The left-wing candidate to replace Angela Merkel when she steps down as Chancellor of Germany has said he backs the formation of an EU army.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has governed Germany since 2005, has said she will not run for a fifth term this year.
Speaking to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on Saturday, Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the Social Democrats, said: “For me, a common army is part of the idea of European sovereignty.”
While the left-wing politician added that such an endeavour would not be a project for the near future, he appeared to have given it some thought, detailing that the EU army would need to be “a democratic structure” controlled by the European Union, including engagement with the European Parliament with regards to financing and agreeing on military operations.
While the Social Democrats are in third place in the polls to take over as leaders of the German government — behind Angela Merkel’s party and the Greens — the idea of an EU army has received support from Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the past.
In November 2018, Merkel backed the formation of “a real, true European army”, the remarks coming after France’s President Emmanuel Macron called for a “real European army” to “protect” Europeans from China, Russia, and even the United States of America.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the woman who, in 2019, was tipped to be Merkel’s successor as CDU party leader and likely Chancellor of Germany, backed the idea of a “Europe of security” which “must someday also include a European army”.
Germany’s then-defence minister Ursula von der Leyen — now the President of the European Commission, the EU’s powerful unelected executive — bragged in 2019 that “a united EU military is becoming a reality” with Germany and France as the “driving forces in defence”.
More recently, as President von der Leyen told the globalist panel of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in January, the EU has “set up the building blocks of a European defence union”.
In November 2017, the European Union took its first major step in the formation of an EU army when the vast majority of the EU27 signed up to the Permanent Structured Cooperation process (PESCO), a key part of the EU’s Defence Union plans which had been set out by then-European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who claimed months before that the bloc needed a “fully-fledged European Defence Union” by 2025.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage had warned for years of a coming EU army, and that if the United Kingdom remained in the political bloc it could become pulled into the project.
British europhiles have denied that such an EU army would ever come into being, with former Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg calling it a “dangerous fantasy” during a 2014 debate with Farage.
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