Merz Defends Ukraine Aid as AfD Leads Polls at 30 Percent
Military assistance to Ukraine, Merz argued, takes nothing away from domestic priorities.
“Not a single euro flowing to Ukraine is being diverted from social or educational spending in our country. Not a single euro is missing,” Merz said. He noted that the government had carved out an exception to Germany’s constitutional debt rule so that defense spending can be funded through additional borrowing.
The chancellor described the danger as concrete, not hypothetical. “We see that Russia’s readiness to escalate is rising toward Ukraine, toward our Eastern European neighbors, but also toward our own country,” he said.
Merz then turned on the right-wing AfD and the socialist Left Party, accusing both of minimizing the threat and stoking division.
“It is incomprehensible to me how those on the far left and far right continue, to this day, to play down the situation,” he said, accusing them of deliberately driving divisions, uncritically spreading disinformation. “One gets the impression you want the chaos because you want to gain party-political advantages from it.”
Lawmakers from the AfD and the Left Party have repeatedly argued that the billions of euros earmarked for Ukraine should go to domestic needs such as pensions and infrastructure.
The pressure on Merz’s conservative CDU/CSU alliance is mounting, as it trails the AfD in opinion polls. A survey by INSA published this week put the AfD at 30%, the CDU/CSU at 18.5%, the environmentalist Greens at 14%, the center-left SPD at 13.5% and the Left Party at 10%.
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