Perhaps it's the choice of words that reveals the most about this relationship. He never speaks of the Franco-German couple as a matter of principle, says an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron on a gray winter day in Paris. When you do, you automatically end up with categories like fidelity, love, marriage and divorce. In other words, vocabulary that has no place in the relationship between Paris and Berlin.
ANZEIGE
These days, the French are uninterested in romanticizing the relationship. "Emmanuel Macron is a strategist. For the president, joint European action is a geopolitical necessity, not a romantic matter," people say at Élysée Palace, the president's official office.
For years, the Franco-German friendship, this unlikely rapprochement of two nations after two world wars, has been glorified as a kind of love story. As a kind of amour fou between the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl and the Socialist François Mitterrand. Or later, as the delicate bond between Angela Merkel, then Europe's longest-serving politician, and a very young, extremely impatient President Macron. The picture had always been a bit off, but now it doesn't fit at all.
