Dear Reader,

Today the Generaldebatte was held in the Bundestag. This is the central debate of budget week in which the Chancellor takes to the rostrum to defend the government’s spending plans.

Olaf Scholz used his speech to defend the extra debts the government would be taking on to modernise the army, house Ukrainian refugees and secure new energy supplies. He pledged that this spending would not come at the cost of the pricey commitments already made in the coalition agreement.

What struck me most about the debate was the limp reply by the Alternative for Germany (AfD), whose co-leader Tino Chrupalla was the first party head to respond.

Chrupalla avoided any mention of the war for the first five or six minutes. Bizarrely, he led his allotted time with generic attacks on the government over its alleged failure to address social inequality between urban and rural areas and between the west and the east.

When he did talk about the war, he condemned the g…