German SPD tries to tie Merkel to Trump on military spending

Railing against an unpopular U.S. president has worked for Germany’s Social Democrats in an election campaign before. Now they’re trying the same tactic again.

کد خبر: ۷۲۲۳۴۸

تاریخ: ۲۶ مرداد ۱۳۹۶ - ۰۹:۴۳

Fifteen years ago, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was lagging in opinion polls and widely expected to lose to his conservative challenger — until he denied U.S. President George Bush support for the invasion of Iraq, made his opposition to the war a key campaign theme, and ended up being reelected by a whisker.

With less than six weeks to go until this year’s parliamentary election, the SPD — now spearheaded by former European Parliament President Martin Schulz — is trying to damage Chancellor Angela Merkel by linking her to U.S. President Donald Trump’s calls for higher military spending by Germany and other NATO allies.

The message: Unless you want Germany to become an armed-to-the-teeth military power, vote for Schulz.

Trailing by more than 15 percentage points in the polls, the center-left party — currently the junior partner in Merkel’s coalition government — has amped up its rhetoric on the issue. Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel declared this week that the election was a vote on whether Germany "remained a force for peace or followed Trump’s armament madness.”

The Social Democrats are not suggesting that Merkel, a cautious leader most at home in the political center, is anything like Trump. But they are — sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly — suggesting that she and the U.S. president are tied together in wanting to ramp up military expenditure.

The SPD know they could be onto a winner if they can link any of Merkel’s policies to Trump, who — unlike his predecessor Barack Obama — is highly unpopular in Germany.

"When it comes to defense spending, [Merkel’s] conservatives traditionally represent a position that seems to be in line with the current position of the White House,” Rolf Mützenich, the deputy chairman of the SPD’s group in the German parliament, told POLITICO from the campaign trail in his constituency in Cologne.

His party, Mützenich said, has "a completely different position, which we will make clear over the next couple of weeks,” adding that instead of boosting military spending, Germany should spend more on humanitarian aid and other ways to prevent and resolve conflicts peacefully.

Germany’s military budget was a point of contention between Washington and Berlin even before Trump entered the White House. But Trump’s presidency pushed it to the forefront of public debate.

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel in Berlin | Michael Kappeler/AFP via Getty Images

Berlin will spend around €39 billion on defense this year, some 1.22 percent of its GDP, according to NATO estimates — far below a guideline figure of 2 percent of GDP outlined by NATO leaders in a declaration in 2014.

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly castigated NATO allies for their military dependence on the U.S., which is projected to spend around 3.6 percent of its GDP on defense this year, and demanded all members of the alliance meet the 2 percent benchmark. He singled out Germany for criticism, declaring Berlin owes NATO "vast sums.”

To reach the NATO figure in the timeframe set out in the 2014 declaration, Berlin would have to almost double its defense expenditure by 2024, turning Germany into by far the biggest military spender in Europe.

Merkel’s conservative bloc, traditionally an advocate for more defense spending, supports this goal. But Schulz and his party consider 2 percent much more of an advisory figure than a binding target.

Schulz has pointed out the 2014 declaration is far from clear-cut, with NATO leaders committing themselves merely to "aim to move towards the 2 percent guideline within a decade.”

After Merkel’s conservatives pledged to "incrementally increase defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP” in their election platform, the SPD went on the attack.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel called the commitment "a subjugation to the U.S. president of a type that until recently I would not have thought possible.”

On Tuesday, the SPD’s Manuela Schwesig, the premier of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state, questioned where the money would come from for such a large increase in military spending. She said the SPD wanted to use any extra government spending to invest in education.

Only 1 out of 10 Germans believes that Trump does the right thing in world affairs, compared with almost 9 out of 10 for Obama, according to a June 2017 study by the Pew Research Center.

Against this backdrop, campaigning on the defense spending commitment could strike a chord with Germans, who are extremely wary of militarism given the country’s history.

"The 2002 election showed that you can campaign on a foreign policy issue and win elections with that,” said Hendrik Träger, who teaches politics at the University of Leipzig.

And yet, the odds for Schulz are long.

His greatest obstacle is that unlike Schröder, who could run 15 years ago on a simple anti-war message, Schulz is opposing an abstract number — the amount of military spending as a share of GDP.

At the same time, Merkel — although more cautious in her words than the SPD — has repeatedly distanced herself from Trump since he took office. While defending the close relationship between Germany and the United States, she has made clear that she has very different views from Trump on a range of issues including globalization, trade and climate change.

When Merkel returned from a three-week vacation last Friday, she used her first press conference to take a swipe at Trump’s threat to unleash "fire and fury” on North Korea. In her usual measured tone, Merkel warned that an "escalation of rhetoric [was] the wrong answer.”

Statements like that go down well in a country which values few things as much as stability. In fact, having such a brash and volatile president in the White House could actually help Merkel in the election.

"With Donald Trump, there’s a U.S. president who likes to tweet at night and whose actions are hard to predict,” Träger said. "That’s why many people in Germany feel good about having a calm and controlled politician like Angela Merkel as their ‘anchor for stability’ and a counterpart to Trump.”