Germany Pushes Historic Rearmament, Lifts Defence Budget to €108B
Germany pressed its historic military buildup -- a 2026 defence budget of 108.2 billion euros, up from 86 billion, with plans to borrow up to 400 billion over five years and grow the Bundeswehr from about 186,000 toward 260,000 troops. But the drive is strained: Trump pulled 5,000 US troops and cancelled a missile deployment after Chancellor Merz criticised the Iran war, leaving Germany exposed to Russian Iskanders and scrambling to buy Tomahawks. A Dusseldorf court separately jailed a Syrian man for life over a 2025 Islamist knife attack in Bielefeld that wounded four.
Germany pressed ahead with the most ambitious military buildup in its postwar history. Chancellor Friedrich Merz's coalition has lifted the 2026 defence budget to 108.2 billion euros, from 86 billion in 2025, and plans to borrow up to 400 billion euros over five years to meet NATO's new target of 3.5 percent of GDP on core defence; Merz has vowed to build "Europe's strongest non-nuclear army." A new conscription law aims to grow the Bundeswehr from about 186,000 troops toward 260,000, with a 200,000-strong reserve.
But the effort has been knocked off balance. After Merz criticised the United States over its handling of the Iran war, President Trump retaliated by ordering the withdrawal of 5,000 of the more than 35,000 US troops in Germany and cancelling a planned deployment of the long-range missiles Berlin needs to deter Russia. With Russian Iskander missiles stationed in the Kaliningrad exclave -- within range of Berlin -- and no deep-strike weapons of its own, Germany is pressing Washington to sell Tomahawk cruise missiles, though the US may have few to spare after the Iran war.
The buildup unsettles allies as much as it reassures them. France and Poland are wary that a rearmed Germany could become a local hegemon, complicating talk of a European "coalition of the willing," and at home Merz's popularity has eroded quickly while the far-right AfD surges toward historic highs before autumn regional elections. Persistent delivery delays -- from communications gear to armoured vehicles -- point to deep institutional inertia.
In the courts, a Dusseldorf court sentenced a 36-year-old Syrian man, Mahmoud B., to life imprisonment for a 2025 attack it deemed Islamist-motivated and carried out as a member of a foreign terrorist organisation. He had stabbed customers at a bar in Bielefeld who were celebrating their football club's promotion in May 2025, wounding four people before his arrest.