French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will try to relaunch bilateral cooperation, weighed down by a series of disputes, during a working lunch on Wednesday at the Élysée.
“After their exchanges in Berlin on October 3 and ahead of the European Council on October 20, the two leaders will continue their discussion on defence, economy and energy in order to strengthen Franco-German cooperation,” said Tuesday. the Elysee.
“They will come back in particular to the common challenges that our countries will have to face in the decade to come and to the best way to respond to them in a united and united manner,” underlined the French presidency.
European solidarity in the face of soaring energy, nuclear, European arms prices… nothing is going well between the two leading European economies, which are supposed to be the engine of the Union.
So much so that the Franco-German Council of Ministers scheduled for Wednesday in the prestigious setting of the Château de Fontainebleau, near Paris, and which was to be the first for Olaf Scholz, had to be postponed for several weeks.
Berlin is promoting an anti-missile shield project, including an Israeli component, which 14 European countries want to join including Great Britain, the Baltic countries, the Netherlands and even Finland. Denouncing an “arms race” within the continent, Paris remains in the background and defends its own project, with Italy.
Europe’s future combat aircraft, a sea serpent between the two countries, is another sticking point, with the risk that the competing British project, Tempest, will get ahead.
During the last European summit, the two leaders, who met separately, displayed a certain desire for appeasement. Emmanuel Macron felt that this meeting had “made it possible to clarify many things” and that it was “normal” not to always have the same positions.
The president and the chancellor will also discuss Wednesday the “latest developments” of the war in Ukraine, “always in the same spirit of unwavering support” in kyiv, continued the Elysee.
At an international conference devoted to the reconstruction of Ukraine on Tuesday in Berlin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the international community for a financial effort to cover a budget deficit of 38 billion dollars expected next year.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for his part to “start now” this reconstruction, believing that it was “nothing less than creating a new Marshall Plan for the 21st century”.