Parties blame each other after bill halted at last minute, as fears grow over voluntary service and lottery idea is vetoed
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.”
