France and Germany: clouds darken at the dawn of a new EU era

Welcome back. The leadership team that the EU is assembling to run the show in Brussels for the next five years will have plenty on its plate. In an unstable world that in some geographical and policy areas threatens the EU’s core interests and values, the incoming team’s priorities will include security and defence, business competitiveness, climate change and enlargement to the east.

At present 27 countries belong to the club. But the EU’s machinery tends to operate most effectively when France and Germany act together to provide strategic guidance and impetus.

This time, and in my view more acutely than at the start of previous EU political cycles, Germany and France are beset with intensifying domestic troubles that may weaken their ability to play their traditional role. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

Ring out the old, ring in the (mostly) new

In some respects, the transition to a new era in Brussels has gone smoothly so far — but a few banana skins may lie ahead.

Ursula von der Leyen will serve a second term as European Commission president after winning a vote in the European parliament more comfortably than had been forecast only a few months ago.

Meanwhile, EU leaders have chosen former Portuguese prime minister António Costa as the next head of the European Council, which unites the 27 heads of state and government, and Estonian premier Kaja Kallas as the bloc’s next foreign policy chief.

These nominations followed European parliament elections whose results, it must be admitted, were open to different interpretations, depending on your political preferences and anxieties. Stefan Lehne, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, put it nicely:

Half the headlines in European media stress the “surge of the radical right”, while the other half offers the comforting message that “the centre is holding”. Both happen to be true. The radical right gained support but still amounts to only 25 per cent of MEPs, and the centrist party groupings . . . easily maintained their majority.

Uncertain political outlook in Paris and Berlin

We should keep in mind that the election results were anything but reassuring in France and Germany. President Emmanuel Macron’s defeat at the hands of the far right led to the political impasse that grips France, now almost two months without a new government.

The question is to what extent the risks surrounding France’s 2027 presidential election will hamper ambitious policy initiatives in Brussels as the new EU leaders settle in.

In Germany, all three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition suffered serious setbacks in the EU elections. More trouble is heading their way in the form of three state elections in eastern Germany: Saxony and Thuringia on Sunday, and Brandenburg on September 22.

The far right is expected to make strong advances, and perhaps come first, in these contests. Meanwhile, the coalition parties face the humiliating possibility that they will win few or even no seats at all in the three state assemblies. (See this useful briefing from the Deutsche Welle broadcaster.)

Is it possible, as David Marsh suggests here, that Scholz’s coalition will give up the ghost even before the Bundestag elections due to take place just over a year from now?

Gender politics and the European parliament

In other respects, the EU’s transition still has some obstacles to overcome. The most pressing is the make-up of von der Leyen’s commission.

She requested that each national government submit two candidate commissioners — one woman and one man — for her to choose from, so that she could assemble a new team balanced in gender. But the majority of states have put forward just one male candidate. In some cases, these are not exactly frontline politicians.

How this will be resolved, I don’t pretend to know. But there are three points worth making.

First, as noted by Alberto Alemanno, a scholar at HEC Paris business school, the way that so many member states have brushed aside von der Leyen’s request “shows an unprecedented level of disrespect by EU governments towards the president-elect”.

Second, politics has become so fragmented and polarised across Europe that many governments have opted to make nominations that may keep the peace at national level, but at the expense of not serving the wider EU interest.

Nothing better illustrates how the EU isn’t a federation but an unusual, hybrid organisation where much national sovereignty is pooled but the centre remains weak and governments often put their own interests first.

Third, there will be uproar in the European parliament. Every commission nominee has to pass a grilling in the assembly, and even if the gender issue is sorted out before these hearings, MEPs will be on the warpath.

In 2019, the assembly rejected three candidates, the most prominent of whom was Sylvie Goulard, a French liberal and close Macron ally.

Something similar can be expected this time. The parliament has a view of itself — slightly delusional, some would say — as the most virtuous of EU institutions, upholding the bloc’s principles when others indulge in grubby deals.

It also loves to show that, though it lacks the full powers of national legislatures (it cannot, for example, initiate laws on its own), it can flex its muscles where it does have rights. One right is to reject proposed commissioners.

Hungary’s strange EU presidency

The likely upshot is that von der Leyen’s commission won’t be truly up and running until November.

In the meantime, the Brussels-based institutions and most national governments are thoroughly fed up with the country that has held the EU’s six-month rotating presidency since July — Hungary.

This is not only because of Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán’s freelance diplomacy, including trips to see Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, when the rotating presidency has no authority to conduct EU foreign policy on its own.

It’s also because of Budapest’s recent announcement that it plans a new fast-track visa system for citizens of eight countries, including Russia and Belarus, to enter Hungary without security checks or other restrictions.

There are obvious security implications for the EU when it is committed to supporting Ukraine with military and financial means in its war of self-defence against Russia.

Time to end unanimity in foreign policy?

The Hungarian problem raises a broader issue. How can the EU conduct a coherent, vigorous foreign policy when one or more member states are out of line, or when conflicts such as the Israel-Hamas war divide the bloc?

In his recent book Europe’s Coming of Age, the Greek scholar Loukas Tsoukalis says:

In a world where the geopolitical tectonic plates are shifting fast and security concerns take over from economic efficiency, in a world where Russian revisionism takes a nasty turn and US unilateralism sometimes turns ugly, the EU has had enormous difficulties in grappling with the reality of power politics.

Tsoukalis proposes a solution. A new EU treaty that removes the need for unanimity in foreign policy appears unlikely, because some governments suspect that such an initiative could fail in national referendums — as happened in 2005 in France and the Netherlands, when voters rejected a proposed EU constitutional treaty.

Instead, Tsoukalis says, “a core group of countries will urgently need to move faster towards a common foreign and defence policy”. France and Germany would naturally have to be part of this core group — and yet they don’t see eye to eye on some important issues, as Joseph de Weck explains here for the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

France and Germany: political strife, economic ills

This brings me back to the domestic troubles of France and Germany.

Some of these are economic in nature. The German economic model, based partly on imports of Russian energy and exports of manufactured goods to China, is in dire need of a radical transformation.

After the news this week that the economy fell into contraction in the second quarter, Carsten Brzeski of ING bank wrote:

“The German economy is currently back where it was a year ago: stuck in stagnation as the growth laggard of the entire Eurozone.”

At the same time, France’s political strife threatens to undo much of the economic progress made over the past 10 years, as Laurence Boone wrote for the FT.

As elsewhere in the Eurozone, high levels of public debt and budgetary constraints are part of the problem, as the European Central Bank has pointed out.

For the EU, the concern is that economic difficulties are stimulating political forces such as the radical left and right in France and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and anti-establishment, Russophile Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany.

These forces will resist the kind of bold step towards a core group of EU foreign policy actors that Tsoukalis recommends. They are also strong enough to influence the policy choices of mainstream parties in areas of vital concern to the EU, such as migration, the bloc’s common budget and climate change.

As the new EU leadership team takes shape in Brussels, it will be essential to keep an eye not just on their activities but on how political events unfold in France and Germany.

More on this topic

Slowly but surely? Unpacking EU energy sanctions against Russia — an analysis by Francesca Batzella for the UK in a Changing Europe think-tank

Tony’s picks of the week

• Turkey’s recent role in mediating talks between Ethiopia and Somalia underscores how Ankara’s influence in Africa has boomed over the past two decades, the FT’s Aanu Adeoye, Adam Samson and Aditi Bhandari report.

• As Washington considers countermeasures to China’s nuclear weapons build-up, it should be aware of how certain measures could unintentionally lead to outcomes that weaken US deterrence, Tong Zhao writes for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.