German chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz has said he would like talks with France and Britain about sharing their nuclear weapons, but not as a substitute for US nuclear protection of Europe.
“Sharing nuclear weapons is an issue that we need to talk about … we have to become stronger together in nuclear deterrence,” he said on March 9 in an interview on Deutschlandfunk radio.
His comments came a day after agreeing cornerstones of a coalition deal between his Conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
“We should talk with both countries [France and Britain], always also from the perspective of supplementing the American nuclear shield, which we of course want to see maintained,” he said.
Germany, due to its Second World War past, has bound itself to non-nuclear defence in a number of international treaties but participates in NATO weapons-sharing arrangements.
At a summit in Brussels on March 6, European Union leaders backed plans to spend more on defence amid fears that Russia, emboldened by its war in Ukraine, may attack an EU country next and that Europe could no longer rely on the US to come to its aid.
Merz’s tougher stance on security and migration reflected a changing political landscape, where the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has surged to become the country’s second-largest party.
Germany’s plans to tighten migration laws did not clash with pan-European migration rules to be introduced by Brussels, Merz said.
“We want European solidarity … but Germany also naturally has a right to defend its own security and order,” he said.
Merz has said he wanted to form a coalition by Easter and said he would press for the outgoing German parliament to pass two major financial packages on infrastructure and defence and changes to State borrowing rules known as the “debt brake”.
Merz and the SPD, crucially, need support from the Greens party to pass the measures and Merz on March 8 said there would be intensive talks with the party in the next few days.
“We will integrate climate protection measures [in those packages],” Merz told Deutschlandfunk.
In a position paper, Greens ministers said they wanted to see a bigger proportion of funds in the financial packages going to States and municipalities and money for defence to be ring-fenced, if they were to support the plans.
