The promise was received with applause by the NATO allies: In the future, Germany actually wants to invest two percent of its gross domestic product in the defense budget. That was not always the case, as a look at the past shows.
When Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised in the Bundestag on Sunday that Germany intends to exceed NATO’s so-called two percent target in the future, he could be sure of the applause of the Western alliance. Because in the years before Putin’s attack on Ukraine, the federal government kept it to words, but did not follow up with deeds, as a look at the development of military spending in comparison to gross domestic product (GDP) shows.
It shows that there has been a fairly steady downward trend in defense spending since peaking at 4.9 percent in 1963. In the years of the Schröder and Merkel governments, the figure bobbed around in the range between 1 and 1.3 percent of gross domestic product before there was a slight upward movement to 1.4 percent in 2020.
NATO set itself the target of 2 percent at its 2002 summit in Prague. At that time, the Baltic States, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia were invited to become members of the Defense Alliance. The condition was to invest “sufficient resources” in defense. The benchmark at the time was 2 percent of GDP. For the sake of fairness, existing NATO members should also aim for this condition.
In absolute terms, Germany’s military spending in 2020 was around $52.8 billion.
Source: Stern
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