Due to the riots that are setting France ablaze, the French president decided on Saturday 1er July to cancel his trip across the Rhine, which was to start this Sunday. The decision was announced in the afternoon after several hours of hesitation and a telephone conversation with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president. “Given the internal situation”Mr. Macron explained “that he wished to be able to stay in France for the next few days”. The head of state was to stay in Germany until Tuesday, passing through Ludswigsburg, Berlin and Dresden.
The cancellation of this visit, which was devoted to the celebration of the sixty years of the Elysée Treaty, the Franco-German friendship pact, should not arrange relations between two countries. Sixteen months after the start of the war in Ukraine, these are at a standstill, particularly in terms of defense and security. kyiv’s allies may have put forward their unity, but the question of Ukraine’s accession to NATO is a new subject of misunderstanding between Paris and Berlin. Two weeks before the Alliance summit in Vilnius (Lithuania), on July 11 and 12, France moved closer to the positions defended by Poland and the Baltic countries, at the risk of distancing itself from Germany.
Mr. Scholz and his team became aware of the French change of footing during the recent summit of the Weimar triangle, on June 12 at the Elysée, in the presence of the Polish President, Andrzej Duda. “The meeting was more like a kind of brainstorming, led by Macron, where the closeness of sight between Paris and Warsaw was obvious”, observes a diplomatic source. A few hours earlier, the Head of State had convened a defense council to influence the French position and thus send a signal of support to kyiv, while the Ukrainian counter-offensive is proving to be laborious.
A certain annoyance
In April 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel opposed together a rapid entry of Ukraine into the Alliance against the advice of the United States of George W. Bush. During his first mandate, Mr. Macron had remained on this line, even suggesting to kyiv, a few days before the Russian invasion of February 2022, to give up this NATO perspective in order to spare Moscow. Without taking up the term himself, the French president had gone so far as to cast doubt on a possible “finlandization” of Ukraine, in reference to Finland’s neutral status, stemming from the Cold War. A notion that quickly became obsolete with the choice made by Helsinki, in the spring of 2022, to finally join the Atlantic Alliance, which has been done since April.
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