Berlin urges Paris to boost defense spending by cutting other costs

Politico Europe · Feb 16, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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News Defense German officials are growing increasingly frustrated with what they see as French President Emmanuel Macron’s failure to deliver on his calls for European “strategic autonomy.” Johann Wadephul said the same lesson applies to all European countries and urged them to implement NATO’s defense spending target of 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035. February 16, 2026 2:05 pm CET BERLIN — Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said France needs to spend more on defense even if it means cutting other kinds of spending. Wadephul’s comments are likely to fuel ongoing tensions between Berlin and Paris at a time when Chancellor Friedrich Merz and President Emmanuel Macron have openly clashed on everything from trade to common borrowing. German officials have increasingly criticized Macron for speaking passionately about the need for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy from the U.S., while not, in their view, delivering on that rhetoric by increasing defense spending aggressively enough. “[Macron] repeatedly and correctly speaks of our pursuit of European sovereignty,” Wadephul told German public radio in an interview on Mondayo. “Anyone who talks about this must act accordingly in their own country. Unfortunately, efforts in the French Republic have so far been insufficient to achieve this.” Wadephul called on Paris to abandon calls for eurobonds, or a joint EU borrowing scheme, in order to finance defense spending. Instead, the French government needs to find cuts in other areas to create fiscal room, the German foreign minister argued. “We therefore call on France to do what we are doing here, with difficult discussions, to create investment capacity, including in the social sector, to take one or two austerity measures, to make savings in other areas too, in order to have the breathing space needed to achieve the vitally important goal of European defense capability,” Wadephul said. Wadephul said the same lesson applies to all European countries and urged them to implement NATO’s defense spending target of 5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035, as agreed last year. “Anyone talking about independence from the U.S. today needs to do their homework first. And Europe still has a lot of work to do in this regard.” While tensions between Macron and Merz over spending and defense are not new, Wadephul’s unsolicited advice on how the French should spend was not well received in Paris. “I would like to recall the facts. In 2017, France increased its defense budget. Since then, that budget has doubled,” a French economy ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government practice, said in response to Wadephul’s comments. “We are convinced that strong Franco-German ambition is absolutely necessary for European defense.” The tensions come at a particularly sensitive time, just days after Merz, at the Munich Security Conference, said he had early talks with the French president on a European nuclear deterrent. Berlin has no nuclear weapons of its own and, amid growing concerns about the reliability of U.S. security guarantees, is increasingly looking to France, which has its own nuclear weapons. At the same time, Berlin wants to maintain alliance with the U.S. to the extent possible. Wadephul on Monday cautioned against writing off the transatlantic alliance. “I strongly advise that we stop these debates now, that we stop questioning the NATO alliance and cohesion when no one in Washington is questioning it,” Wadephul said. “Without the U.S. nuclear umbrella, without U.S. intelligence information, we are defenseless here.” France was expected to spend 2.05 percent of GDP on defense in 2025, according to NATO data. Germany, which in years before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine spent relatively little on defense, was on track to spend 2.4 percent, according to government data. Giorgio Leali contributed to this report from Paris.