The Blank Cheque: How Germany Rewrote Its Constitution, Committed a Trillion Euros, and Remained an American Client.
On March 18, 2025, the German Bundestag voted 517 to 207 to amend the Grundgesetz — Germany's Basic Law, the foundational constitutional document that emerged from the rubble of the Second World War and has governed the republic ever since — to carve out an unlimited borrowing exemption for defence spending. Three days later, on March 21, the Bundesrat completed the constitutional process, giving the reform the force of law. Any military expenditure exceeding 1% of GDP would, from that moment forward, be entirely free of the Schuldenbremse — the debt brake — the fiscal rule that Germany had inscribed into its own constitution in 2009 and had held up to the rest of Europe as a model of budgetary discipline for a generation. Critically, the new law does not merely cover Bundeswehr procurement. It explicitly extends the borrowing exemption to cover military aid to "countries attacked in violation of international law" — a permanent, constitutionally shielded financing window for the war in Ukraine, written directly into the Basic Law. #Schuldenbremse #Grundgesetz #Zeitenwende #Verteidigungsausgaben #Bundestag
