Senior German coalition politician: Conscription should be reviewed

Reintroduction of military conscription should not be ruled out, a senior member of Germany's pro-business FDP liberal party, the junior partner in the ruling coalition, said in remarks reported by the newspaper Die Welt on Wednesday.

"I have previously been against the suspension of compulsory military service," deputy FDP head Wolfgang Kubicki said. Conscription made the Bundeswehr a people's army, he said.

Germany was neither mentally nor factually ready or capable of defending itself, Kubicki told the national daily.

Europe as a whole was unable to defend itself on its own at the moment. "For that reason I'm in favour of supplying Ukraine what we can supply, and then reordering rapidly for the Bundeswehr," he said.

There was a risk that the United States would not be prepared to defend Europe, and for that reason Germany had to rearm as quickly and as effectively as possible, and "if necessary reinstate compulsory military service," Kubicki said.

Kubicki has adopted a different attitude to Christian Dürr, the party's parliamentary head, who came out against recent comments by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius regarding the reintroduction of military service.

Dürr pointed to "a serious intervention in the freedom of young people" in remarks to the Funke Media Group.

Kubicki backed Pistorius' call for the Bundeswehr to be made ready for war. "Glossing over this conceptually is mad. We have to be war-ready. You would never have heard this from me before 2022," he said.

The morning of the Russian invasion on Ukraine in February that year had dissolved "the entire basis of my political convictions," he said referring to his support for attempts by former German leaders to seek reconciliation with the Soviet Union and later Russia.

Those who want peace should prepare for war, Kubicki said, adding that supporting this aphorism would have been inconceivable to him previously. "I now say it's correct."

In comments also to Die Welt in mid-December, Pistorius raised the possibility of reintroducing conscription, which was suspended, but not abolished, in 2011 after being in force for 55 years.

Pistorius, a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD), described that decision as a mistake. In a debate in the Bundestag in February, Scholz rejected a return to conscription.