France needs to boost its defence spending to make European self-sufficiency a reality, Germany’s foreign minister has said.
As European powers increasingly acknowledge they may be left on their own for their defence as the transatlantic relationship comes under strain, Johann Wadephul said Paris needed to put its money where its mouth was.
“He repeatedly and correctly refers to our pursuit of European sovereignty,” Wadephul said of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in an interview with the German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk. “Anyone who talks about it needs to act accordingly in their own country.”
European countries are facing pressure to enhance their defence capabilities as anxiety increases about whether Washington would use its military might to come to the aid of its Nato partners in the event of an attack.
Nato member states pledged at a summit last June to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, but Wadephul said progress towards that goal had been falling short.
“Unfortunately, efforts in the French republic have also been insufficient to achieve this so far,” he said. “France, too, needs to do what we are doing here amid tough discussions.”
Germany last year exempted most defence expenditures from its constitutional “debt brake” and it has earmarked more than €500bn for defence between 2025 and 2029.
France, which is the midst of bitter battles over its public spending, places third in the EU in terms of its debt burden as a proportion of GDP, after Greece and Italy.
Wadephul’s criticism comes amid friction in the Franco-German alliance, traditionally seen as the driving force in EU cooperation. Germany has rejected repeatedly Macron’s calls for pooled debt to boost investment, while there is discord between Paris and Berlin over plans to build a next-generation European fighter jet and seal an EU trade deal with a group of South American countries.
On the opening day of the Munich Security Conference last week, Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, warned of the threat Russia posed to Europe and attempted to draw the US back into firm mutual security commitments, even as he acknowledged ties were in need of repair.
“In the era of great power rivalry, even the United States will not be powerful enough to go it alone,” he said. “Dear friends, being a part of Nato is not only Europe’s competitive advantage. It is also the United States’ competitive advantage. So let’s repair and revive transatlantic trust together.”
At the same time, Merz disclosed he had held initial talks with Macron over the possibility of joining France’s nuclear umbrella. However, the prospect of Europe pro-actively seeking its own nuclear defence capabilities beyond US protection laid bare differences within Germany’s ruling coalition.
Wadephul, a member of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), voiced caution about the prospect of Europe mounting its own more robust nuclear defence, saying: “There are enough atomic weapons in the world.”
He told German public television late on Sunday that “no one in Washington is questioning” whether the US would use its own nuclear arsenal to defend Europe if necessary, and he warned against creating that impression with a debate questioning the US protective shield.
Germany’s vice-chancellor, Lars Klingbeil, said Berlin would continue to rely on Nato’s nuclear deterrence system and had no plans to acquire its own atomic weapons – an option it renounced under existing treaties.
He welcomed the talks with France about joining its nuclear umbrella. “We’ll see what the outcome is,” Klingbeil, a Social Democrat, told the German news agency dpa.
However, the senior Christian Democrat Armin Laschet said the proposal risked sending a message to Washington that Germany was voluntarily renouncing the US protective shield. And he noted that France would insist on full control over how its nuclear arsenal was used.
“He [Macron] will not give the German chancellor a say in this nuclear armament issue,” Laschet said on public television.
Thomas Röwekamp, the CDU chair of the Bundestag defence committee, said Germany must take on more responsibility for European security but not in an ill-advised drive to replace US nuclear guarantees. He called in the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper for a “European complement within Nato” to the US atomic arsenal.
France had been making a key contribution to European deterrence for years, Röwekamp said, and the current exchange showed “how closely we are continuing to develop this contribution together”.
In an article published in the Guardian and the German newspaper Die Welt at the weekend, Britain and Germany’s highest-ranking military leaders made an unprecedented joint appeal to the public to accept the “moral” case for rearmament and prepare for the threat of war with Russia.
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