Of course the wrongs are shared, but the list of disputes is growing. cellIt is going so badly that Paris and Berlin cancel at the last moment an appointment that neither of them had missed for 20 years: the Franco-German Council of Ministers, initially scheduled for Wednesday, October 26 in Fontainebleau. The meeting is postponed to January, if by then everyone has patched things up. Because no one is fooled, it’s not just about scheduling problems. The two partners have real fundamental differences.
The icing on the cake is at the end of September when the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, unexpectedly releases his 200 billion euro plan to help his businesses and households cope with inflation. The Germans are obviously delighted, but everyone is stunned. Because such massive aid, drawn up without consultation, while some European friends around you are well in debt and well in the mess, it is still not very united. It is all the less so since Berlin never misses an opportunity to teach its neighbors a lesson in terms of budgetary rigour. It is perceived as “Do as I say, not as I do“.
On energy, there is a very specific point on which Paris and Berlin oppose each other almost every day, and which will be discussed today in Brussels at the Council of 27, and that is the price of the gas used to produce electricity. Spain and Portugal were able to cap prices, France would like us to do the same throughout Europe. Except that it gives pimples to Olaf Scholz… artificially lowering the price of gas, he says, it encourages people to consume more, it’s the end of energy sobriety. And above all, the big suppliers like Qatar or Norway will sell their goods elsewhere.
In terms of defence, you have two major industrial projects emblematic of Franco-German cooperation which are bogged down: the tank of the future and the Scaf, the aircraft of the future supposed to replace the rafales and the eurofighters in 2040… are not about to see them leave the factories.
But what really angered Paris was the anti-missile and anti-aircraft defense system that Berlin wants to equip itself with in case things go really wrong with Russia. 14 NATO countries have joined this project of “shield of the European sky” which would be built from German, American, even Israeli material. Exit France, which has bet everything on its Mamba ground-to-air system.
It was the war in Ukraine that accentuated all these disagreements: a war that shifted the center of gravity of the European Union. It is in the East that everything is played out, in Poland, in the Baltic States, in all the countries exposed to the Russian threat. Germany today looks towards them much more than towards France. Even if we should not underestimate either the fact that if the Germans give the impression of going it alone, it is also because it is already so difficult to reach an agreement within the coalition , between the Democrats, the Greens and the Liberals… that they no longer necessarily have time to think about their French partner.