2026. But because “no one” has yet explained “where this money is going to come from in such a short period of time,” “interim financing” is necessary to make up the “difference.” “We still have to see how to do that.”
Abraham demanded to the FAS that “nothing should be ruled out” with regard to loans to finance the Bundeswehr, that one should not “tie one’s hands” and that all options had to be “thought through”. “If you rule out everything possible beforehand, you take away political leeway.”
Wadephul had already said on October 16th at a Ukraine event organized by the “Center for Liberal Modernity” in Berlin that, given the current situation, one must ask oneself “whether we need to raise new funds.”
However, such considerations are not a consensus in the Union. The spokesman for the parliamentary group in the Defense Committee, Florian Hahn (CSU), told the FAS that he rejected “new special assets or new debts”. A spokesman for the CDU responded to the FAS’s question as to whether party leader Friedrich Merz was also thinking about raising new funds to support Ukraine with the sentence: “We politely ask for your understanding that Friedrich Merz does not want to comment on this at the moment.”
Photo: Sign “Stand with Ukraine” lies on the ground (archive), via dts news agency
