LONDON — U.K. Chancellor John Healey is set to deliver an unexpected increase in defense spending at his first budget on Wednesday, as Britain strains to reach its NATO commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035.

Healey — who quit as defense secretary in the dying days of Keir Starmer’s government over a funding row — hopes he can show how Britain will start to reach that target now that he’s safely ensconced in the powerful Treasury.

Until last week, it was assumed that the top finance minister would defer decisions on ramping up funding until next year’s multi-year, government-wide spending review. So Wednesday’s move could represent an early win for the Ministry of Defence in Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s new government.

But with regular warnings in the press and in public about Britain’s unpreparedness for conflict, there’s much more to watch for beyond Wednesday’s headline hike. POLITICO walks through the seven key details and defense industry demands.

1) How will Healey play the numbers game?

Healey’s government-rocking resignation back in June was explicitly over a refusal in Downing Street and the Treasury to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defense by 2030.

Now that he is leading the Treasury, Healey is under pressure to deliver on that. But even that keeps Britain shy of the bigger NATO aim.

On existing plans, U.K. defense spending is set to rise to 2.7% next year and remain flat until 2030. Healey’s first move will be to fill the £4.7 billion black hole in defense funding in the Defence Investment Plan — meant to overhaul the armed forces and improve readiness — published earlier this year.

More money is now expected beyond this, briefed to the media in recent days as a “down payment” towards spending 3% on defense by 2030.

But two government officials, granted anonymity like others in this article to discuss internal thinking, said the pathway to meeting NATO’s larger, 3.5% target will only come in next year’s spending review, not the budget.

Even on the smaller measure, the margins for the chancellor are tight, with government spending rules and debt targets leaving little room for maneuver. Mike Martin, an MP on the House of Commons Defense Committee, told POLITICO: “They have got themselves into a straitjacket over defense spending and none of this will be resolved before the next election. This is why I think an early general election is inevitable.”

2) Will the chancellor move to funnel private capital into defense?

Britain’s defense industry has long called for more direct government spending on domestic contracts. But the sector also wants more private capital flowing into U.K. firms, and will be looking to Healey to set the conditions.

The Financial Times reported last week that Healey will allocate £15.4 billion to the country’s National Wealth Fund and £5 billion to the British Business Bank — a share of which could end up with defense companies.

Two key details to watch here are whether the government claims this money counts towards its wider defense spending commitments, or whether any cash is allocated purely for defense firms. Potential reforms to and incentives for pools of private capital, such as pension funds and venture capital funds, to invest in defense would also be welcomed by the sector in this budget — but the industry may be left waiting.

One of the government officials cited above said that a Defence Finance and Investment Strategy is slated for December, with a Defense Investment Summit coming December 1.

3) Where does Healey stand on global defense team-ups?

On Sunday evening, the Treasury disclosed that it would not join the Canadian-led Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) — a proposed multinational financial institution with its own AAA credit rating that aims to provide cheap loans for countries to invest in defense.

The U.K. had previously considered joining the bank, or merging it with its own separate initiative, the Multilateral Defence Mechanism (MDM) — a planned scheme for joint defense procurement, stockpiling and supply chains for member countries.

But a joint statement with Ottawa said that the institutions will now work in partnership.

The MDM currently has £400 million allocated from June’s Defence Investment Plan, while none of the other member nations — the Netherlands, Finland and Poland — have confirmed whether they have contributed capital to the project.

Now that uncertainty over Britain’s membership of the DSRB has gone, the government will be looking to flesh out its plans for its own MDM.

4) Can the chancellor slash energy and manufacturing costs?

Two industry figures told POLITICO that one of the biggest barriers to doing defense business in Britain — making it less attractive than other nations — is the country’s comparatively high energy costs.

However, slashing costs for energy-intensive industries, including the industrial base of the defense sector is expensive, and schemes aimed at reducing costs — such as the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme – already exist. Measures reportedly under consideration this time around appear to focus more on reducing households’ energy costs than on supporting businesses.

A third industry figure predicted that ministers would not offer immediate support for business energy bills because “every possible option” for instant help “is too expensive.” But a defense industry investor said the Treasury is, however, looking at reducing the financial burden of machinery — which they said is a key issue for small firms wanting to ramp up production as part of the supply chain.

5) What does Buy British actually mean?

The government has been consulting with the defense sector and wider British industry over what exactly constitutes a British company under its plans to implement a new “Buy British” scheme.

The plan aims to bring together Andy Burnham’s pledges of re-industrialization and more evenly-spread growth across the country, and comes after the EU proposed its own Made in Europe procurement plan to try and boost the bloc’s own firms.

The push is also designed to build sovereign capability, which has become increasingly important to Britain amid fears that the U.S. is an unreliable ally. The recent row over Ukraine’s constrained access to the Starlink satellite system has exacerbated such concerns.

Early suggestions indicate the government will take a broad definition — in a potential boost for multinational defense giants. Rupert Pearce, the Ministry of Defence’s National Armaments Director, told a recent industry event that, from his perspective, French defense company Thales, which has a headquarters in the U.K., “is a British company.”

6) Will Healey move further on AI and hybrid defenses?

Ahead of the budget, Healey’s Treasury announced a series of AI-specific policies with potential defense applications.

These include £165 million for AI-driven detection and surveillance of biological threats — a move first teased by the boss of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service.

The government will also put £60 million into its Sovereign AI fund to invest in British tech companies, including autonomous systems, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.

Watch to see whether the chancellor waves around more promises of boosting British resilience to malign actors on Wednesday.

7) Will Donald Trump even notice?

Britain’s comparatively slow progress on defense spending has already caught the eye of the Trump administration.

Warren Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., warned earlier this year that Britain must make “sustained investment” in defense, rather than focusing on “other spending priorities,” and warned against “backloading” defense spending to a later date. 

A lack of a meaningful movement on defense spending — or at least eye-catching claims from opposition parties that Healey has fumbled it — could grab the attention of Trump’s team this time around. The timing is tricky: the Pentagon is currently undertaking a review of American military assets stationed in mainland Europe and the U.K.

BERLIN — As she was climbing the ranks of far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) a decade ago, Alice Weidel privately denounced one of her party’s most influential figures for using racist arguments and Nazi-era language, and sought to have him expelled.

Years later, she praised his leadership, said a bid to ban him from the party was “exaggerated” and that he was suitable for a federal cabinet position.

That striking reversal emerges from a massive leak of internal AfD communications, including emails in which Weidel condemned Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, and warned that extremists were driving away mainstream conservative voters.

The revelations come from more than 420,000 emails and roughly 48,000 documents released by hackers this week, providing a rare glimpse inside Germany’s largest far-right party. An anonymous spokesperson for the hackers told Die Zeit the attack was not “politically” motivated “in the sense that [they] support another party,” but that they published the allegedly stolen material to promote “transparency and public accountability.”

The AfD confirmed the breach, saying hackers had attacked a hosting provider in late September. It condemned the leak as “an attack on the German party system and therefore on democracy itself.”

WELT, which, like POLITICO, is part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, examined emails from one of Weidel’s accounts between 2015 and 2017, when she was a relatively junior figure in the party’s leadership.

Asked by WELT to explain the contrast between her warnings at the time and her present position, Weidel declined to comment through a spokesperson.

A spokesperson for Höcke did not respond to a request for comment sent by POLITICO on Saturday.

‘Deeply problematic’

The messages seen by WELT show a politician deeply alarmed by the growing influence of Höcke, who championed an ethnically defined German nationalism drawing on ideas associated with the Nazi era.

In October 2015, Weidel warned colleagues that the party’s proximity to Pegida, an anti-Islam street movement, and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (now known as The Homeland) was alienating the conservative voters it needed to attract.

“In the west we are losing the mainstream conservative electorate completely through our proximity to Pegida, and to the NPD in the east,” she wrote.

Weidel also strongly pushed back on a speech from Höcke that same year, where he contrasted a “life-affirming African expansionary type” with a “self-negating European placeholder type,”

“This is deeply problematic, because the reasoning here is racial. It is fundamentally wrong,” she wrote to the AfD’s federal executive board. “And please, spare me the usual ‘that’s-not-how-it-was-meant.’ I can’t hear it any more.”

In another message, she warned that extremists were deliberately blurring the boundary between the AfD and neo-Nazi politics, driving mainstream conservatives away “in horror.”

She also feared that Höcke’s rhetoric could bring the party under scrutiny by Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, its domestic intelligence service monitoring threats to the constitutional order.

“Höcke’s statements alone, and the use of the term Volksgemeinschaft” — the Nazi-era concept of an ethnic national community — “are enough to land the AfD in that report,” she wrote, referring to the intelligence service’s annual assessment. “Some in our party seem in a hurry to drive the AfD, deliberately or not, into oblivion.”

In May 2025, the agency classified the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation”, citing, among other things, an exclusionary concept of the German nation. The classification, which grants authorities broader surveillance powers, was provisionally suspended by a court in Cologne last February.

‘Wake up, for once’

The leak also features emails about a speech Höcke gave in January 2017 to the AfD’s youth wing, attacking Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance.

Höcke described Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “memorial of shame,” criticized the country’s efforts to confront its Nazi past and demanded a “180-degree turn in the politics of memory.”

Weidel herself brought a motion to expel him from the AfD.

The motion, obtained by WELT, accused Höcke of using “vocabulary from Adolf Hitler” and endorsing the “Führerprinzip” — the Nazi doctrine of absolute leadership authority. It described him as displaying an “affinity in essence with National Socialism.”

In an internal message, Weidel urged colleagues to recognize the implications of Höcke’s language. “Wake up, for once,” she wrote, warning of the “explosive force of the double meanings” in his speech.

As Weidel prepared to seek the party’s nomination as lead candidate for the 2017 federal election, the leaked correspondence shows that she blocked the recording of her own motion against Höcke in the minutes of a party leadership meeting, arguing that further controversy would damage the party.

Höcke subsequently acknowledged that his speech had been a mistake and asked the leadership to withdraw the move against him.

Weidel publicly welcomed his letter as a “positive signal” and called for an end to the infighting.

Within weeks, she had secured her nomination as the AfD’s lead candidate. Asked whether she would campaign alongside Höcke, she replied: “Yes, of course. We are two parts of one party.”

Indeed, the emails suggest that Weidel’s private misgivings had not entirely disappeared. In May 2017, she condemned an AfD election poster featuring a pregnant woman and the slogan “‘New Germans?’ We’ll make our own” as “an NPD poster,” in a reference to the neo-Nazi party.

Today, Weidel no longer publicly criticizes Höcke. She has praised his leadership in Thuringia and even suggested him for a federal cabinet position.

“We get along very well and we got to know each other over the years,” she told BILD in a 2025 interview. When she was asked whether Höcke was suitable for a federal cabinet position, she simply replied: “Yes.”

When asked in February 2025 about the 2017 expulsion proceedings against him that were backed by Weidel, Höcke called it “old news.”

“We got to know each other and came to appreciate each other. Alice Weidel was the right lead candidate and did a top job,” Höcke told WELT at the time.

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PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has instructed local authorities to ban protests on Saturday except those organized by unions, he said Thursday.

Any request to “protest” or “regroup” made by people “who have no legitimacy to do so” will be “refused,” Macron said after a security meeting with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and intelligence services.

The aim, he added, is to maintain public order and “protect businesses” after last week’s turmoil in France.

Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, while incidents of vandalism and looting affected thousands of businesses and public buildings on the sidelines of the protests.

Calls for a fresh round of protests have already begun to emerge online, raising the possibility of a protest movement that becomes a weekly occurrence, as was the case during the 2018-2019 Yellow Vest movement.

“The president believes that six months before a presidential election, debate should take place more in TV studios, in newspapers, and ultimately by the choice at the ballot box,” a person close to the French president said.

Trade unions usually hold talks with local authorities ahead of planned demonstrations. For Saturday, authorities may offer “alternative routes” to ensure maximum security, Macron announced.

He added that he will chair a defense council Friday and announce “new decisions” afterward.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said elite tactical police units and a military unit normally deployed on French soil for counterterrorism operations would also be mobilized this weekend.

The government has been accused of mismanaging last week’s protests by significantly underestimating the number of demonstrators and consequently failing to deploy enough police to prevent criminal acts on the sidelines.

A protest organized by a major trade union Saturday in Paris has been approved, French media reported, while all protests in the area including Lyon, one of the country’s biggest cities, have been banned.