Four months before the federal elections, which she will no longer stand for, Angela Merkel will chair her last Franco-German Council of Ministers this afternoon.
Over sixteen years in power marked by these annual meetings with Presidents Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and therefore Macron, this will be his fifteenth participation today.
The pandemic, which had led to the cancellation of the 2020 vintage, again nails the ministerial delegations to the ground.
The all-digital 2021 edition will make the event lose its dramaturgy.
Which rather suits the host of the summit, the chancellor fleeing pathos.
This virtual meeting will once again be an opportunity, as Ministers Scholz and Lemaire already did last week, to highlight the latest successes of the Franco-German duo: the European recovery fund and the take-off of the project. of the SCAF combat aircraft. "
It will be a question of showing that the momentum initiated will not be suspended by the two successive deadlines, the German and then French elections", the French side
explains.
The fundamental differences should be passed over in silence on this symbolic day, the product of what the French president explained by the expression of
“two mental universes
” in Marion Van Renterghem's book “
It was Merkel”
.
Asked about Franco-German friendship, the Chancellor summed it up recently during a conference organized by the WDR channel: “
French and German politicians get up in the morning with two different visions of the world (... ).
And despite these differences in cultural permeations, these different state structures, this friendship is characterized by the desire to find a common angle of approach ”
.
Ecology, a bone of contention
One of the four components of the Council of Ministers will be devoted to the green transition. "
These are not two galaxies that separate Berlin and Paris on this issue but two planets,
" said Frank Baasner, director of the Franco-German institute in Ludwigsburg. “
There is a non-aggression pact. Germany does not mention the French nuclear fleet and France does not speak publicly about coal pollution
”. The underground conflict sometimes comes to the surface, as illustrated by a discord in Brussels in which the two countries took the lead of opposing groups. France wants to obtain the classification of nuclear among clean energies, a heresy in the eyes of the Germans.
“
We were told, when I was little
,” says Green MP Franziska Brantner, who grew up 8km from the old Fessenheim plant,
that if the west wind blew in the event of a disaster we would all be dead. Beyond the risk, nuclear energy is only economically profitable with billions of taxpayers. We have a responsibility to invest these billions in technologies that can be replicated around the world to fight global warming. This is impossible with nuclear power, uranium being a rare mineral, and plutonium posing enormous proliferation risks.
"
No chance that environmentalists, approached to participate in the next government in Berlin, give an inch on the closing date of the last German atomic power stations, set at the end of 2022. "It is at the heart of their program", comments Frank Baasner. "
There is this widespread idea among the German Greens that technology cannot do everything, that the forces of nature are sometimes more powerful and that you have to know how to accept not being able to control everything
".
In order to compensate for the decline in its energy production, Germany is diversifying its sources of supply.
As evidenced by the absolute desire to complete the Nord Stream II gas pipeline and the inauguration last week of the Nord Link electric cable.
The bartering of its surplus electricity produced by wind power for hydroelectric power produced by Norway will allow it to decarbonize its balance sheet.
And to depend a little less on the importation of French nuclear electricity.
David Philippot
