Olaf Scholz, clad in a black coat, digs a shovel into the ground, loosens sand, and tosses it a few inches forward. Alongside Boris Pistorius, his defense minister, the German chancellor has just broken ground on a new Rheinmetall ammunition factory in Lower Saxony. He grins and shakes hands with Armin Papperger, Rheinmetall’s CEO, for the cameras. Before long, this factory will produce 200,000 artillery shells each year.
It’s been two years since Scholz pledged that Germany would take on a larger role in European security and the defense of Ukraine—an effort to which his government has already committed 100 billion euros. Now, as the German military restocks and modernizes, national arms giants like Rheinmetall, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (KMW), and Diehl Defence are arguing that the government should invest in long-term, high-volume national procurement contracts that are safer and more lucrative for the defense industry. The government has succumbed to this pressure, providing billion and multi-million euro contracts for defense manufacturers. Rheinmetall, for one, is currently in the running for a 3 to 4 billion euro armored scout vehicle deal. Lockheed Martin, which secured a roughly 10 billion euro contract for an order of its F-35s, previously treated members of the Bundestag Defense Committee to a 24,000 euro four-course dinner—where it presumably lauded the warplanes’ capabilities over a champagne toast.
Even with an increasingly spending-happy German Ministry of Defense, the national defense industry needs foreign buyers to make large-scale weapons production—both for domestic and foreign use—economically viable. All arms exports require the sign-off of the federal government. But the responsible ministries have become decidedly less picky about export destinations, particularly to war zones. In January, they signed off on Diehl Defence’s sale of 150 air-to-air missiles to Saudi Arabia—ignoring the governing coalition’s agreement to ban arms exports to states “demonstrably directly involved in the war in Yemen.” All in all, a staggering 11.71 billion euros worth of arms exports were approved in 2023, compared to 4.9 billion euros in 2020.
To secure a share of the defense spending pie, Rheinmetall, KMW, and others rely on lobbyists—many of them former ministers and Bundestag representatives (MdB). Some worry that sitting politicians’ decision-making can be influenced by the prospect of a lucrative lobbying role after they leave government. Dirk Niebel, federal development minister until 2013, for instance, supported the controversial export preapproval of 200 tanks partially manufactured by Rheinmetall to Saudi Arabia in 2012. Barely a year after his exit from the Merkel cabinet, Niebel joined Rheinmetall as chief lobbyist. The friendships that Niebel formed with high-ranking officials during his time in government now give him greater sway over the government’s decisions: He regularly meets with the likes of State Secretary Susanne Baumann and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck on behalf of his new employer. Niebel’s is not an exceptional case: The revolving door between government and industry has been an issue in German politics for years. And while MdBs are able to request and publicize records of federal ministers’ meetings with lobbyists, the reason for such meetings is often vaguely categorized as a “general discussion”—no great victory for transparency.
Staffers often make an even faster switch: A Free Democratic Party MdB’s chief of staff, for example, departed the Bundestag for Rheinmetall in March without any lag between the two jobs. “A door opens, a door closes,” she wrote on LinkedIn. Between 2017 and 2023, 330 outgoing Federal Ministry of Defense employees entered immediate employment in the defense industry. To prevent ex-staffers and politicians from monetizing their contacts and information, Abgeordnetenwatch, a parliamentary transparency watchdog, recommends a three-year pause between government service and lobbying. The current mandated cooling-off period, however, tops out at 18 months and applies only to parliamentary state secretaries and members of government.
While still in office, many MdBs hold roles in organizations like the Association of the German Army (FKH) and the German Association for Defense Technology (DWT), which many see as lobbying forums. Defense Committee Chair Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who recently turned heads for sporting a “Taurus [missiles] for Ukraine” shirt, is a member of both groups. In an interview, she denied that they were lobbying organizations. In actuality, representatives of Rheinmetall, Airbus, Boeing, KMW, and other defense contractors regularly cozy up to MdBs on the Budget and Defense Committees at FKH and DWT parliamentary evenings, roundtable discussions, and social gatherings. Neither side is required to disclose the content of these informal conversations, which may well sway how MdBs vote on major procurement projects.
The awarding of contracts falls to the Defense Ministry’s Procurement Office, headquartered in an old Prussian office building in Rhineland-Palatinate. Here, 2,400 positions are considered “high corruption risk” due to frequent contact with the defense industry. “High corruption risk” positions must be vacated after five years, but this rule has been broken 450 times since 2004. Some of those in “high corruption risk” positions have held them for up to 28 years. Conversely, lawyers and auditors tasked with overseeing the integrity of contract awarding are few and far between.
One large contractor, Diehl Defence, seems to have found its cushy relationship with the German federal government useful when Alexander Biber, the mayor of Troisdorf, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia, threatened to foil its growth plans. Troisdorf is already home to a Diehl subsidiary’s factory, and the plant’s expansion onto adjacent land—which had already been approved for the long-term presence of explosive materials—was seen as logical for increasing the production of ammunition and explosives. After Biber announced plans to zone the land for commercial and residential use instead, Diehl’s friends at the Ministry of Defense and the Bundestag rushed to its aid. “This is not about Troisdorf or even about Germany; this is about Ukraine, all of us, our sheer survival,” an enraged Strack-Zimmermann contended on an evening talk show. Diehl executives promptly consulted with Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius and North Rhine-Westphalian Minister-President Hendrik Wüst, who appeared to push Biber to take a meeting with the arms giant.
Germany requires representatives of special interests to publicly disclose the purpose, scope, financing, and nature of their work in an online Lobbying Register, which was first made mandatory in 2022 and expanded in October 2023. Companies that fail to register are banned from lobbying members of government. In practice, however, the Lobbying Register reveals very little. The Rheinmetall entry, for instance, merely reports that its lobbyists are engaged in a “direct, transparent and trust-based dialogue” with the government. With billion-dollar contracts at stake, an expansion of the Lobbying Register is desperately needed to ensure the integrity of procurement and export approval decisions.
The war in Ukraine has rehabilitated the German arms industry’s image at home. As Berlin assumes an ever more critical role in the security of Europe, the integrity of its arms procurement and export agreements must be beyond reproach. The government must maintain trust and enact more effective transparency measures to make the defense industry’s lobbying visible to the German people, who are bankrolling its current moment in the sun.