At the beginning of the year, German men aged 18 began to receive a compulsory questionnaire registering their fitness for army service under a law passed last month.<\/p>\n
Joining the army is voluntary for now, but the law allows the government to introduce mandatory service to meet its goal of building what it says will be the strongest army in Europe for the first time since World War II.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Last November, active duty personnel stood at 184,000 troops, a jump of 2,500 since May, when Chancellor Friedrich Merz first told the parliament that the army, or Bundeswehr, \u201cneeds to become Europe\u2019s strongest conventional army\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the biggest they\u2019ve had for a very long time, and it\u2019s already the strongest force we\u2019ve had since 2021,\u201d Timo Graf, a senior researcher at the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences in Potsdam, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n The government is tempting voluntary service members on 23-month contracts, with generous salaries and perks. Those contracts can then be extended to indefinite professional service.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pay is 2,600 euros ($3,000), and because housing is free, medical insurance is free, they will end up having something like 2,300 euros ($2,700) after taxes and deductions. It\u2019s a lot of money for young people,\u201d said Graf.<\/p>\n Germany has made a NATO commitment to reach 260,000 active duty personnel by 2035, and to double its reservists to 200,000. This would bring it close to the half-million-strong army it had at the end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n The news has discomfited Moscow.<\/p>\n \u201cGermany\u2019s new government is speeding up preparations for a full-scale military confrontation with Russia,\u201d Russia\u2019s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechayev, told the German news portal Apolut in an interview last month.<\/p>\n From the German point of view, however, it is Russia\u2019s refusal to withdraw from Ukraine that has fuelled the political will to spend 108 billion euros ($125bn) to rebuild the armed forces this year, equivalent to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), and more than twice the 2021 budget of 48 billion euros ($56bn).<\/p>\n \u201cJust in one year, we have gone from 58 percent to 65 percent support of an increase in more defence spending,\u201d said Graf.<\/p>\n By 2030, Germany is to spend 3.5 percent of its GDP on defence.<\/p>\n According to a December survey by Politbarometer, a German election poll and television programme, eight out of 10 Germans are now convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin is not serious about pursuing a peace agreement in the war in Ukraine, and many have begun to believe intelligence officials\u2019 warnings that Russia plans to eventually expand its war to NATO countries.<\/p>\n The year \u201c2029 has been presented as a possible date for Russia to attack NATO, and that has become the reference date for people\u201d, Graf said. \u201cWe can see over the last four years of this war that we\u2019ve been sleepwalking, not understanding the gravity of the situation. Europe\u2019s future is at stake here.\u201d<\/p>\n The threat perception from Russia is only one side of the equation. German society has found its loss of faith in the United States over the past year equally transformative.<\/p>\n A poll conducted by the state channel ZDF in June 2025 asked Germans, \u201cWill the USA continue to guarantee Europe\u2019s security as part of NATO?\u201d Seventy-three percent said no. By December, this majority had risen to 84 percent.<\/p>\n Nine out of 10 Germans now see US political influence in Europe as pernicious, evidently fearing the open encouragement of far-right, Russia-friendly parties, as happened in Germany\u2019s federal election in February last year.<\/p>\n US President Donald Trump\u2019s National Security Strategy, published last November, lectured Europe that it faced \u201ccivilisational erasure\u201d, because of over-regulation from Brussels and \u201cmigration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence\u201d \u2013 nativist positions held by Europe\u2019s far-right.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve realised\u2026 Trump has no interest in helping Germany at all,\u201d said General Ben Hodges, who used to command US forces in Europe. \u201cThe National Security Strategy was awful\u2026 it was a giant middle finger from Trump to Europe,\u201d he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Germans have such little faith in Washington, that six out of 10 no longer even trust the US nuclear deterrent, and three-quarters would like to see it replaced with an Anglo-French deterrent.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople who value NATO and those who are pro-EU converge in the idea of a European NATO,\u201d said Graf. \u201cGermans still value NATO as a defence organisation, it\u2019s just that they do not trust the Americans to play their part in NATO, and they do support the idea of a European NATO.\u201d<\/p>\n Graf said Bundeswehr polling showed that support for a European army, always sketchy in Germany, for whose security NATO was expressly built in 1949, jumped in the past year by 10 points to 57 percent.<\/p>\n Merz\u2019s pledge is not new.<\/p>\n His predecessor, Social Democrat Olaf Scholz, had also promised to build Europe\u2019s strongest army in 2022, the year Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n But although Scholz got parliament to approve a one-off, $120bn boost in defence spending, the extra money only started trickling down later, in 2024.<\/p>\n Scholz\u2019s government at the time blamed bureaucratic procedures, but some believe there were cultural obstacles as well.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Bundeswehr was not perceived positively and, therefore, nobody in their right mind would choose that as a career. So then it would be a more niche thing to do, maybe more for people on the right side of the political spectrum,\u201d Minna Alander, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis specialising in security and defence, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cWell-educated Germans, older Germans, grew up hearing about how terrible Nazi Germany was,\u201d said General Hodges, who now lives in Germany. \u201cAnd for older Germans who were children during the war, the absolute worst nightmare for them would be a war with Russia, or without the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n But perceptions have changed rapidly since 2022.<\/p>\n Merz came to power condemning both Moscow and Washington, demanding \u201cindependence\u201d from the US.<\/p>\n By the time he assumed office, parliament had already approved a suspension of constitutional deficit limits to give him an enormous, permanent increase in defence spending. Last month, parliament approved roughly $60bn in defence procurements.<\/p>\n Analysts believe pro-Kremlin narratives will still seek to exploit whatever latent scepticism exists.<\/p>\n \u201cSensitivity over conscription is something that Russians are packaging into their propaganda narratives to many societies in Europe,\u201d said Victoria Vdovychenko, a hybrid warfare expert at Cambridge University\u2019s Centre for Geopolitics.<\/p>\n \u201cGermany is one of them, so basically, you\u2019re going to see a spike in news in terms of how bad it is that the Germans are sending in the kids to be killed,\u201d she told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n She is also wary of the time it will take for money and political will to translate into industrial capacity and force.<\/p>\n Scholz pledged to create a brigade to defend the Suwalki gap, a vulnerable neck of Lithuanian land sandwiched between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a Russian-held territory on the Baltic Sea, but recruiting, training and equipping it is still under way.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not stupid people, so we never rely on European processes, [the notion that] anyone will come as a god to help us,\u201d said Vdovychenko, who is Ukrainian. \u201cWe definitely understand, it\u2019s our people who will be always at the forefront.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n At the beginning of the year, German men aged 18 began to receive a compulsory questionnaire registering their fitness for army service under a law passed last month. Joining the army is voluntary for now, but the law allows the government to introduce mandatory service to meet its goal of building what it says will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Germans lose faith in Trump\u2019s US<\/h2>\n
![\"German](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/2025-12-17T153936Z_1663989799_RC2FIIAPV4W4_RTRMADP_3_GERMANY-POLITICS-MERZ-1768771497.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513&quality=80\")
Will Germany get the job done?<\/h2>\n
\u2018We never rely on European processes\u2019<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"