Germany's SPD rejects Nato 2 percent defence spending target

Germany's Social Democrats on Sunday rejected Nato's target of spending 2 percent of national output on defence and accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservatives of kowtowing to the demands of US President Donald Trump. With Germans set to vote in a national election next month, SPD leader Martin Schulz and Thomas Oppermann, who heads the centre-left party in parliament, issued their strongest criticism to date of Merkel, the Nato spending target and Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen.
"We say a clear no to the 'two-percent target' of Trump and the CDU/CSU," the two leaders wrote in an essay for the Funke Mediengruppe newspaper chain, referring to Merkel's Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party. "It's not only unrealistic, it is simply the wrong goal," they said, in comments aimed at differentiating the SPD from Merkel's conservatives after four years in a "grand coalition".
The comments put the SPD on a collision course with US officials, who began pressing Germany long before Trump's election last November to increase its military spending. The SPD leaders, whose party is lagging Merkel's Christian Democrats in the polls by 15 percentage points, said Germany would have to nearly double current defence spending from 37 billion euros to meet the Nato target.
That would make it the largest military power in Europe - a goal they said "no one could want" given Germany's Nazi history. Instead, they said, Germany should focus on building a strong European defence union and, ultimately, a European army - a stance that may resonate with a deeply pacifist German public that remains sceptical of military engagements.
"Merkel and the CDU/CSU make themselves small vis-a-vis Donald Trump when they answer his provocations around the two-percent target by saying, 'Okay, fine, we'll put in more money,' as if we didn't have any better ideas what to do," they wrote. They said increased military spending should be matched by higher outlays for diplomacy, humanitarian aid and crisis prevention.