German Finance Minister Christian Lindner has defended decisions on next year's budget taken by the ruling three-party coalition, in particular those regarding the Defence Ministry, in comments to Bild newspaper on Saturday.
"The defence minister is getting more money than in the previous budget, but he is getting less money than what he called for in public," Lindner, a member of the pro-business liberal FDP, told the mass-circulation tabloid.
"This is the entirely normal budgetary process," he said, pointing out that a minister worked passionately for his department and asked for the maximum. "The task of the finance minister and the federal government overall is then to check what s desirable and what is truly necessary," Lindner said.
The defence budget is set to grow by €1.2 billion from currently around €52 billion ($56 billion), considerably less than the figure demanded by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Pointing to the war in Ukraine and increased security concerns in Europe, Pistorius had called for a boost to his budget by more than €6 billion.
On Friday, Scholz said that the regular defence budget would total €80 billion from 2028, once a special fund of €100 billion, announced shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, had been exhausted.
The German cabinet has been engaged in a wrangle over the budget for weeks, with Lindner insisting that the so-called "debt brake" in the constitution should not be eased to allow more deficit spending.