The Chancellor is criticized in Europe for making important decisions without consultation with his partners. A challenge that reflects on the Franco-German couple, while a lunch between Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz is planned at the Elysée Wednesday.
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“It is not good for Europe or Germany that [the latter] isolates itself,” warned Emmanuel Macron, on October 20, before joining a meeting of heads of state and European government in Brussels. By dropping this sentence twenty-four hours after the cancellation of the Council of Franco-German ministers, scheduled for Wednesday October 26 in Fontainebleau (Seine-et-Marne), the President of the Republic could not mean more clearly than the differences between Paris and Berlin are the symptom, in his eyes, of a much broader problem: Germany’s growing isolation in Europe. An isolation that the Head of State and Chancellor Olaf Scholz will find it difficult to make you forget when finally, on Wednesday, for a simple work lunch at the Elysée.
that this declaration was an immediate objective of flexing Mr. Scholz at the edge of a European Council promising to be particularly difficult, it seems quite obvious. “Macron sought to isolate Berlin and dramatize the situation to move Germany”, judge Sébastien Maillard, director of the Jacques-Delors institute. Retrospectively, the blow was probably not badly played since the German Chancellor finally accepted that a mechanism of ceiling on the price of gas was studied at the community level, which he refused so far. Beyond these tactical considerations, remains the diagnosis: that of a Germany which, by its positions, would be above all concerned with defending its own interests, at the expense of its European partners.
Within the European Union (EU), France is not alone in expressing such grievances. “I hope that Germany understands that we are twenty-seven member states and that if everyone only thinks, it is the community as a whole that will be losing,” worried the Prime Minister of ‘Estonia, Kaja Kallas, on October 20, on the German channel ZDF. “EU’s energy policy should not bend to a diktat from Germany,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki accused two weeks earlier, standing for the 200 billion euros plan announced by Olaf Scholz to alleviate the effects of the rise in gas prices on consumers and businesses. “Germany had already shown its arrogance by teaching others during the financial crisis [of 2008] and that of COVVI-19. Today, this same country uses the formidable force of its economy to mobilize huge means in The only goal to help his own industry, “said Mr. Morawiecki.
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