(Paris) After the display of disputes, the attempt to relaunch: Emmanuel Macron receives Olaf Scholz on Sunday in Paris to display a certain unity found, on the occasion of the 60e solemn anniversary of the reconciliation treaty between Germany and France.
After a ceremony at the Sorbonne at 11 a.m. (5 a.m. Eastern time), the French president and the German chancellor will meet at midday at the Elysée Palace with a Franco-German council of ministers.
In October, this annual meeting had to be postponed due to disagreements on a series of key subjects, from energy to defence. Result, the meeting between the first two powers of the European Union will this time be scrutinized closely to detect their degree of agreement.
The date of the reunion is highly symbolic: sixty years to the day after the signing of the Élysée Treaty by Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, which “marked the end of decades, if not centuries, of fierce rivalry and bloody wars”, write the two leaders in a column published by the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sunday newspaper.
While the war has returned to the continent for eleven months, Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron have affirmed their desire that “Europe becomes even more sovereign”, by investing more in defense and by adopting “a strategy strengthening European industrial competitiveness”.
France warns against a “deindustrialisation” if the EU does not respond in a muscular way, with substantial funding, to the massive American plan of subsidies for renewable energies, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In unison with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Thursday in Barcelona, the French president hopes to rally the German chancellor to his cause. A German government source predicts “an agreement”, “even if the starting points are different”.
“Not a romantic love”
The two neighbors must also try to agree on European reforms to stem the surge in energy prices linked in particular to the war in Ukraine, and put forward joint projects in terms of innovation. A train ticket designed to encourage young people to travel between the two countries will also be launched.
In terms of defence, while the Future Air Combat System (FAS) has made progress recently, missile defense remains a stumbling block: Berlin is promoting a shield project including an Israeli component to which 14 European countries want to join, while that Paris is working on its own system, with Italy, in the name of Europe’s “strategic autonomy”.
The two leaders could discuss the advisability of sending heavy tanks to Kyiv – which comes up against Berlin’s reluctance to deliver its Leopard tanks.
“Let’s be on the initiative”, launched on Saturday the deputy of the French presidential party Benjamin Haddad, advocating the sending by France of a “limited number of Leclerc tanks to create a dynamic”.
What to give food for thought to the observers who mocked the breakdown of the Franco-German engine, often considered essential to the progress of the EU?
At the Élysée as at the chancellery, we refuse in any case to dramatize the crisis within the tandem.
A French diplomatic source notes that the government now refrains from speaking of a Franco-German “couple”, a term in a register that is too emotional. “It’s not a romantic love, but a real political responsibility,” says a German diplomatic source.
It is therefore with realism that the two allies approach this new phase, even if a scent of incomprehension has floated between them since Olaf Scholz succeeded Angela Merkel at the end of 2021, each annoyed by the initiatives taken by the other without prior consultation.
The Chancellor and the President display polar opposite temperaments, which complicate this special relationship where personal ties often make the difference.
“For the Germans, Macron is a Frenchman as they imagine them, he talks a lot, loves the verb,” notes Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, diplomatic adviser to Jacques Chirac in 2002-2007.
“Scholz is at first sight a cold man, it is as if it pained him to have to speak, he thinks three times before acting”, says for his part Joachim Bitterlich, adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl from 1987 to 1998.
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