There is a crisis between Germany and France – Putin is happy that online blackmail is becoming a huge problem – and the war in Ukraine is making everything worse

Two weeks ago, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz showed how to deal with a difficult guest: when Hungarian problem politician Viktor Orban Scholz visited in Berlin, there was not even a press conference afterwards. Now that Scholz himself traveled to Macron in Paris, he was of course the problem politician himself. In any case, Macron gave the German the Orban treatment and canceled a joint press conference outright.

The episode shows how bad German-French relations are now. Arms policy, energy policy, economy, even European policy: there is no consensus anywhere. A bilateral ministerial meeting scheduled for this week had to be hastily cancelled.

Macron delivered the climax at the summit of EU heads of state and government last Thursday. The Frenchman warned the world public that Scholz would go into “isolation” with his lonely attitude in Europe. So now the relaxation exercise with a three-hour meal in the “Salle des Portraits” in the Elysee Palace. The two then spoke privately for 20 minutes with the aim of smoothing things out personally.

Afterwards, the German side said that everything was fine. They spoke “in a very cooperative manner” and very intensively, “in stark contrast to the media situation surrounding this meeting”. It remains to be seen if the French side saw it that way too.

Is friendship just a “myth”?

But one thing is clear: In France, people are increasingly concerned about the survival of the Franco-German friendship, which French newspapers have increasingly described as a “myth” in comments in recent days. What’s especially devastating is that in Paris, Scholz gives the impression that he just doesn’t care about his French partners.

If there really were a “turn of the tide” and the Franco-German “tandem” collapsed, the balance on the continent would shift even more east than has already happened in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. With their ambivalent, sometimes hesitant attitude at the start of the war, both Berlin and Paris lost a lot of confidence there.

Meanwhile, the Baltic states and Poland seem to rely more on the US than on the old “core Europe” as a reliable partner. This fragmentation is viewed with care in Brussels. The fear is that the feud between Germany and France will eventually play into the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has always been interested in a weak, divided Europe. (aargauerzeitung.ch)