Germany’s coalition partners have failed to agree on a proposed new form of military service, cancelling a press conference on the subject at the eleventh hour on Tuesday.
Negotiators from Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had previously backed a proposal to introduce a lottery system, which would be used if enough volunteers did not sign up in a given year.
The suggested changes, which echo the system used in Denmark, come as Germany looks to strengthen its armed forces in wake of the security threat posed to Europe by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Berlin has said it will expand its army from 180,000 to 260,000 active soldiers within a few years.
Reports suggested that SPD politicians were unhappy with the lottery system idea, leading to its collapse on Tuesday.
Up until Tuesday afternoon, it looked like the coalition partners were in agreement, with Jens Spahn, the head of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, saying that “a good solution has been found”.
The sudden disagreement reveals the fragility of Merz’s coalition and shows just how divisive the issue of military service is in Germany.
It is now unclear whether the military service bill will be debated in the Bundestag as planned on Thursday.
Anger within the coalition
After the dispute on Tuesday, Norbert Röttgen, a CDU politician, told RND that he blamed Pistorius, the SPD defence minister.
“The SPD must now sort itself out,” said Röttgen, who accused Pistorius of behaving “destructively” and plunging “his own parliamentary group into chaos”.
For his part, Pistorius made no secret of his annoyance as he left the SPD parliamentary group meeting on Tuesday.
“That wasn’t my idea, it was a Union (CDU) idea,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, referring to the proposed lottery system.
In August, Pistorius announced a plan to send a mandatory questionnaire to all male school leavers, allowing them to voluntarily sign up for military service if they wished.
Under the initiative, young women would also receive the survey, but would be under no obligation to respond.
In response, the CDU expressed concern that not enough volunteers would sign up.
“I am in favour of immediate compulsory military service,” Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, of the CDU, told the Funke Mediengruppe newspapers at the beginning of October.