Fail better – the Samuel Beckett life philosophy – is a good description of the aspirations and realities of the Franco-German relationship.
As the Paris-based Irish writer knew from personal wartime experience, reconciliation between France and Germany and close bilateral ties was a miracle given the physical and psychological wounds left by centuries of war. After cycles of function and dysfunction in the previous decades, the Franco-German relationship – a motor of European unification – appears to be stuttering once more. And this comes ahead of January’s 60th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty, the foundation of modern ties.
That Olaf Scholz travels to Paris for a working lunch on Wednesday, rather than the planned bilateral council of ministers, tells its own story.
Bilateral disagreements are many and growing – in particular on key energy and defence issue. Germans were furious when Macron warned Berlin not to “isolate itself” in a debate over an EU-wide gas price gap – even after Berlin officials agreed to explore the issue. Meanwhile Paris fears a ¤200 billion German stimulus package in response to high energy prices could distort the single market.
Shooting the breeze with trailblazer chemists
Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica
Tactical analysis: Clare got their numbers right, but it’s hard to measure sheer magic
Artist and shepherd Orla Barry: ‘Breeding animals is like making an artwork. You’re putting certain animals together’
Back in Berlin, officials were not impressed that a German-backed plan to build a new “Midcat” overland gas pipeline from the Iberian peninsula to Northern Europe now appears to have been trumped by”BarMar”, a French-backed undersea pipeline linking Barcelona to Marseille.
After the departure of Angela Merkel as German chancellor, it was always going to take time for a new Franco-German duo to bed in. French officials say that unprecedented pressures over China and Russia’s war on Ukraine require a “strategic redefinition of Franco-German relations”.
Last August in Prague Scholz sketched out a “watershed” German blueprint for the EU – on coordinated defence, harmonised fiscal rules and majority voting. Now that Germany is recalibrating its place in Europe, Paris wants a watershed in its bilateral relationship with Berlin.