Germany has agreed to buy American Tomahawk cruise missiles and deploy them in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the Bundestag parliament on Thursday morning.
Meraz has just returned from the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, which was also attended by President Donald Trump and other senior US government officials.
What did Merz tell Parliament?
Merz was speaking about his government’s record in a sweeping address to the Bundestag.
As well as a range of domestic and economic priorities – such as planned income tax and pension reforms working their way through Parliament – he described the ultimate goal as “moving towards a future where our country is not susceptible to blackmail, but can use its strengths to confidently confront every threat that arises to our independent way of life.”
Merz said the “results” of this week’s NATO summit in Turkey “exceeded all my expectations”, adding that it showed the alliance was “united, strong and confident”.
“On the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara we also agreed with the US government that Tomahawk missiles will be purchased by us and deployed in Germany,” Merz. Said. “With this we are closing an important strategic gap in our defence. And at the same time we will work on developing our own European systems and deploying them in Europe.”
Merz called the agreement this week to sell TKMS submarines to Canada the largest military contract in modern German history.
He said such agreements “make it clear to me that NATO is and will remain a transatlantic alliance.”
“But as Europeans we are also strong and we have understood that we cannot simply outsource our security,” he told the chamber in Berlin.
Many more to follow…
Edited by: Natalie Muller
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