When the SPD parliamentary group held a trial vote on the eve of the special session of the Reichstag to approve the war credits, 78 MPs voted in favor and 14 against. The outvoted minority included the parliamentary group leader Hugo Haase, representative of the left wing and a convinced pacifist. As a young lawyer, he had defended many social democrats persecuted in the German Empire, including Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. For 16 years he had taken a stand against the irresponsible arms race of the imperialist powers. Now he saw himself unable to approve five billion marks for the alleged “defense war” against Russia. Because the majority of the SPD deputies had decided to be part of a faction, the pacifist Haase had to announce the SPD’s yes in the Reichstag against his inner conviction. “The free future of the German people,” he exclaimed, “is threatened by a victory for Russian despotism.”
Rolf Mützenich is today’s Hugo Haase
SPD parliamentary group leader Rolf Mützenich must have felt something similar at the special session of the Bundestag when he defended the armaments package for the Bundeswehr that Chancellor Olaf Scholz had pulled out of a hat overnight. Mützenich, who embodies the SPD’s traditional policy of disarmament and détente like no other active politician, stood at the lectern and had to sell the largest rearmament program in the Bundeswehr’s existence as being without alternative. “Putin’s attack” destroyed the international order and “threw back decades” the European peace policy.
Since their “February experience” in the Bundestag, the German Social Democrats (almost all) have been talking as if the luxurious equipment of the Bundeswehr with the most modern battle tanks, combat aircraft, combat ships and combat drones had always been a matter close to their hearts, as if no socialist had ever asked for it from NATO Increase in defense spending in doubt or even – like Sigmar Gabriel – ridiculed. As recently as March 2017, the then Foreign Minister scoffed at his US colleague: “I don’t even know where to put all the aircraft carriers… I think it’s completely unrealistic to believe that Germany will achieve a military budget of over 70 billion euros a year… I don’t know of any politician in Germany who believes that this would be achievable or even desirable in our country.”
But in the face of war, not even the Jusos dare to join a peace alliance that opposes the planned waste. Only the Socialist Youth – The Falcons, the spokesman for the SPD working group for employee issues, Klaus Barthel, and the left wing in the SPD, which has shrunk to a splinter group called Forum DL21, have the courage to openly contradict the Federal Chancellor and to denounce the “unprecedented paradigm shift”: ” A well-equipped Bundeswehr does not need special funds or additional billions. The Bundeswehr is not plagued by underfunding, but by structural problems in the management and procurement of materials.”
Germany pumps almost as much money into the military as Russia
With this opinion, however, the left is at a loss. Both the co-chair Saskia Esken and the “short-term party rebel” Kevin Kühnert praised the chancellor’s billion dollar coup. The Secretary General, who has mutated into a Scholz defender, assumes that the SPD parliamentary group will support the Bundeswehr rearmament. One must, according to Kühnert’s philosophical justification, “use the logic of the military as the final authority”.
Not a word about the fact that the Bundeswehr budget has been increasing disproportionately since 2015, sometimes by four, sometimes by seven, sometimes by twelve percent a year, from 33 billion euros in 2015 to 50.3 billion in 2022. Not a word about the fact that Germany is almost pumps so much money into the military as Russia that the NATO supremacy USA – according to the Stockholm peace research institute SIPRI – covers a gigantic 39 percent of global military spending, Russia only 3.1 percent. The expenditures of the European NATO members alone exceed the expenditures of Russia by a factor of six. So why an additional “100 billion bazooka”? To keep China in check in the future? In order to initiate a new German “world policy”?
The Greens, who were still committed to non-violence when they were founded, have also adapted their peace policy convictions to the “new realities”. Although the Green Youth are plagued by a few “stomach ache”, basically you have nothing to counter the overwhelming comparisons of the Green cabinet members. Just as Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer justified participation in the Kosovo war with Ausschwitz in 1999, Robert Habeck is now playing on the keyboard of the feminist Metoo movement: one should not simply look on at “military rape”. For Greens who still have doubts, Habeck has a special treat in store. Thanks to Christian Lindner’s debt policy, people will now get out of fossil fuels even faster.
The Greens want to make people forget their approval of the 100 billion armaments by claiming part of the money for green “energy security”. Similar to Lindner, they therefore glorify the exit from dependence on Russian natural gas as a heroic “defense of freedom”. Renewable energies, according to Lindner’s most recent adjustment volte, are “freedom energies”. They guarantee security of supply just as rearmament guarantees peace.
Union parliamentary lobbyists stand by their guns
However, the Union, which is needed for the planned anchoring of the 100 billion package in the Basic Law, has signaled that crooked eco deals cannot be made with it. No, the entire sum must benefit armaments. Of course, the CDU and CSU also want to have a say in the details of the planned projects, such as which group should be given which orders in which constituency. Parliamentary lobbyists stand by their guns.
The government’s plan to enshrine rearmament in the Basic Law is revealing in two respects. On the one hand, the government wants to get the Union on board with this coup, because a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag and Bundesrat is required to change the Basic Law. From the traffic light, barely a hundred days in office, a new Groko emerges, an oversized coalition of CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and FDP. Laid out for well over four years. Secondly, elevating continuous rearmament to constitutional status means that future coalitions with different political composition will be unable to stop, cut back or change the armament program.
This unprecedented coup confirms the trend towards authoritarian democracy that has been noticeable since the financial crisis, in which any opposition is either marginalized or dismissed as politically and intellectually irresponsible. Although the constant political appeal for cohesion, unity and unity suggests that the oversized coalition is about social solidarity, in reality it is about authoritarian government and accepting “unpopular” measures as uncritically as possible. The voters are the stupid ones in this game, because they always have to reckon with the fact that “new realities” will force the parties to “radically change course”. With the result that previous alignments no longer apply or are postponed until further notice. More than a hundred years ago this was called the Burgfriedenspolitik.
The government’s trick of financing the announced rearmament exclusively through new debts and calling the whole thing a “special fund” in tried-and-tested Orwellian language is praised as particularly clever by all those involved. If the 100 billion program to promote Lockheed Martin, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Airbus, Thyssen-Krupp and Rheinmetall had to be financed through tax increases, violent protests would be foreseeable. As it is, however, the expenditure affects neither the wealth of the rich nor the purses of large groups of voters. Or better: not yet! Because some economists already fear that the constant injections of credit (when production is running at full capacity) will fuel inflation.
So the armaments package will go through smoothly in the Bundestag. But a two-thirds majority is also secure in the Bundesrat, since the four government participations of the left in Thuringia, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Berlin and Bremen are not enough for a blocking minority.
The risk for Friedrich Merz
For the new CDU chairman Friedrich Merz, the opposition’s switch to the government course is still risky. If “war chancellor Scholz” (ARD) gains in stature through his bazooka policy – initial polls seem to confirm this – all upcoming state elections for the Union this year could be lost. In Saarland, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein there is a risk of their prime ministers being voted out of office, and in Lower Saxony the CDU could be thrown out of the coalition.
If the traffic light government also succeeds in selling German armaments as a European project for the future, as emancipation from the USA and as an entry into a sovereign and defensible EU, it will even manage to allay neighbors’ fears of Germany’s military dominance Merz once again beat the terms of office of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (two years) and Armin Laschet (one year). However, no one knows how the war in Ukraine will continue, whether an escalation will make all the power games in Germany obsolete.
Even the SPD parliamentary group leader Hugo Haase, who had to announce his parliamentary group’s bitter decision in the Reichstag, did not know on August 4, 1914 that the progress of the war would soon tear his party apart. In 1916, angry comrades in parliament called him a “dirty soul”, “scoundrel” and “traitor” because he criticized the government’s war policy. Because of his pacifist stance, he was expelled from the parliamentary group and party, and in 1917 he founded the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD) with other opponents of the war. By the end of the war, nine million soldiers and six million civilians had died. Hugo Haase died on November 7, 1919 as a result of an assassination attempt.