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Trump and Putin to hold call on US plans for Ukraine ceasefire – Europe live

Putin-Trump call scheduled for afternoon, Kremlin confirms

We have just heard from the Kremlin on the exact timing of the Putin-Trump phone call, with officials saying it is scheduled for 1pm to 3pm GMT (2pm to 4pm CET).

“There is a large number of issues from the normalisation of our relations and the Ukrainian issue, all of which the two presidents will discuss,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said, quoted by AFP.

Key events

Fiery start to Bundestag debate on Merz’s spending plans

Kate Connolly

Kate Connolly

Berlin correspondent

We’ve seen a fiery start to the Bundestag debate ahead of a historic vote to change two articles of the constitution and establish a 500 billion Euro fund for infrastructure, in Germany’s outgoing parliament.

An extraordinary session of the outgoing lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, meeting for a vote to adopt the draft law brought by the SPD and CDU/CSU parliamentary groups to reform constitutional debt rules and set up a 500 billion euro infrastructure fund, in Berlin, Germany. Photograph: Annegret Hilse/Reuters

An attempt by the far-right AfD, far-left Die Linke, and the left-wing conservative BSW to stop the proposals has failed in the opening few minutes.

Bernd Baumann, parliamentary head of the AfD, which last night failed in its attempt to block the debate in the constitutional court and tried again in the Bundestag this morning, said it was an insult to the electorate that the old parliament was being used to push the legislation through.

Merz, he said, “endorsed by the Bundestag, which has long been voted out of office” was trying to “take over the chancellorship with the (help of the) SPD and the Greens as if it were a Banana Republic”.

Christian Görke of Die Linke accused Friedrich Merz of backtracking on one of his main election promises not to relax the rules of Germany’s constitutionally enshrined debt brake. At the same time he emphasised the need for its reform, as it had caused previous governments to ‘break our country’ by pursuing an obsessive savings policy, rather than investing where necessary.

Jessica Tatti of BSW, the breakaway group from Die Linke, referred to the proposals as ‘war credits’ (Kriegskredite) which had to be stopped. She slammed the social democrats in particular, for backing Merz’s deal, quoting from a letter she said a long-term party member announcing his departure from the party had shared with her.

“Please spare us the sabre-rattling and the nuclear threat,” the outgoing SPD member wrote. The party should instead “strive for peace and forging a speedy understanding with Russia, with whom we could have a lot of good things in common”. By backing the spending deal which Tatti said will see billions of Euros of investment in German defence spending as well as saddling younger generations with immense debt for years to come, the SPD had renounced its core values of “freedom, justice, solidarity and peace”, Tatti said, quoting from the letter.

These voices will set the tone for the debate over the coming hours in what the tabloid Bild, often good at snappily capturing the mood, has succinctly nicknamed ‘Die Schulden-Schlacht’ – the debt battle.


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