Baerbock attacks Scholz over stalled Ukraine aid as German election looms

Annalena Baerbock has delivered a blunt assessment of her own government's performance on Ukraine, telling POLITICO that Germany is no longer viewed as a driving force for peace policy in Europe. The foreign minister's intervention exposes a fracture inside the interim cabinet that goes beyond routine coalition friction. It reflects a deeper disagreement over how Germany finances its foreign policy commitments at a moment when the war in Ukraine is entering its third year and the United States is preparing for a change of administration.

The €3 billion package stuck in a borrowing dispute

At the centre of the row is a €3 billion military aid package for Ukraine that commands broad support across the German political spectrum. Baerbock, the Greens' co-leader, has pushed for its rapid passage. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, however, has made his agreement conditional on financing the expenditure through new borrowing. That condition runs into outright opposition from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), Scholz's junior coalition partner until the traffic-light government collapsed in November, and from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the main opposition force. Both parties favour increased aid to Kyiv but reject additional debt to pay for it.

The constitutional dimension is not incidental. Germany's debt brake, enshrined in the Basic Law since 2009, limits the federal structural deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product. Suspending it requires a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag, a threshold the current parliamentary arithmetic makes extremely difficult to reach. Scholz's insistence on using the emergency clause, previously invoked for the pandemic and the energy crisis, has been criticised by the Federal Court of Auditors and by fiscal conservatives within his own Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an attempt to circumvent the rule rather than confront the need for reprioritisation.

Baerbock warns of damaged trust among allies

Baerbock's language was unusually direct for a serving foreign minister addressing her own government. She warned that hesitation on the aid package risks damaging the trust of European partners who have come to rely on German leadership. That trust, she argued, was already strained by the slow pace of German deliveries earlier in the war, a point she has made repeatedly in private meetings with counterparts from Warsaw to Paris. The foreign minister's frustration is shared in several European capitals, where German indecision is seen as a recurring obstacle to faster collective action.

The criticism extends beyond the current administration. Baerbock explicitly named the CDU under Angela Merkel and the SPD, which governed in grand coalition with the conservatives from 2013 to 2021, for pressing ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline despite warnings from eastern European allies and the United States that it would increase German dependence on Russian gas. Merkel had described the project as a purely private-sector venture, a characterisation Baerbock now rejects. She drew a direct line from that decision to the recent severing of undersea data cables in the Baltic Sea, which German and Nordic intelligence agencies attribute to Russian sabotage.

Nord Stream legacy and Baltic security

The Nord Stream 2 argument is more than historical score-settling. It frames Baerbock's broader case that Germany's security policy has been shaped by a willingness to treat Russian intentions as manageable commercial risks. The pipeline was completed in September 2021 but never certified after Russia recognised the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in February 2022. The subsequent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022, still officially unsolved, and the pattern of cable cuts in the Baltic since late 2023 have reinforced the view in Berlin and Stockholm that the seabed has become a theatre of hybrid warfare.

Baerbock's reference to the Riyadh conference she attended in early January underscores how these security concerns are now discussed beyond the transatlantic sphere. She reported that Arab partners raised the Trump administration's territorial ambitions regarding Greenland and the Panama Canal as evidence of Western unpredictability. That perception, she suggested, is pushing some non-European actors toward closer coordination with the EU, an unintended consequence of American volatility that Europe could exploit if it presents a coherent alternative.

Election campaign complicates the calculus

The federal election on 23 February adds urgency to every manoeuvre. The Greens are polling at 14 percent, a distant fourth behind the CDU/CSU alliance led by Friedrich Merz, the SPD and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Merz has signalled a tougher line on Russia and a willingness to increase defence spending, but his party's refusal to countenance new borrowing for Ukraine aid creates a paradox: the likely next chancellor opposes the fiscal mechanism that Scholz demands as the price for releasing the funds.

Coalition arithmetic after the vote is uncertain. A CDU/CSU, Greens alliance, sometimes called a black-green coalition, would align on foreign policy and defence but clash on climate policy and taxation. A grand coalition between the conservatives and the SPD would reprise the configuration that governed for twelve of the last sixteen years, with all the policy inertia Baerbock criticised. The FDP, currently hovering near the five percent threshold, may not return to the Bundestag at all, removing the most doctrinaire fiscal hawk from the equation but also eliminating a potential coalition partner for the conservatives.

Defence spending targets and the Trump factor

Baerbock said Germany must consistently invest more than 2 percent of GDP on defence, adding that in crisis years the figure could approach 3 percent. Germany crossed the NATO 2 percent threshold for the first time in 2024, largely thanks to a one-off €100 billion special fund created after the invasion of Ukraine. That fund is nearly exhausted. Sustaining the target without it will require permanent budget increases that neither the SPD nor the CDU has fully costed in their election programmes.

Donald Trump's demand that NATO members spend 5 percent of GDP, more than double the alliance's current guideline, looms over the debate. Baerbock struck a notably calm tone on the incoming US administration, saying Europe would cooperate where possible but would not be thrown off course if relations become difficult. Her sanguinity contrasts with the alarm in some European capitals about a potential US withdrawal from European security. The foreign minister's argument is that European strategic autonomy, long discussed but rarely funded, becomes a necessity rather than an aspiration under any American administration that questions the alliance's burden-sharing.

What the deadlock means for Kyiv

For Ukraine, the German impasse is more than a domestic political spectacle. Germany is the second-largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the United States, having committed roughly €28 billion in bilateral military assistance since February 2022 according to the Kiel Institute's Ukraine Support Tracker. The €3 billion package under discussion includes air defence systems, artillery ammunition and armoured vehicles that Ukrainian commanders have identified as critical for 2025 operations. A delay of weeks or months while German parties negotiate coalition agreements could create a capability gap at a time when Russian forces are pressing along the front line in Donetsk oblast.

European partners have limited ability to compensate. France, the United Kingdom, Italy and the Nordic countries have all increased their contributions, but none matches Germany's industrial scale in land systems and artillery production. The European Defence Agency's latest capability report notes that German manufacturers, Rheinmetall, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, Diehl Defence, account for a disproportionate share of European land combat system output. When German export licences stall, the effect cascades through Ukrainian supply chains.