In the blurry, paparazzi-style photograph, the most important couple in Europe are snuggled up on the bed of a luxury hotel, wearing pyjamas.
“François” has an arm draped tenderly around “Angela’s” shoulder. She stares demurely at the croissant that his pudgy fingers direct towards her mouth. A pretzel is poised on her thigh.
"France-Germany. Ich Liebe Dich (moi non plus)" is the bilingual cover story of this weekend's Le Monde magazine. Zeit Magazin, which co-produced the special issue, chose another spoof photo with the same actors playing Angela Merkel and François Hollande.
On Zeit's cover, an inebriated-looking "Angela" lolls on a pile of cushions, wrapped in fur, with "François" hovering behind her. "How do you say 'Is this love' in French?" is the title.
The Zeit team found dozens of "Angela" lookalikes, while Le Monde struggled to find a man who resembled Hollande.
“Come on! We thought you had a ‘normal’ president!” the Germans teased their French colleagues.
Another photo shows “Angela” and “François” throwing tomatoes at a portrait of US president Barack Obama, doubtless prompted by US phone taps.
"The result of this photo session will shock some people but amuse others," says an explanatory page in Le Monde.
“The goal is to de-dramatise this essential relationship.”
The two magazines wanted “to do something funny and sexy – that is to say the opposite of people’s idea of the Franco- German relationship”.
In addition to articles on an ageing feminist who is "the Simone de Beauvoir of Germany", a French actor who is unknown in France but famous in Germany, and Berliners' attachment to their French cultural centre, the issue contains two pages of statistics that confirm many stereotypes.
Vive la différence
The average Frenchman spends 28 minutes more at table each day than the average German. A Frenchman drinks 54 litres of wine annually; a German 20.2 litres. But a German drinks 107.2 litres of beer, compared to 30 litres for a Frenchman. There are 136 st- rike days per 1,000 workers in France; 17 per 1,000 Germans.
The main article, “Hollande- Merkel; the Marriage of Rea- son”, reviews their relationship over the past 18 months. They got off to a rocky start, because Hollande had called for the defeat of Merkel at a German socialist party (SPD) conference in December 2011. Merkel did not believe Hollande could defeat Sarkozy, and was surprised by his election.
The “Franco-German couple” is so crucial that newly elected French presidents and German chancellors begin their terms in office with a trip to the other’s capital. Hollande arrived two hours late for dinner in Berlin, after lightning struck his aircraft. “Mr President, I hear you consulted the SPD before you came to see me?” Merkel asked.
“Madam Chancellor, I have a lot in common with the SPD, why deny it?” Hollande replied.
“But you are chancellor and I am president now. You are my working partner.”
Merkel and Hollande know their “marriage” must last at least until May 2017. Yet it took them eight months to break the ice, last January, at a brasserie in Berlin. Merkel pulled Hollande aside. “We know each other now. We can call each other by our first names and say ‘tu’,” she said.
Over dinner, Merkel regaled Hollande with her mockery of European leaders, including Herman Van Rompuy and José Manuel Barroso.
Bad patch
The relationship hit a bad patch in May, when a French socialist party draft text mentioned "the selfish intransigence of Chancellor Merkel".
Hollande had earlier spoken of “friendly tension” with Germany. He rang Merkel to say: “It wasn’t my doing. That’s what political parties are like.”
The pair decided to try to reverse the media image of two leaders with nothing in common. Yet despite their best efforts – a visit to the Louvre’s exhibition on German painting, followed by a presentation of a joint project for Europe – this Franco-German couple shows none of the emotion that united Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac.
"The most important thing for us is the reliability of our relationship, not its intimacy," Hollande told Le Monde.
