Historic Expansion of the Military Budget: Germany Adopts the Largest Rearmament Budget in their History

On July 6, on the immediate eve of the historic North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Ankara, Turkey, the German coalition government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil set in motion the largest rearmament budget in the history of the Federal Republic. The adoption of the 2027 federal budget draft by the cabinet marks a dark turning point in post-World War II European history. It signals that the German ruling class has shed all past historical inhibitions and is systematically placing the whole of society on a total war footing.

The figures contained within the new fiscal blueprint are staggering. The regular budget of the Defence Ministry will see a massive, unprecedented leap of 32.7 percent within a single year, climbing from €82.7 billion to €109.7 billion. No other ministry or public sector area in Germany will see anything remotely approaching this level of funding increase. When combined with €30 billion drawn from the special fund (Sondervermögen) for the Bundeswehr and €11.6 billion earmarked for direct military support to Ukraine, these three line items alone skyrocket Germany’s immediate military package to a colossal €151.3 billion. In tandem with this financial influx, the Defence Ministry is creating 6,000 new military posts and 2,100 civilian positions.

However, as the government’s long-term financial planning documents reveal, this historic surge is only the opening salvo. According to the mid-term financial trajectory adopted by the Merz cabinet, the regular defense budget alone is projected to grow to €153.9 billion in 2028, €162.9 billion in 2029, and an astronomical €183.7 billion by 2030. Within a mere four years, Germany’s core military spending will have more than doubled compared to its 2026 baseline. The initial €100 billion "special fund"—established by the previous Social Democrat-led coalition immediately following the outbreak of the proxy war in Ukraine—is on track to be fully exhausted by the end of 2027. From that point onward, the German bourgeoisie intends to finance its aggressive rearmament directly through the core federal budget and through the accumulation of massive new state debt.

A Blank Cheque for the Military Machine

To clear the legal path for this explosion of militarism, the federal government has effectively carried out a financial coup against the working class. Last year, with the explicit backing of the Green Party in the Bundestag and state governments in the Bundesrat involving the Left Party (Die Linke), Berlin largely suspended the constitutional "debt brake" for military and so-called security expenditures. Under these revised terms, any war-related expenditure exceeding 1 percent of Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) is entirely exempted from normal borrowing limits.

The political hypocrisy is stark: while workers are told day in and day out that there is absolutely no money available to fix failing schools, rescue a collapsing healthcare system, secure dignified pensions, or rebuild crumbling municipal infrastructure, the state military apparatus has effectively been handed a blank cheque.

By 2029, Germany’s total NATO-related expenditure is mandated to rise to 3.5 percent of its GDP. This figure encompasses not just the core defense budget but military-applicable spending spread across various other civilian ministries. This aggressive timeline puts Germany six years ahead of the broader alliance schedule. At the 2025 Hague summit, NATO states committed to a full 5 percent GDP target to be achieved by 2035. This target is split into at least 3.5 percent for direct military assets and up to 1.5 percent for militarily usable infrastructure, civil defense, communications networks, and corporate arms development. On the basis of Germany’s current economic output, hitting this 5 percent threshold means that the German working class will soon be forced to cough up well over €200 billion per year purely for the machinery of destruction.

The ruling class is entirely explicit about who the target of this mobilization is. While presenting the budget, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil (SPD) declared without embellishment that Germany had to "make up three decades" in the shortest possible time, warning that the nation could not defend itself "against Putin with a balanced budget". Stripped of its propaganda euphemisms of "defense" and "deterrence," this budget represents a deliberate step toward an outright, direct NATO war against the nuclear-armed Russian state.

The official target year set by the Bundeswehr and government strategists is 2029. Leading military officials openly proclaim that by the end of this decade, not just the armed forces, but the entirety of German civil society, must be fully "war-ready". They claim Russia could be capable of attacking NATO territory by then, using this calculated scare tactic to justify a total reorientation of public life toward national and alliance warfare.

Germany Takes the Reins of "NATO 3.0"

The economic and political coordination between this record-breaking budget and international imperialist strategy was made visible at the NATO summit in Ankara. There, world leaders accelerated what NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has dubbed "NATO 3.0". This doctrine outlines a "stronger European NATO" where continental European powers assume a far greater share of conventional warfare, reorganizing the global military burden-sharing with the United States.

Rutte explicitly pointed to Germany as the vanguard of this transformation, declaring, "Germany is leading, and Germany is delivering". He praised Berlin’s commitment to driving annual military spending above €150 billion by 2029. Indeed, no other major European power is moving as aggressively or ruthlessly as Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has repeatedly articulated his goal: to build the Bundeswehr into "the strongest conventional army in Europe" as quickly as humanly possible. Upon taking office, Merz justified this claim by pointing directly to Germany's massive population size, its immense economic power, and its geostrategic position at the geographic center of Europe.

Speaking from Ankara, Merz underscored that Berlin is not merely reacting to pressure from Washington or navigating the demands of US President Donald Trump. Rather, German imperialism is aggressively pursuing its own independent global aims. "We are not making this enormous effort to do anyone a favour," Merz stated bluntly before his departure, emphasizing that Germany is rearming purely in its own "security interests". To solidify this European hegemony, Merz used the summit to announce a new German initiative under which European NATO powers will take over an even larger portion of the direct financing and arming of the Ukrainian military.

The Rise of a War Economy and Conscription

This unprecedented defense budget is the financial engine behind a comprehensive economic and social mobilization. Crucially, the Ankara summit opened not with diplomatic pleasantries, but with a "Defence Industry Forum," a clearinghouse where capitalist governments and transnational arms corporations signed projects and agreements worth tens of billions of dollars. Among these are advanced negotiations for Germany to buy up to ten GlobalEye surveillance aircraft from Saab, plans to purchase five Triton reconnaissance drones, and a major joint venture between Rheinmetall and Lockheed Martin to produce ballistic ATACMS missiles directly on German soil.

Demanding a total "revolution" in the transatlantic weapons sector, NATO's Rutte declared that "the hum of the machines must become a roar". Under this dictate, governments are required to guarantee massive, long-term corporate contracts, dismantle environmental and labor regulations, and secure energy and raw material supply chains specifically for arms manufacturers. Furthermore, the state must ensure that a vast pool of trained labor is funneled away from productive civilian sectors and into weapons factories. By next year, NATO intends to produce 4 million artillery shells annually—nearly double its previous output.

This is the classic blueprint for a total war economy. Education, energy, transportation networks, academic research, public health, and basic industrial manufacturing are being systematically subordinated to the logistical needs of the military machine. Under Orwellian rubrics like "resilience," "critical infrastructure," and "comprehensive defence," the historical boundary separating civilian life from the military is being erased.

The domestic legal front for this transformation was solidified last week with the passage of draconian new war laws. The newly enacted Bundeswehr Infrastructure Act grants sweeping exemptions and fast-track authority that bypasses construction, planning, and environmental protection laws, allowing the state to rapidly build barracks, training grounds, ammunition depots, and heavy military transport lines.

Simultaneously, the German population is being legally registered for military service and placed under direct state control. The Reserve Strengthening Act completely abolishes the historic principle of "double voluntariness". Previously, an individual had to consent both to being classified as a reservist and to each specific period of active service. Under the new law, any individual leaving active military service will be automatically assigned to the reserve and can be legally called up against their will for mandatory reserve duties lasting several weeks every single year. Depending on prior service time, the state can force individuals into three, four, six, or twelve weeks of compulsory service annually, with the explicit goal of growing the reserve force to at least 200,000 personnel by 2035, alongside 260,000 active soldiers.

This infrastructure lays the direct groundwork for the return of full-scale military conscription. Since the start of 2026, every single 18-year-old man and woman in Germany has received an official state questionnaire assessing their physical suitability and psychological willingness to serve in the armed forces. Beginning July 1, 2027, physical medical examinations will become legally compulsory for all young men born in 2008. If these soft coercive measures fail to meet the military's aggressive recruitment targets, the Bundestag is already legally empowered to activate full "needs-based conscription," establishing the bureaucratic and legal machinery necessary for the forced recruitment of an entire generation of working-class youth.

War Abroad Means Class War at Home

The staggering costs of this imperialist revival are being extracted directly from the flesh of the working class. Nothing exposes the predatory class character of the Merz-Klingbeil budget more clearly than a direct comparison of departmental allocations. While the regular military budget enjoys an explosive 32.7 percent increase, the budget of the Federal Health Ministry is being brutally slashed by roughly 34 percent—plummeting from €21.8 billion down to just €14.3 billion.

Compounding this disaster, the coalition government has announced cross-departmental austerity savings of €4 billion for 2027, followed by automatic annual cuts of €8 billion starting in 2028. By 2029, the state intends to eliminate 8 percent of all positions across the federal public administration. Tellingly, all state security and police agencies are explicitly exempted from these cuts. Massive reductions are instead being forced onto development cooperation, federal pension subsidies, healthcare access, and social housing programs.

These measures represent only the introductory chapter of a full-scale social counterrevolution. The billions of euros flowing into the coffers of arms corporations, tank manufacturers, and drone developers are being systematically stolen from the elderly, the sick, the unemployed, and vulnerable working-class families.

History demonstrates that war abroad and class war at home are fundamentally inseparable components of the same capitalist policy. A society that permanently redirects hundreds of billions of euros toward the instruments of geopolitical violence cannot and will not tolerate basic democratic rights at home. As mass popular opposition inevitably grows against forced conscription, brutal social austerity, and the threat of world war, the capitalist state will respond with increasing aggression to suppress strikes, anti-war protests, and socialist political opposition.

The NATO summit in Ankara itself offers a stark warning of the authoritarian methods to come. To secure the summit, the regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan effectively banned all public protests and turned the capital into an armed fortress patrolled by tens of thousands of riot police and security forces. An anti-NATO demonstration was violently broken up, resulting in the immediate arrest of over 100 participants.

Simultaneously, state authorities launched coordinated "anti-terror" sweeps across the country, conducting raids against hundreds of left-wing activists and placing more than 100 people into indefinite pretrial detention.

Crucially, every single NATO power—including Germany—fully endorses and supports this brutal domestic repression. The imperialist powers require the dictatorial Erdoğan regime as an indispensable partner for their expanding wars against Russia and Iran, and their long-term strategic preparations against China. The police-state measures executed in the streets of Ankara are a mirror image of the dictatorial methods that the ruling classes across Europe and North America are preparing to deploy against their own populations to crush the brewing revolt against war, conscription, and social devastation.

The historic expansion of the German military budget demonstrates that the fight against militarism cannot be waged through appeals to the capitalist parties or the bourgeois state apparatus. The urgent task facing workers, students, and youth across Germany and Europe is to build an independent, mass revolutionary socialist movement. This movement must be rooted in the international working class and single-mindedly dedicated to the overthrow of the profit system, the dismantling of NATO, and the establishment of genuine workers' power through international socialism.