Chancellor Friedrich Merz formally inaugurated Germany’s 45th Armoured Brigade at Rūdninkai training area in Lithuania this week, completing the build-up of the first permanent foreign Bundeswehr deployment since the Second World War and bringing roughly 4,800 troops and accompanying armour to NATO’s eastern flank under permanent rotation. The ceremony, attended by Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Christopher Donahue, was held under tight security.
In remarks before troops, Merz said “the security of our Baltic allies is the security of Germany,” a formulation Berlin officials said he had crafted to mark a clear ideological break with two decades of more cautious Bundeswehr force posture. The brigade, which combines two German tank battalions, an infantry battalion, and combat-support units, has been assembled in stages since 2023 and is now under permanent stationing rather than rotational deployment.
The deployment is paid for in part by a 2026 German defence budget that has crossed the €100 billion mark for the first time in recent decades, with the Bundeswehr now consuming a little over 2.5 percent of GDP. The figure does not include the residual €20-billion-plus dispersal of the 2022 special fund that financed the initial post-Ukraine modernisation push.
Merz is using the deployment to anchor his broader rearmament programme at a moment when his domestic standing has weakened. Polling published last week by Forsa found only 15 percent of German voters said they were satisfied with his coalition’s performance, the lowest reading for any postwar chancellor at this stage of a first term. The CDU/CSU and SPD coalition lost two land-level votes earlier this spring and faces five further state elections in 2026.
On the eastern-flank politics, the Lithuanian deployment is broadly welcomed; in central and western Germany it remains contested. The Greens have demanded an explicit parliamentary mandate covering rules of engagement, which Merz so far has declined to seek. The opposition Linke and the far-right AfD have, from different starting points, criticised the deployment as escalatory; the AfD has said it would withdraw the brigade in its first hundred days if it ever entered government.
Within NATO, the deployment is being read as a marker of how far Germany has moved on hard-security questions since 2022. SACEUR Donahue called the brigade “a structural change in the deterrence posture along NATO’s longest exposed border,” and said it would shorten reaction time in any Suwałki Gap contingency by “a matter of days rather than hours.”
For Merz, the immediate political question is whether the Lithuania ceremony helps him recover any of the credibility he has lost on domestic economic management. Industrial production in March came in 1.4 percent below the same period last year, and unemployment is now hovering near 6.4 percent. Coalition partners in the SPD have begun to demand a more activist fiscal stance to support manufacturing, a debate Merz has so far resisted.