How Macron and Scholz broke the Franco-German alliance at the heart of the EU

It was meant to be a patching up of the notoriously fraught Macron-Scholz relationship, a “reset”, to borrow Hillary Clinton’s expression. 

Last October, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, his wife Britta Ernst and the best part of the Federal Republic’s Cabinet welcomed their French counterparts for a two-day “team building” outing in Hamburg, the north German city where Scholz was First Burgermeister (Mayor) for seven years. 

No fixed agenda – the two leaders and their ministers were supposed to talk AI, among other topics – just an exercise in “working together”. This included a boat trip in the harbour, a walk along the shoreline, and an informal meal of Fischbrötchen (pickled herring sandwiches) at a street counter.

Perhaps predictably, it didn’t go very well. It rained during the boat outing. Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte – wearing improbable Jackie O sunglasses hiding half her face – tried to look as if they enjoyed the fish sarnies, and failed, badly.

The French contingent gave off a “we’re slumming it because we have to” vibe, while the Germans tried valiantly to be hearty. The only fluent German speaker in the French group, Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, divided his time between his German counterpart, Christian Lindner, and the two leaders. 

The final press conference produced well-meaning bromides, with Scholz dutifully talking up the “French-German couple”, an expression that for decades has only been used by the French.

“We have a duty, I would say a moral, political and historic duty, to build common paths forward for our two countries and for our Europe,” Macron said, calling for “new forms of cooperation” and the fostering of a “mutual fascination” between the two countries.

Yet cooperation requires agreement and on major issues, the two European powerhouses have not been seeing eye to eye. There were three major points of contention that were expected to be thrashed out at the Hamburg meeting. 

Firstly, EU energy prices, which France wants to remain low to reflect her domestic nuclear capacities. Secondly, on investigating possible unfair competition from China on electric cars, something which Scholz opposes. 

And finally, the vexed question of whether Germany will buy American aircraft and weapons systems rather than European (read French) ones. On these three issues, no agreements were forthcoming. Only warm words.

This was six months ago, and if anything, the désamour has widened.

Macron set noses out of joint across the EU when he last month raised the idea of sending European troops into Ukraine to beat back Russia’s advances. The suggestion earned a public rebuke from Scholz, who said definitively: “There will be no ground troops, no soldiers on Ukrainian soil sent there by European countries or Nato states.”

Only three weeks ago, at a press conference in Sweden where he was signing a mutual military cooperation treaty, German defence minister Boris Pistorius looked like he’d swallowed a lemon as he was told of Macron’s call for Ukraine’s allies “not to be cowards” in an obvious dig at Germany.

“We don’t need really, from my perspective at least, discussions about boots on the ground or having more courage or less courage,” Pistorius retorted to the assembled press while his Swedish counterpart Pål Jonson stood by. “This is something which does not really help solve the issues we have when it comes to helping Ukraine.”

Franco-German relations, long the driving force in the European project, are at a low ebb. The French economist Jacques Regniez thinks the malaise dates back to the start of the war in Ukraine and the “shock to the system” it meant for the German economic model.

“When the Germans get angsty, their reaction is to immediately focus on their own interests first.” He points out that Scholz’s uneasy coalition also came to power almost at the same time as the Russian attack.

Yet the fraying relations between the two countries can also be traced back to the uneasy relations between the two men leading them. Macron and Scholz have frequently butted heads, with their contrasting views and styles making them fraught allies.

“This... is symptomatic of deep flaws in the Franco-German relationship, even if, visibly, there is still a desire to work together, and to strengthen ties,” Jeanette Süß, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, told Le Parisien newspaper.

The tension between the two leaders could not come at a worse time: a strong working relationship between Macron and Scholz is crucial to not just the future of Ukraine but also greater Europe.

A French source in Brussels warns: “If France and Germany cannot agree on aid to Ukraine, it will be catastrophic. Macron and Scholz have never been able to tame each other, but they need to send a positive message to the rest of Europe and overcome their personal difficulties.”

Macron admired and in some ways was even in awe of Angela Merkel – her political longevity and her diplomatic instincts, which enabled her to deal successively with four French presidents of widely different temperaments, fascinated him.

However, the French president has been deeply disappointed in her successor.

France’s presidential system allows the president far more powers than the German system, including control of the army and French foreign policy.

That is a far cry from the regional and parliamentary constraints over the Chancellor in Germany.

However, the feeling in Paris is that Scholz is not averse to playing up these restrictions as a way to simply refuse to consider French views and interests.

Even when Merkel found herself at the head of an unstable “grand coalition” government, Macron could understand her coping strategies. He himself, while not ruling an alliance of deeply diverging parties, lost the parliamentary majority required to oil the wheels of a proper Fifth Republic regime in 2022.

Differences of opinion between the two men abound. 

Scholz has strong anti-nuclear and pacifist leanings, inherited from his formative years on the hard left of the Juso, the Socialist Youth, in the early 1980s.

He belonged to the “Better Red Than Dead/Atomkraft, nein danke” generation, which rejected nuclear power, civil or military. Germany has been phasing out power plants for years.

Macron, meanwhile, has advocated for a nuclear “renaissance”, promising to build up to 14 new nuclear reactors by 2050.

Scholz marched against the deployment of Pershing missiles in Germany, demanding Germany leave Nato. In 1984, as a Juso leader, he appeared on East German State television, with Egon Krenz, then East Germany’s leader. (Scholz has since mentioned his “detox” from extreme opinions.)

Macron, while initially reluctant to challenge Russia in Ukraine, is today far more strident.

The two men have clashed in public on multiple occasions, always hastily arranging a photoshoot afterwards to insist they are actually on good terms.

Yet tensions are ratcheting up as the war in Ukraine drags on.

“Emmanuel Macron has made a spectacular two-year journey from apparent dove to leading hawk since February 2022,” says Mujtaba Rahman, the Europe Director for the Eurasia Group, a leading think tank. 

The French president evolved “from would-be Putin intermediary to implacable Putin foe”. He has gone from saying “‘Don’t humiliate Russia’ (2022), to ‘Russia must be defeated’ (2023) to today’s war leader,” notes Rahman.

To some, his casual suggestion that Europe may send troops to Ukraine was mostly histrionics: le Président, supposedly performing his greatest part. Macron’s personal style gives plenty of ammunition to his critics, as evidenced by the latest official pictures showing him sweating, unshaven, gloves on, in his boxing gym.

This is the kind of picture Scholz would never dream of posing for (during his recent Middle East tour, he barely let himself be snapped on his morning run in Aqaba).

But many Macron critics, until now unsparing in their commentaries, salute both the change on Ukraine and the pictures themselves.

Nathalie Vogel, a German academic, Russia expert and research fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, says: “Macron is sending a message Putin will understand. We may joke about his endless bare-chested pictures on horseback, with polar bears, in uniform: it’s the language of Russian communication. 

“Macron is answering the dismissive, contemptuous tweets by Medvedev writing he’d be too afraid to come to Kyiv.”

Macron is also pushing back against what is seen in Paris as wilful denial of resources to Ukraine. Berlin was slow to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine and is now resisting sending Taurus long-range missiles.

There was anger in Paris when the Kiel Institute, a German think tank, compared the amount of arms and equipment sent by Germany (€17bn worth) and by France (€900m to €2bn depending on how you count).

“The provoking Kiel release aimed to camouflage Olaf Scholz’s flat refusal to send Taurus long-range missiles to Ukraine,” says Norbert Röttgen, a Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) MP and until three years ago the head of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee. 

“Chancellor Scholz still believes that Germany should not be perceived as an aggressor by Russia. It was the same with Leopard tanks. Because of our delays the Ukrainian offensive was crucially stalled. Ukrainians died.”

Röttgen believes Scholz suffers from a fatal flaw of timidity. He believes Scholz is unable to realise “that all of us in the West will be more vulnerable if Ukraine loses, or even if it has to make major compromises with Russia.”

Röttgen’s – and CDU leader Friedrich Merz’s – assessment now match Macron’s own conviction, but it is not likely to soften Scholz’s attitude. Scholz is locked in a Liberal-Green-SDP coalition whose well-documented discord could at any moment trigger a snap election before the set 2025 date. The polls are not encouraging.

“Often, depending on whom you ask within the German government, you can get three different answers. And Scholz is incapable of arbitrating,” says a Paris source.

No coincidence then that Germany’s public opinion so far supports not sending Taurus missiles to Ukraine. Scholz has no mandate to do much more than listen.

The sputtering of the “French-German engine” that has led Europe from the days of Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer’s EEC was in many ways predictable for years. It has little to do with the respective political families of the two countries’ leaders but more the passage of time.

In fact, differing political opinions have in the past led to some of the most fruitful relationships between the two countries.

“History shows the best French-German relations took place between a president and a chancellor where each was from a different party,” notes Vogel. “The most emblematic by far were François Mitterrand the socialist and Helmut Kohl the Christian Democrat.”

Both lived through the Second World War and shared a long-term vision. Even when they disagreed, as on reunification, then on Kohl’s political choice on Deutschemark/Ostmark parity, “there was a deep connection”, says Vogel.

Before them, in less momentous times, the Gaullist heir Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the socialist Helmut Schmidt got along very well personally, despite coming from very different backgrounds. Both had to work together to keep Europe’s economy afloat during the two oil crunches of 1973 and 1978. 

Kohl’s socialist successor Gerhard Schröder also had a good relationship with Jacques Chirac.

Disruption started with Nicolas Sarkozy’s election – Merkel found the new French president so alien that her staff prepared a briefing package that included clips from Louis de Funès comedies and a presentation on Le Grand Vizir Iznogoud, a comic created by the author of Astérix about a hyper-ambitious medieval vizier trying to oust his Caliph and rule in his place. (Anyone preparing to work in a French corporate environment should read Iznogoud to realise what they’re letting themselves in for.) 

It is said that Merkel did not get any of the jokes; but her relationship with Sarkozy endured, give or take a few unkind Sarkozy quips at her inability to resist second helpings of French cheese at state dinners after announcing she was on a diet.

It was Sarkozy, after all, who took France back into Nato’s integrated command, against serious pushback from a part of his own party.

François Hollande, who had the least understanding of Germany of any French president of the Republic, was often seen as hapless on the international scene. Yet he showed up Germany in 2014 by cancelling the delivery of two French Mistral helicopter carrier boats, after Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas, at a cost to France of €450m. 

His disagreements with Germany had to do with the swelling of the French debt, in effect trying to get it subsidised by the ECB.

Still, there was no serious clash between Hollande and Merkel. However, by that point the famous Franco-German alliance was slowly losing its importance to many. Some of this was simply generational – with a younger cabinet, including one 1977-born Macron, E. – the underlying post-war reasons for France and Germany to reconcile were lost in the mists of time.

Others had to do with France’s previous inability to accept the rebalancing of the EU towards the east, which favoured Germany. Famously, Jacques Chirac in 2003 contemptuously dismissed the decision of new EU members Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to join the US-led coalition for the Iraq war.

“When you are a new member in a club, you should know better than to rock the boat at once. That’s not very well behaved. They’ve missed a good occasion to shut up.”

Twenty years later, in May 2023 in Bratislava, Macron made a point to address his audience by reversing Chirac’s blunder.

Speaking at the annual GlobSec conference on his conversion to total Ukraine support, he said: “We have missed occasions to listen to you [on Russia’s aggression].”

But Macron’s statement was also a dig at Scholz, whom Baltic, Eastern and Central Europeans see as being too passive in the face of Russian aggression. (Estonians, for instance, see Putin’s announcement that he put their Prime Minister Kaja Kallas on a wanted list as a clear warning of conquest, promising war on their former colony.)

Recently scathing of the French president on the subject, Eastern Europeans now begin to see him as a major ally. Their defence chiefs are calling for urgent action within Europe to protect the Continent amid fears an emboldened Putin won’t stop at Ukraine.

Once upon a time, France and Germany were the two Continental allies: their partnership underpinned European unity, security and economic strength for decades.

There was always jockeying between the two – Charles de Gaulle had a vision of a French-led Europe in which Germany, neither a nuclear power nor a permanent member of the Security Council, would ride her coattails – yet this friendly rivalry was part of the dynamism that powered the Continent.

The relationship between the two countries – and the men running them – is now different.

“They’ve been malfunctioning from the start, and now there is actual hate between them,” says Vogel.

With the Russian threat looming to the East and Ukraine in need, Macron and Scholz must find a way to work together – and fast – for the sake of Europe.