BERLIN — Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, is a social democrat in a government led by conservatives, and the man now responsible for revamping and expanding the armed forces in a country that has been allergic to militarization for 80 years since instigating two world wars.

His party is in free fall, scoring its lowest vote share since 1887 in federal elections earlier this year. The administration in which he serves has seen its approval rating tumble to 25 percent. At 65, he is blunt and a bit rough around the jowls, at one point declaring it’s time for Germany to become a “grown-up country.”

And yet in survey after survey, after nearly three years in the job, Pistorius is far and away Germany’s most popular politician.

The enduring appeal of Germany’s gruff defense chief is perhaps the most potent illustration of the contradictions that have put Germany and the European Union in a quandary. A nation and a continent that have defined themselves since World War II as a peace project now face an urgent imperative to arm and defend themselves against a growing Russian threat. It is a challenge they are struggling to meet.

Russia’s aggression and President Donald Trump’s demands that Europe take responsibility for its own security have led to a remarkable shift in public perception of the continent’s needs. But the precarious position of Germany — where the military remains small, weak and underprepared — raises doubts about Pistorius’s ability to muster the political will and broad national support to impose fundamental change.

“Germans want to be like Switzerland: economically successful, but as politically neutral as possible,” said Sigmar Gabriel, the former longtime leader of Pistorius’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), who served as vice chancellor and foreign minister in the 2010s. “We’re not ready to seriously consider war again.” Pistorius’s push for remilitarization, he said, will “force us Germans to be clear about where we really stand in Europe and the world.”

A fierce debate over reinstating compulsory military service highlights Pistorius’s challenge. The country is still 80,000 active-duty soldiers short of the 260,000 it aims to have in the next decade, not to mention tens of thousands of reservists. To get there, Pistorius has tried to walk a careful line between his party’s opposition to conscription and the reality that the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, is unlikely to reach sufficient force levels through voluntary enlistment.

When Pistorius introduced a proposal that relied on voluntary recruitment, it was blocked by Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which leads the governing coalition. Last month, the coalition presented a revised plan that included provisions for a draft lottery — only for Pistorius to object.

Pistorius declined to be interviewed for this article. A spokesman said the minister was “very busy due to the current security policy situation.”

Pistorius’s friends and colleagues attribute his popularity to his candor — a willingness to speak unpleasant truths about the inadequate state of Germany’s military and the enormous infusion of cash and personnel required to be ready to defend the country and the continent.

“He’s not one of those people who constantly spout technocratic jargon, but rather someone who people understand,” said Gabriel, a friend of Pistorius since they got their start in state politics together in the early 1990s. Gabriel added, “And you get the impression that he genuinely believes what he says.”

Still, straight talk will only get Pistorius so far. He’s now serving in his second administration — he was the lone cabinet holdover from the broadly unpopular SPD-led Olaf Scholz government. Eventually, Pistorius will be judged on the results of his attempts to strengthen the Bundeswehr. So far, those efforts have come nowhere close to the government’s targets.

The Forsa Institute, a leading political polling firm, regularly asks Germans whether they feel they’re “in good hands” under various politicians. In the latest survey, from October, Pistorius scored an average rating of 58, on a scale from zero to 100. No other national politician scored above 43. Merz eked out 35.

“He has consistently remained unchallenged at the top of every ranking,” said Manfred Güllner, Forsa’s founder and director. Pistorius is the most popular German politician since Angela Merkel, said Güllner, who couldn’t think of a defense minister this beloved since Helmut Schmidt more than 50 years ago.

Rolf Mützenich, who led the SPD in the parliament from 2019 until earlier this year, attributed Pistorius’s status as the most popular German politician partly to a lack of competition — the country is not exactly full of dynamic public figures. But he warned that Pistorius has “a very volatile relationship” with the populace.

“I’ll tell you quite frankly, I don’t envy politicians who enjoy high popularity,” Mützenich said. “This often leads to a downfall.”

Germany’s most popular politician

If you put the most influential leaders of the SPD from the past 20 years in a room and threw a dart at random, there’s a good chance of hearing a yelp in a Lower Saxony accent.

Pistorius grew up in the small Lower Saxony city of Osnabrück, where his mother served on the city council and as an SPD member of the state parliament. His first job in politics was in the administration of Lower Saxony Minister-President Gerhard Schröder, who served as chancellor from 1998 to 2005. At the time, Gabriel was a member of the Lower Saxony Parliament. (Schröder’s fourth wife, Doris Schröder-Köpf, was later in a long-term relationship with Pistorius; she’s now in the state parliament.)

In a party increasingly divided between war-skeptical progressives and defense-oriented moderates, it was clear where Pistorius and Gabriel stood. “We belonged to a group that people today would call the right wing of the Social Democrats,” Gabriel said, before correcting himself: “‘Centrists’ is maybe better.”

Pistorius was later elected mayor of Osnabrück and appointed state minister of the interior and sports by Lower Saxony Minister-President Stephan Weil.

“He was always someone who was very popular, yet remained clear on his principles,” Weil said, noting his “rare combination of authority and approachability.” “Boris Pistorius very convincingly embodies a strong state,” he said. “Yet everyone can easily imagine having a beer with him.”

As Pistorius was overseeing Lower Saxony’s security offices and youth soccer leagues, Germany was undergoing major changes. Three days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Scholz announced a “Zeitenwende,” or turning point. He secured a 100 billion euro ($115 billion) special fund for defense, which has since been massively boosted by an exemption of defense spending from Germany’s “debt brake” that typically limits government borrowing.

The money was there; the personnel were not. The military had too few service members and weak leadership. In January 2023, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht resigned after barely a year in office, a tenure characterized by minor scandals and efforts to aid Ukraine that were seen as comically inadequate. After the Russian invasion, Lambrecht offered Ukraine 5,000 helmets, a gesture Kyiv’s mayor dismissed as a “joke,” asking, “What kind of support will Germany send next, pillows?”

So Scholz turned to Pistorius, a relatively unknown state bureaucrat whose military experience was largely limited to his compulsory service in the 1980s.

Gabriel said he was “surprised” when Scholz chose Pistorius, who had previously run against him for party chairman. “Scholz had a reputation for only hiring people whose loyalty he was absolutely certain of,” Gabriel said, not “good, independent people.”

Pistorius set to work bolstering Germany’s defense capabilities. It was time, he said, for Germany to become “the backbone of deterrence and collective defense in Europe.”

Pistorius was a forceful supporter of Ukraine — too forceful, according to the left wing of his party. His approval ratings soared as Germans rallied around a military buildup in the face of Russian aggression.

Last fall, not long after Joe Biden dropped his U.S. presidential reelection bid, Scholz faced pressure to step aside in favor of the far more popular Pistorius. The defense minister was coy about a run for chancellor, telling reporters, “In politics, you should never rule anything out.” He added, “The only thing I can definitely rule out is that I’ll become pope.”

Scholz stayed in the race, and the SPD cratered to 16.4 percent of the vote, well behind the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Merz took over as chancellor, and his coalition opted to leave Pistorius in place as the government accelerated the military buildup and committed to higher NATO spending targets.

For all the stir over Pistorius’s “war readiness” comment, however, by all accounts, the German military is nowhere close — lacking not only soldiers but also the weapons, equipment and expertise to fight a war. Germany’s heavy industry is beginning to shift toward defense production, but it’s not clear that it can retool sufficiently or quickly enough.

Looming over it all is the matter of recruitment.

With much of his party adamantly opposed to a military draft, Pistorius presented legislation in August that relied on voluntary recruitment. Merz expressed skepticism, saying, “I suspect it won’t remain voluntary alone.” Markus Söder, leader of the state of Bavaria and head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Merz’s CDU, said there was “no way around conscription.” The CDU and CSU postponed the bill’s introduction, leading Pistorius to slam his coalition partners as “negligent.”

Last month, the parliamentary coalition introduced a revised plan — to institute a draft lottery if voluntary efforts fell short. Pistorius, furious, blocked it.

Norbert Röttgen, the CDU deputy chairman in parliament, complained to the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, “In over 30 years, I have never experienced a federal minister blatantly torpedoing an important legislative process within his own area of ​​responsibility and plunging his own parliamentary group into chaos.”

The new military law is set to come into effect on Jan. 1, but its final shape remains unclear, with the intra-coalition conflict still unresolved. Polls show that around 6 in 10 Germans support conscription if voluntary recruitment proves insufficient. But most people between 18 and 29 — those likeliest to be drafted — are against it.

Ralf Stegner, a member of parliament and former SPD deputy chairman who’s aligned with the party’s left wing, said Pistorius’s popularity numbers are deceptive, because “conservative Social Democrats” tend to have high overall favorability rating by sitting at the political center but don’t necessarily have the support of most SPD voters.

“If you ask the people who vote for the SPD how they find his concept of [war-readiness], I would offer you a bet: You would hardly get double digits,” he said.

As one of the few German politicians with positive favorability, Pistorius has been floated as a future candidate for chancellor, potentially in the scheduled 2029 election — or sooner, if the governing coalition collapses.

The German government has tended to swing between the center left and the center right, suggesting the SPD’s turn could come next. But these aren’t normal times: The AfD is surging, the mainstream parties are doing all they can to keep the far right out of power and the SPD is struggling to find its constituency amid divisions that Pistorius has helped expose.

Asked if Pistorius, his friend of 35 years, is interested in becoming chancellor, Gabriel said no.

“I think he knows that he has to be successful in this job, and that the probability of the SPD providing the next chancellor is quite small,” Gabriel said. “So I don’t think he’s concerned with such questions.”