There was a time earlier this century when few politicians in France would dare criticise Germany. The country was the powerhouse of Europe and Angela Merkel was the de facto president of the continent. Today there is political mileage to be had in attacking Germany, and the assaults have increased this year as campaigning intensifies ahead of June’s European elections.

Relations between the two countries are at their lowest ebb in decades

In an interview last week Marion Maréchal, the European candidate for Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, said that as far as Germany is concerned, ‘France is looking more and more like a battered wife who can’t manage to leave her husband… I think France needs to start looking at things differently’.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, has blamed the German automobile industry for bullying the EU into agreeing international trade deals that are detrimental for France’s farmers.

For François-Xavier Bellamy, representing the centre-right Republicans in the European elections, it’s Germany’s short-sighted energy policy – specifically it’s abandonment of nuclear energy – that has weakened France. ‘We need to talk to each other frankly,’ said Bellamy.

There is also discontentment on the left. Indeed, the only political leader in France with a history of criticising Germany is Jean-Luc Melenchon, founder of la France Insoumise. He believes that German capitalism has long exploited the French worker. When Germany was eliminated from the 2018 football World Cup, Melenchon tweeted, ‘Pure joy’.

In his first term as president, Emmanuel Macron might have tried to capitalise on this ‘Germanophobia’ in order to portray himself as the good European. But that was when Merkel was Chancellor and he looked forward to his visits to Berlin. Things are different with Olaf scholz.

On his first full day as president of France in May 2017 Macron flew to the German capital where Merkel lavished praise on the 39-year-old Frenchman. When the pair emerged from a meeting to face reporters, they brimmed with joyful enthusiasm. Merkel said a new chapter had opened in Franco-German relations, and she and Macron would ‘breathe new dynamism’ into the partnership. Seven years later relations between the two countries are at their lowest ebb in decades, and Germany has become a punchbag for French politicians, as well as journalists.

In 2021 one of France’s leading weekly current affairs magazines, Marianne, ran a lengthy feature entitled ‘How Germany has fleeced France’. Inside, it described how for decades their neighbour had exploited them agriculturally, militarily and economically.

Examples were numerous: from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Merkel’s unilateral decision in 2015 to throw open Europe’s borders, to Germany’s refusal in 2012 to agree to a merger between Dutch aerospace conglomerate EADS NV and Britain’s BAE Systems. The French were on board because it would have created the world’s biggest aerospace and defence group; but what might have been good for French business would have been bad for Germany’s, so Merkel pooh-poohed the merger. A few months later war erupted in Ukraine, one consequence of which was a European energy crisis. France pins the blame for most of this crisis on Germany.

As far back as 2007, shortly after Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president, France was warning Germany that it would be a mistake to abandon nuclear energy. Merkel paid no heed. She phased out Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors and then pressurised France to do likewise. And they did, first under Francois Hollande and then Emmanuel Macron.

This policy was halted only after Putin sent his tanks into Ukraine. Recognising his folly, Macron performed a swift U-turn and announced a €100m ‘rebirth’ of France’s nuclear industry. France’s relationship with Germany has not been the same since. They have realised how their neighbour has bullied them this century. Perhaps the differences could have been patched up had the leaders wanted, but the truth is that Macron and Scholz – who replaced Merkel as Chancellor in December 2021 – can’t stand each other.

Last year the German magazine, Stern, ran an article claiming there was a ‘huge crisis’ between Macron and Scholz. The article coincided with Macron’s state visit to Germany, the first by a French president since 2000. But if it was meant to rekindle the romance it failed. The spark has gone.

Fundamentally, it’s a divergence on how Macron and Scholz envision Europe’s future. In one of his first major speeches on becoming president, Macron outlined his ambition for closer European integration to an audience at the Sorbonne in September 2017; he mentioned European ‘sovereignty’ 18 times, in the context of security, industry, agriculture and technology. The USA, said Macron, was in the process of a ‘gradual and inevitable disengagement’ from Europe.

In 2019 Macron said the West was experiencing ‘the brain death of NATO’, comments which earned a rebuke from Merkel. No, she said, the alliance remained ‘indispensable’ and Macron’s ‘sweeping judgements’ were unnecessary.

The election of Joe Biden has not altered Macron’s view that Europe needs what he described in 2023 as greater ‘strategic autonomy’. Lamenting Europe’s default position as ‘America’s followers’, the French president said that approach would result in the EU Members States getting ‘caught up in crises that are not ours’. Macron’s comments were not appreciated by the USA, or Germany, which also bridled at Macron’s boast that he had ‘won the ideological battle on strategic autonomy’.

It was a hollow boast. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strengthened Germany’s reliance on the USA and their decision in 2022 to purchase 35 Lockheed fighter jets angered Paris, which had been developing a Franco-German fighter jet for the future. It was seen by Macron as undermining the tacit agreement between Germany and France that while the former was the economic leader in the partnership, France – the only EU nation with nuclear weapons and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council – was the strategic one. There is also resentment in Paris because it was France who post-war took the initiative in rehabilitating first West Germany and then, after reunification in 1989, Germany.

It hurts and angers Macron, a devout Europhile, that Scholz’s Germany appears to have chosen America over Europe. Germany, however, is part of Nato’s nuclear sharing programme, one of five countries in the alliance to host US nuclear weapons.

In an address to the Bundestag in January this year Macron honoured the memory of Wolfgang Schäuble, the president of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021. Schäuble was a committed Europhile and it was surely not lost on Macron that he died on December 26 last year, a day before the passing of another fervent believer in the European project, the Frenchman Jacques Delors.

Macron spoke in German and concluded his speech with a rallying cry: ‘Long live Europe, long live Germany, long live Franco-German friendship.’ It was Macron at his eloquent best, but few were fooled. ‘Stories of glaring jealousy between Macron and Scholz are legion,’ wrote The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. ‘Paris and Berlin know that their current path is leading them down a blind alley.’

France’s politicians know it, too, just as they know there are votes to be had in bashing their neighbour. These days everyone in France rejoices when the German football team loses.