France’s former suitor goes cold

Date: 22/04/1999

The arguments at last month's Agenda 2000 summit underlined the growing rift between Germany and France. Tim Jones assesses the main reasons for the deepening cracks in the Bonn-Paris axis

IT IS a re-education." This remark from a French diplomat after the recent EU summit in Berlin revealed the mixture of exasperation and arrogance pervading Paris' corridors of power regarding their new counterparts across the Rhine.

For the first time in two decades, as Germany's parliament meets again in the redesigned Berlin Reichstag, French policy-makers fear that German politicians are starting to question the need for their 'special relationship' with Paris.

Could it be, they wonder, that the Franco-German motor, which has long powered the EU's most ambitious political initiatives, has a carburettor problem?

Seven months into the job, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder continues to depress the French with his reluctance to genuflect before the icons of the Bonn-Paris axis.

For all that his first visit as chancellor-elect was to Paris, Schröder and his aides just do not value the Common Agricultural Policy, economic government and an ever-growing EU budget as his predecessors Helmuts Kohl and Schmidt did.

It was certainly for political effect at home, but Schröder's speech to the Social Democrat faithful, in which he lambasted Kohl for signing up to anything in the name of 'Europe' and complained about "German money being thrown away in Brussels", truly shocked the French establishment.

" Kohl gave some interviews, especially towards the end, when he talked about reducing the German budget contribution, but generally he left that sort of thing to Waigel," said a senior French official.

Former German Finance Minister Theo Waigel was allowed to play the 'bad cop' in search of Bonn's wasted tax-euro while Kohl floated above this grubby world. "He had a much more strategic view of the value of the Franco-German partnership," said the official.

In the early days of Germany's red-green coalition of Socialists and environmentalists, politicians in Paris had high hopes. Socialist Premier Lionel Jospin and his powerful Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn believed they would be able to drive forward a left-wing Union agenda with the new government.

Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine quickly struck up an excellent relationship with his Green counterpart, Joschka Fischer. The former revolutionary impressed the Quai d'Orsay with his unusually (for a politician) enquiring mind and devotion to Kohl's foreign policy goals.

The trouble was that the strongest link of all was with Finance Minister Oskar Lafontaine - SPD chairman and Saarland premier - with a love of all things French and a personal antipathy towards his British counterpart Gordon Brown.

Despite forging close links with the chancellery under Schröder's enforcer Bodo Hombach, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's ambition to wriggle in between the Franco-German coupling was never going to succeed while Lafontaine was in town.

Strauss-Kahn sometimes had to calm Lafontaine's ardour, particularly when it came to annoying the European Central Bank, but the relationship was exceedingly tight: the closest since Waigel and Jean Arthuis, French finance minister under Alain Juppé's ill-fated administration.

However, this cosiness disguised a widening gulf in other policy areas.

Schröder, while charmed by the old Chirac magic in the early days of his chancellorship, is said to have been seared by the experience of watching the May 1998 Brussels euro summit unfolding.

" In Germany, Chirac was portrayed as pushing Kohl around and trying to obtain influence over the euro," said a German diplomat. "The federal chancellor never wants to be seen like that."

Eleven months later, he was. At the summit in Berlin to settle the EU's finances for the next seven years, Chirac forced his colleagues to stay awake all night as he fought to unpick a reform to the CAP agreed only a week earlier.

THE French, of course, see things differently. Diplomats say the long night in Berlin was the direct result of poor German statesmanship. By insisting on pursuing the idea of 'co-financing' CAP subsidies with national cash, Bonn made the French feel persecuted.

" They gave the impression that they had no idea how seriously we took this," said an official. Paris saw the notion as the beginning of the end of the only truly common Union policy.

Eventually, a decision was taken at the highest level to go public with French frustration so that the Germans would realise that this was not a game. Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany openly talked about a crisis in Franco-German relations and threatened a veto.

This is where Schröder is different from Kohl. At a special budget summit in Bonn in February, he backed off from CAP co-financing and acknowledged the strength of Chirac's feelings. But, at the same time, he was anxious to ensure that the British and Spanish did not get the impression that they would be knifed in the back to save the Franco-German axis.

According to diplomats, he was as careful to reassure Blair and Spanish Premier José Maria Aznar respectively over their rebate from the EU budget and regional aid as he was to mollify Chirac.

While personally popular, Schröder was seen as the head of a chaotic coalition full of prima donnas and tax-raising lefties. The sudden and still-unexplained resignation of Lafontaine, followed by Schröder's stuttering first reaction to the crisis at the European Commission, did not help the chancellor's cause. He needed a deal in Berlin, in the words of a Brussels ambassador, "to lay the ghost of Kohl; to make himself a player in Europe".

Stunned by the loss of Lafontaine, the French were relying on Schröder's need for a budget deal at any cost both to press their case and to bring him back into the Paris-Bonn fold. They were disappointed.

Right up until the last minute, the Germans used their presidency of the Union to get their money back: a campaign regarded in Paris as distasteful, even Thatcherite.

Moreover, the French felt it was they who were being asked to pay more to let the Germans pay less, while Blair would be allowed to hang on to his anomalous €3-billion annual rebate even after enlargement - a privilege condemned as "scandalous".

Chirac and Jospin were amazed that the Germans did not even try to stitch up a Franco-German CAP deal to take to Berlin, as they would have done in days gone by.

Chirac and Schröder had met in Paris only five days before the summit, but the chancellor - who wanted to isolate Chirac in Berlin as Blair had failed to do at the euro summit a year earlier - instead insisted that the negotiations should be conducted by all 15 heads of state and government.

Once again, the French president dug in his heels. He managed to water down the CAP reform package, but was so single-minded in this purpose that he lost out in other policy areas.

By allowing Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Sweden to reduce their contributions to the British rebate, he not only re-institutionalised a financial instrument which Paris believes to be iniquitous but he also ended up paying an extra €200 million to Blair.

At the end of May in Toulouse, Schröder, Chirac and Jospin will hold one of their regular bilateral summits where Fischer and Védrine will unveil the results of work carried out by a team of officials into the rénovation of the Franco-German relationship.

By then, perhaps, it will have become clearer whether the party is over, and whether the French political élite will have to operate alone in a hostile world in which the Germans no longer feel it necessary to apologise for the past.

Major feature on the current rift in Franco-German relations.