Officials in Paris and Berlin are excited about the good relationship incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has with French President Emanuel Macron.
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has finally found the kindred German spirit he’s spent years looking for — and he has Donald Trump to thank.
By vacillating on America’s commitment to NATO and demanding that Europe step up to protect Ukraine against Russia, the U.S. president is upending the security architecture that’s protected Western Europe for the past eight decades.
It’s a geopolitical shock that is pressing incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to revive the long-sputtering Franco-German motor that is supposed to drive the European Union’s economy and chart its political trajectory.
For Macron, relations with Germany have been a perennial frustration. While France has called for the EU to chart its own course militarily and industrially with a policy of “strategic autonomy,” Berlin has been skeptical, not wanting to alienate the U.S., which has been the lodestar of its post-war defense strategy.
Despite Macron’s valiant diplomatic efforts — including delivering a eulogy for former finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble predominantly in German last year — Berlin has not succumbed to his charms on key policy issues, ranging from trade to joint debt.
Now all the old certainties are vanishing fast.
In an astonishing U-turn that signals a watershed in relations, Merz is even expressing interest in Germany being protected by France’s nuclear deterrent. It’s one of the many proposals that the French have been pushing for years but traditionally received a frosty reception across the Rhine.
After years of seemingly disagreeing with Germany on everything during Olaf Scholz’s tenure, France is delighting at the prospect of a German leader who, even before taking office, is moving with urgency to clear a path for his country to invest billions of euros in infrastructure and arms.
“Merz and his entourage have the Franco-German reflex,” France’s minister for European affairs, Benjamin Haddad, told POLITICO. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that we will agree on everything, but that there’s a willingness to move forward together.”
Disagreements between the two sides on hot-button issues like free trade agreements are unlikely to magically disappear, but officials say there’s plenty of common ground to be found, especially on the defense front.
“There has been a change in their perception of the world, which is getting more similar to ours,” said Sylvain Maillard, a centrist French lawmaker and president of the France-Germany friendship committee in the National Assembly.
Bonding over Trump
Merz and Macron were probably always going to get along well. Both are former creatures of the corporate world, though Merz’s career in the private sector — which included stints at white shoe law firm Mayer Brown and on the board of investment firm BlackRock — was much longer than Macron’s time as a banker at Rothschild & Co. They even share an affinity for the German artist Anselm Kiefer.
But without Trump, it’s not clear that the two leaders would’ve gotten off on such good footing.
The incoming German leader is an avowed transatlanticist, yet after his party’s election victory in February he made it clear that the United States, a country he claims to have visited more than 100 times, under Trump is no longer the dependable ally it once was.
Three days later, Merz rushed to Paris for a three-hour dinner with Macron at the Elysée palace during which they discussed — in English — issues ranging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to defense spending and the bloc’s economic challenges. Merz describes himself as “very close” to Macron.
“Merz and Macron have found a common wavelength,” agreed someone close to Merz, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “There are intensive contacts that should lead to a Franco-German agenda, which should begin soon after the new German government has taken up its work.”
That doesn’t mean the two sides have an easy path forward.
Merz will have to overcome Germany’s long-standing allergy to debt to catch up after decades of underspending on defense.
And cash-strapped France has no easy way to reach the defense spending target of more than 3 percent of gross domestic product Macron recently set, so it has floated joint borrowing at the European level as a possible solution — a no-go for Germany so far.
Still, the challenges posed by the Trump administration’s retrenchment from Europe have created what one official close to Macron called an “alignment” between Berlin and Paris.
The crisis, the official said, created “quite powerful Franco-German momentum.”
Joseph de Weck, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute think tank, says Merz is “the best partner Macron has probably seen on the other side of the Rhine in the past seven years.”
It’s no coincidence, de Weck noted, that on Merz’s desk at the CDU headquarters in Berlin there is a black-and-white photo of Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.
“Like Macron, Merz thinks in historical terms, and he might want to see a photo of him and Macron in history books one day,” de Weck said.
