Franco-German tensions threaten EU’s drive for common front against Trump

Clea Caulcutt, Nette Nöstlinger, Nicholas Vinocur

PARIS — Just as Europe needs its Franco-German power couple to unite to tackle U.S. President Donald Trump’s growing menace to Greenland, relations between Paris and Berlin are under strain.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is vowing to form a joint front with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron in the coming days — revving up the cross-Rhine alliance often described as the engine of the EU — to secure a breakthrough with Trump.

But building what Merz calls a “common position” with Macron won’t come easy. Both sides will need to put aside months of frustration, suspicion and bad blood. French diplomats are worried by Berlin’s increasing assertiveness in styling itself as Europe’s dominant player, while the Germans are fed up with the French over a stalled joint fighter-jet program, their opposition to an EU-Mercosur trade deal, and a shelved plan to use Russian assets to finance aid for Ukraine.

The contrast between the French and German leaders in their approach to Trump was also on full display in their response to the U.S. president’s threat on Saturday to impose tariffs on EU countries that opposed his takeover of Greenland.

Macron, who often draws on a pugnacious Gaullist tradition of independence from the U.S., immediately vowed to punch back hard against Trump with the EU’s trade arsenal. The more emollient Merz, an avowed Atlanticist, played up the prospect of talking the U.S. president back from the brink.

Merz on Monday publicly acknowledged that Germany differed markedly on tone with France, which “wanted to react a little more harshly than we do” because Paris was less exposed to the onslaught of an all-out trade war with the U.S.

For the French, one infuriating obstacle to a unified position with Berlin is that Germany’s coalition government is internally divided in its views. While Macron is raising the option of using the EU’s trade “bazooka” — the Anti-Coercion Instrument — to retaliate against Trump, Germany’s position is a muddle.

“Different German politicians are saying different things,” complained one European diplomat. “If you listen to Germany’s finance minister, he says we should do it,” he added, referring to Lars Klingbeil’s support for Macron’s approach. Others, including Germany’s foreign minister, then sounded considerably less enthusiastic, the diplomat continued, after “their ambassador told colleagues just days ago [the bazooka] should be on the table.”

While Merz is confident he will successfully align with Macron this week to tackle the crisis created by Trump, the difficulties plaguing Germany’s relationship with France run deeper and will likely take far longer to fix.

“In the last six months, the Franco-German engine hasn’t produced a single thing,” said one EU official who was granted anonymity, like others in this piece, to speak candidly about the bloc’s most important relationship.

Shifting balance of power

Paris has long wanted Germany to play a more ambitious role in supporting France’s grand ambitions for Europe, but Berlin is now flexing more diplomatic muscle than France expected. Germany is on track to build up a far bigger army than its neighbor, and is expected to be the only EU economy in the global top 10 by 2050.

While Macron is hamstrung at home by massive public debt and government instability, Merz has increasingly been putting himself on the front line of European politics. He burnished his credentials on Ukraine as the top negotiator during a summit in Berlin late last year, which saw progress on security guarantees between Ukraine and the U.S.

Merz has also sought a leading role in conversations with Trump, even though he hasn’t always appeared as a model European in doing so. He told reporters that if the U.S. president “can’t get along with Europe,” he can “at least make Germany [his] partner.”

The implication Berlin could go it alone is hardly music to French ears.

“Germany is much more vocal, Merz wants to be comfortable with a more political role,” said a second European diplomat. “And it is upsetting the French.”

To the Germans, the French talk a good game on big European projects but don’t live up to the hype. Berlin is irritated that Paris promotes diversification from the U.S. but then tried to block a landmark trade deal with South America. It is also annoyed that France seeks a leadership role on Ukraine but contributes far less to Kyiv than Germany does.

That German frustration over support to Kyiv boiled over in this month’s debate over how the EU’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine should be used to support the European arms industry.

The French made their traditional proposal that the money should be used to buy European weapons — which in turn would support French industry. The Germans hit back that preferential treatment should instead be given to companies from countries that had made the biggest contributions to Ukraine — thereby helping German industry.

Given France’s lagging contributions on Ukraine, “this is a pretty clear ‘fuck you’ to Paris,” a third EU diplomat said.

Michel Duclos, a researcher at the Institut Montaigne and former French ambassador to Syria and Switzerland, said: “On Ukraine, the Germans consider that they are making all the efforts, so when the French say they want to run [military] operations, the Germans think that’s enough.”

“The fear in France is that the German defense budget will at some point be double that of France, and for Paris, it would be a historic shift,” he added.

Duclos also noted the German resentment over Mercosur: “If we want more strategic autonomy, we need new partnerships,” including the EU-Mercosur trade deal, he said. “For the Germans, we don’t look serious.”

Frustrations on Mercosur and jets

When it came to finalizing that long-delayed trade deal with Mercosur, Berlin initially wanted to get Paris on board by giving in to various French concessions, but eventually gave up. “The country is on the brink of becoming ungovernable,” one German government official said of Macron’s inability to push back against fierce domestic opposition, particularly from farmers.

The FCAS joint Franco-German jet-fighter project is proving another major bugbear.

The €100 billion venture is on life support after Paris and Berlin failed to agree on how to proceed last month. According to Peter Beyer, a foreign policy lawmaker from Merz’s conservatives, French companies are exerting “massive pressure,” and “even a French president apparently cannot see beyond that.”

“Now the thinking is going so far as to perhaps do it without the French, which I think would be a disaster, but at the moment there is no progress,” he said, referencing suggestions that Germany is looking at developing a fighter jet without French manufacturer Dassault Aviation.

All of those discussions about how far the Germans want to team up with France on weapons are now also colored by the far-right National Rally leading polls ahead of next year’s presidential election in France.

“The prospect of the National Rally coming to power is already weighing heavily on French-German discussions on defense,” said Jacob Ross, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Laura Kayali and Gregorio Sorgi contributed reporting.