On backing Ukraine, Germany starts to get the wobbles

That’s among the worrying signs that Germany, Europe’s pivotal country and the No. 2 Western donor to Kyiv after the United States, is going wobbly at the very moment Europe needs to redouble its support.

Virtually every senior European official, diplomat and security expert I’ve spoken with over the past year has intoned the same mantra: Whether or not Donald Trump wins a second term and guts U.S. aid for Kyiv, Europe must do more. Because even a Democratic administration would continue elevating Washington’s security interests in Asia over Europe.

But cracks are now unmistakable in what so far has been that broad consensus — most visibly in Germany.

Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Berlin’s bilateral help for Ukraine has exceeded $16 billion, not counting its share of European Union funding or a further $30 billion spent supporting more than 1 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled to Germany. It has been the linchpin of European funding, which has exceeded total U.S. support by tens of billions of dollars, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

But reports emerged this month that Germany’s powerful finance minister, Christian Lindner, suggested Berlin would freeze new military aid for Ukraine, even after the government had slashed scheduled 2025 support for Kyiv by nearly half, to roughly $4.4 billion.

That news will be read in Moscow as vindication of Putin’s policy of strategic patience, which rests on the assumption that, sooner or later, the West will wilt. Ditto for deepening doubts that Washington will maintain its current aid gusher, averaging about $3.6 billion monthly in delivered and planned funding for Kyiv since the war’s outset.

Lindner’s motives are a matter of debate. He is a deficit hawk and the champion of Germany’s draconian limit on debt, which is enshrined in its constitution.

But his party, the smallest of three in Germany’s unpopular coalition government, is also facing oblivion in next year’s federal elections. He might be seeking a survival strategy amid signs that German backing for Ukraine is slipping.

Polling ahead of parliamentary elections in three eastern states next month, including here in Saxony, where Leipzig is the biggest city, suggests that populist, pro-Russian parties on the extreme right and left are on course to collect 40 to 50 percent of the vote.

They have campaigned against immigration and aid to Ukraine, in the latter case parroting Kremlin propaganda. And they have played on working-class grievances, suggesting that subsidizing Ukrainian refugees saps funding for education and Germany’s own social safety net.

German states don’t set foreign policy; the federal government does. And the five former East German states, where hostility toward funding Ukraine runs deep, make up just 12 percent of Germany’s 85 million people.

Still, virulently anti-Ukraine parties are surging in the east, including the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany, which is at or near the top of polls ahead of the three states’ elections. Another Russophile party, founded in January and rising in the polls, is led by a firebrand former communist who takes credit for the government’s retreat on funding Ukraine.

That’s a stretch. But it’s naive to think Germany’s mainstream parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s traditionally peacenik Social Democrats, aren’t nervous.

The jitters might spread to the Christian Democrats, former chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party, which, now in opposition, holds a commanding lead in national polls ahead of next year’s federal elections. Its leader, Friedrich Merz, hopes to replace Scholz as chancellor and is staunchly pro-Ukraine — but lately doesn’t talk about it much lest he antagonize voters in the east.

“I think that’s the right approach at the moment,” Andreas Nowak, a Christian Democrat official in Leipzig, told me. “You can’t win a federal election in Germany only in the western states.”

Germany suffers from an anemic economy, an aging population and — remember that debt limit — paltry public investment. The result is unreliable trains, failing schools and too little notable homegrown high tech. That has fueled anger with the government, as have spiking levels of immigration.

But Germany remains Europe’s powerhouse by dint of its size and manufacturing muscle. Scholz leveraged his leadership after Putin unleashed his battalions in Ukraine, calling the invasion an era-defining challenge and pumping money into defense after decades of atrophy.

The chancellor has been too timid at times in sending Ukraine some powerful weapons, but for the most part, Germany’s pro-Kyiv center has held. If it goes squishy now, that will send a terrible signal to the rest of Europe — and to Putin.