A lack of consensus within the Franco-German tandem that has been at the core of EU decision-making is causing delays in multiple issues — from financing Ukraine to rules overseeing national budgets.
The negotiation impasse across several high-priority and time-sensitive matters has startled Brussels and other EU capitals, officials from half a dozen states told the Financial Times, and exposed the difficulty of taking decisions without alignment between Paris and Berlin.
The lack of personal chemistry between German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron does not help. “They just don’t seem to get on,” said one person present at recent discussions between the two leaders. “And that’s at the heart of this.”
The problems stem both from significant policy disagreements between Paris and Berlin and the fractious nature of the coalition government in Germany that has made it harder for Scholz to set a clear direction on issues such as energy.
The tensions have been percolating for more than a year.
“Scholz and Macron are both confronting significant domestic challenges, their chemistry isn’t great and the bilateral institutional and senior official links are also quite strained,” said Mujtaba Rahman, Europe managing director at Eurasia Group risk consultancy. “This has aggravated their ability to play nice together in the EU.”
The two leaders will meet several times in October, including at a summit in Spain later this week and an annual bilateral conference that brings together all their ministers in Germany next week. The agenda focuses on technology policy and artificial intelligence, but officials hope to make progress on key issues, perhaps helped by informal interactions, such as a planned boat cruise in Hamburg.
In Brussels, policy decisions that have become bogged down include negotiations on the size of a top-up to the EU’s six-year shared budget, known as the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) — which contains crucial financial support for Ukraine — and an updated version of rules governing how much countries can borrow and spend under the stability and growth pact.
Both issues had been delegated to France and Germany by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, to first find a common position before the rest of the bloc could restart negotiations, three senior EU officials said.
“The two of them just need to sit down in a room together and hash [things] out,” said one of the senior EU officials. “Absent that, it’s pointless for the rest of them trying to find consensus.”
“No it is not working and yes it is worrying,” said another senior EU official. “You can’t get things done if the two of them aren’t seeing the bigger picture.”
The MFF top-up needs to be agreed by the end of the year to meet Ukraine’s 2024 budget needs, a deadline that has taken on additional urgency as a result of the US decision last week to not include support for Kyiv in its new funding bill. The stability and growth pact will come into force in January, updated or not, after being suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A long-awaited reform of the EU electricity market is also bogged down by Paris and Berlin squabbling over nuclear power, which is central to France’s energy policy and which Germany has abandoned as part of its green transition.
Macron has described the Scholz coalition’s opposition to nuclear power as a “historical mistake” given the need to fight climate change.
Laurence Boone, France’s minister of state for Europe, disputed the idea that there was a breakdown between Paris and Berlin, arguing that they shared the “same vision for Europe”, including bolstering economic independence, furthering the green transition and enlarging the bloc to include more countries.
“But there are certain issues where the consensus is harder to find, such as on energy or the new EU budget rules,” she acknowledged. “It’s normal that there is friction here since these are big structural issues that are linked to the competitiveness of our economies. That doesn’t mean at all that the Franco-German motor for Europe is somehow broken down.”
Another French official also noted that Scholz’s coalition, an unprecedented three-party alliance between his Social Democrats, the liberal FDP and Greens, had also often struggled to reach consensus and that, on some issues, there was “German-German disagreement”.
“This is a difficult structure, and that inevitably has an impact on the dossiers,” the person said. “We have to accept the political parameters that exist in Berlin.”
Germany and France also have several bilateral disagreements in addition to the EU issues, including delays to a joint tank program and rival approaches to developing continental air defence systems.
But some officials contended that while finding agreement was proving difficult at the moment, the two countries had a history of finding a way through rough patches and recognising they needed each other to be able to steer the EU.
“The whole point of Europe is to find a negotiation space including French-German conflicts,” said Sven Giegold, state secretary at the German economy ministry, who insisted that relations today were no worse than in previous decades.
He acknowledged that a new aspect of Franco-German tensions was that “so much [is] centred on energy”. And “on energy, of course, there is more contention now than there was in the past — that is true”.
But, Giegold argued: “the list of French-German conflicts in European history is endless and the great thing about Europe is that, in the end, we agree.”
