Germany’s ruling coalition is locked in a furious row over how to plug severe manpower gaps in the country’s military as it seeks to fulfil Nato obligations and prepare for the looming threat from Russia.
A scheme agreed by the governing parties over the summer under a plan laid out by the popular defence minister, Boris Pistorius of the Social Democrats (SPD), would have relied on voluntary recruitment to draw tens of thousands of young men to military service.
But doubts among the chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc that that plan would be sufficient to top up troop levels led to insistent calls for a compulsory mechanism – a form of conscription – to kick in automatically if necessary.
“We want to try to achieve this voluntarily with the SPD first,” said Merz, whose support has plunged amid coalition infighting, earlier this month. “I am sceptical. If we succeed, so much the better.”
Merz pledged on taking office in May to create Europe’s strongest conventional army. Germany does not have its own nuclear arsenal.
The dispute came to a head this week after Pistorius vetoed a compromise under which a contingent of young men selected by a lottery could have been pressed into mandatory Bundeswehr service if the volunteer programme failed to produce enough recruits.
A news conference to announce the outlines of the new “conscription lite” draft bill, which was to have been introduced to the Bundestag lower house of parliament this week, was hastily cancelled late on Tuesday. The parties blamed each other.
“In over 30 years as a member of the Bundestag, I have never seen a federal minister directly torpedo an important legislative process in his own area of responsibility and plunge his own parliamentary group into chaos,” Norbert Röttgen, a senior Christian Democrat, told the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Pistorius fired back that he had long rejected key aspects of the CDU’s proposals, insisting in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper: “I don’t torpedo things, and I’m not destructive either.”
A previous draft law from the summer had included a passage stipulating that the Bundestag could order young men called up only “if the defence policy situation makes a rapid expansion [of troop levels] imperative”. Conservatives found the language too vague and demanded a compulsory option in the law from the start.
The parties have agreed on a first phase of all 18-year-old men filling out a mandatory questionnaire about their fitness and interest in military service. Including women in a conscription programme would require a constitutional amendment, which is not on the table at this time.
Until 2011, men were obliged to perform some form of civic service upon turning 18, with those who did not want to serve in the army having the option to instead carry out Zivildienst in institutions such as hospitals or elderly care homes.
The army downsized after the cold war and both services were eventually suspended under Angela Merkel, although a clause allowing the state to draft men remains part of the basic law.
But since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experts have expressed alarm at the state of the military, with dwindling numbers of recruits and severe equipment shortages. Critics say the conditions have created a vicious circle, making military service unattractive.
In response to Nato assessments of the threat posed by Russia, Germany has pledged to gradually boost troop levels to 260,000 soldiers from 180,000 currently, in addition to 200,000 reservists.
A poll this week found a majority of Germans – 54% – support a return to the conscription system, with support strongest among those over the age of 60.
The inspector general of the armed forces, Carsten Breuer, has stressed the urgency of revising the recruitment process and voiced confidence that the original draft law could attract legions of new volunteers.
“We need rapid growth potential to enable us to defend ourselves and also to deter attacks,” he said.
