Germany’s Merz faces party backlash over partial arms freeze to Israel

BERLIN — German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is facing pressure from within his own ranks over his decision to partially suspend weapons deliveries to Israel.

“The principles of German policy toward Israel remain unchanged,” Merz said in defense of the move in a television interview with ARD on Sunday. “But we cannot supply weapons to a conflict that is being attempted to be resolved exclusively by military means, which could claim hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.”

Merz’s message in the interview — for which he interrupted his summer holidays — was as much addressed toward his own conservative bloc as to the German public.

The chancellor’s decision on Friday to suspend arms exports to Israel that could be used in the Gaza Strip came in the wake of the Israeli government’s plan to expand its military operation in Gaza to “help free our hostages” and “remove Hamas,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last week. Netanyahu’s plan has been widely criticized both at home and abroad.

Merz’s partial weapons freeze was applauded by his junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), with party co-chair and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil saying Merz had made “the right decision.” The SPD has been among those pushing for more concrete consequences over the quickly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

But the decision took many of his fellow conservatives by surprise. Over the weekend, Merz’s team sent out an explanatory paper to coalition members that was seen by POLITICO, and set up a video meeting among foreign policy lawmakers in what resembled internal crisis diplomacy.

“The general consensus is that the communication surrounding the chancellor’s decision could have been handled better,” Jürgen Hardt, one of the conservative’s main foreign policy lawmakers who took part in Sunday’s meeting, told POLITICO. “One must conclude that certain people who one would actually expect to be involved were not specifically involved in this decision,” he added, underscoring he was among the conservatives who backed the chancellor’s decision.

But the Bavarian sister party of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Christian Social Union, and its powerful leader Markus Söder seem to have been among those who were left in the dark.

“The CSU was not involved in this decision and we consider that to be questionable,” its parliamentary group leader Alexander Hoffmann told the Bild newspaper.

Israel’s security is Germany’s ‘reason of state’

Others framed the move as a further illustration of their leader’s tendency to suddenly change course on core issues.

“Reason of state abolished? A break with the principles of [conservative] policy,” the youth wing of Merz’s conservatives said in a post on Instagram.

Israel’s security was declared as part of Germany’s “reason of state” in a 2008 speech by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel on account of her country’s “special historical responsibility” after the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were killed by the German Nazi regime.

“Israel’s security is and remains a matter of German national interest,” Boris Rhein, the CDU state premier for Hesse, said in a post on X on Monday. “Hamas can only be defeated in battle, not at the negotiating table. We must therefore continue to equip Israel to fight this battle, defeat Hamas and end terrorism.”

Merz, however, has found himself in a bind in recent weeks. Pressure from outside has increasingly mounted, with U.N. agencies warning that Palestinians in Gaza were facing famine. Food consumption and nutrition indicators are at their lowest levels since the conflict began, and deaths from starvation are mounting.

Many other European countries, and the SPD, had demanded that Merz take concrete actions by, for example, giving up Berlin’s blockade over a partial suspension of the EU’s association agreement with Israel which provides for close ties on trade and other areas of cooperation.

And while Merz had recently signaled such steps were among the options on the table, that seems to have changed after the sharp blowback from within his own ranks over the weekend.

“We are not prepared to interfere with Israeli trade or trade with Israel. We have already fended off many attempts to do so, including in Europe,“ Merz said in Sunday’s interview.