BANGKOK
Germany's development minister has opened a new front in Berlin's running argument over money and war, asking for Ukraine funding to be exempted from the country's constitutional debt brake because, on current plans, her ministry simply runs out of room to pay for it. Reem Alabali Radovan told Reuters on Friday, on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, that civilian support for Ukraine is funded largely from her development budget — a budget being cut deeply enough that maintaining support at its present level will, in her words, no longer be possible.
The numbers behind the warning
The figures she cited explain why the argument is happening now. Funding for Ukraine inside the development ministry's budget comes to about 330 million euros — roughly $371 million — this year, down from 670 million euros in 2022 and 750 million euros in 2023. In other words, the line that pays for a large share of Germany's civilian help to Kyiv has been more than halved since the first years of the full-scale war, even as the war itself has intensified. "The Russian attacks are more severe than ever, leading to more deaths, more destruction, more suffering," Alabali Radovan said. "But as budget cuts for development assistance continue, we simply will not be able to maintain our support for Ukraine at this level." She was blunt about the arithmetic: "At this point, it is not a political decision; we just face massive cuts and it will no longer be possible." The money, she argued, is well spent — "wisely invested in Ukraine's and Europe's stability."
Her explanation of where the cuts land is the part budget specialists will recognise. Development budgets are built on long-term commitments: programmes agreed years ago, in countries around the world, that cannot simply be switched off. "I am already prioritising support for Ukraine, but there are many other crises and conflicts, too," she said. "And we work in the long term, which means large parts of our budget are already committed." That leaves the flexible money — the crisis instruments, the funds held back precisely so a ministry can respond when something breaks — exposed first. "That means the cuts hit crisis instruments above all, because, naturally, they work with flexible funds that are not yet pre-committed." An exemption from the debt brake for Ukraine funding would, in effect, take this one line out of that squeeze: borrowing for it would be permitted even where the constitution's general cap on government borrowing would otherwise bite.
A coalition split, in the open
Alabali Radovan is a Social Democrat, the junior partner in the governing coalition led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative CDU. Her proposal has the backing of Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, a CDU member — a cross-party alignment that gives it more weight than a routine ministerial complaint. But Reuters reported that it faces opposition from other members of the CDU who are against creating further exceptions to the borrowing rules beyond the ones already approved, including those for defence spending. That is the shape of the fight: not whether Germany should support Ukraine — Alabali Radovan also backed Merz's call for other countries to contribute more, saying "We are the strongest supporters, and I believe others can and should contribute more" — but whether each new priority gets carved out of the debt brake, and what is left of the rule if the carve-outs keep coming.
Why the debt brake matters
The debt brake, the Schuldenbremse, is written into Germany's constitution and sharply limits how much new debt the federal government may take on in normal times. It has been the central fact of German fiscal politics for more than a decade: supporters credit it with Germany's low public debt and borrowing costs; critics say it starves investment and forces exactly the kind of corner-cutting Alabali Radovan is describing. Because it is constitutional, changing or exempting it is a heavy political lift, not a line-item tweak — which is why exemptions already granted, notably for defence, were hard-fought, and why each additional request becomes a test of the coalition's discipline. A development minister making this case publicly, from an IMF and World Bank gathering, is also a signal aimed beyond Berlin: Germany is presenting itself to partners as Ukraine's strongest supporter while warning, in the same breath, that its own budget rules may not let it stay that way without a change.
What to watch
Nothing has been decided. The proposal now has to survive contact with the chancellor's party, the finance side of the government, and the parliamentary budget process that turns ministerial asks into law. Watch for three things: whether Merz himself blesses the exemption or lets it die quietly; whether the CDU's debt-brake defenders soften if the foreign minister's support becomes a formal coalition position; and whether other ministers with squeezed budgets copy the tactic and ask for carve-outs of their own, which would turn a single Ukraine line into a general renegotiation of the rule. For Ukraine, the stakes are concrete: civilian funding pays for the unglamorous scaffolding of a state at war, and Germany is one of the pillars holding it up. The Bangkok remarks are the start of that argument, not its end — and they land in a week when European finance is already being repriced, as our coverage of Saturday's European travel picture and the rest of the overnight news file shows.
