The Daily Populous Saturday March 8th, 2025 night edition
Authored by thetimes.com and submitted by TimesandSundayTimes

The gospel of Luke says it is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to pass into the kingdom of Heaven.

Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-apparent, must envy the camel-threaders the blissful simplicity of their task.

This week, electrified by horror at the level of hostility from the Trump administration, he struck a deal to pursue one of his country’s most momentous reforms since it was reunified in 1990.

It includes a €500 billion slug of debt for infrastructure investment, roughly equivalent to Norway’s entire annual economic output.

The package proposes exempting military spending from the country’s constitutional lock on public borrowing DAVID HECKER/GETTY IMAGES

Yet even that splurge could be dwarfed by a proposal to exempt military spending from the country’s constitutional lock on public borrowing. It is, in theory, a licence for

PausedForVolatility on March 7th, 2025 at 16:49 UTC »

Germany allocating funding only addresses a small part of the issue. Germany really needs to address its litigious procurement system. BAAINBw is fundamentally broken. Streamlining that office alone would address significant procurement issues and, with the stabilization of purchasing power and the ability to reliably commit to contracts, would probably address some of the inflated contract prices Germany sees. It’s not a silver bullet, to be sure, but it would probably help more than allocating a few billion more per year.

Gracchus0289 on March 7th, 2025 at 16:27 UTC »

What is the alternative? You have Russia, China, and now the US acting against EU interests. Europe will take a big hit from this new world order belligerent countries are shaping. Gone are days of suave charm offensives led by EU diplomats. We are back to explicit Bismarckean realpolitik-- more stick, less carrot.

TimesandSundayTimes on March 7th, 2025 at 16:23 UTC »

This week, electrified by horror at the level of hostility from the Trump administration, he struck a deal to pursue one of his country’s most momentous reforms since it was reunified in 1990.

It includes a €500 billion slug of debt for infrastructure investment, roughly equivalent to Norway’s entire annual economic output.

Yet even that splurge could be dwarfed by a proposal to exempt military spending from the country’s constitutional lock on public borrowing. It is, in theory, a licence for an unlimited defence budget, constrained only by coalition politics and the whims of the bond markets.

Announcing the package on Tuesday evening, Merz briefly switched from German to English in an effort to convey the scale of its ambition: “Whatever it takes.”