When Angela met Jacques

We enjoyed the latest round of an old rite today when Angela Merkel turned up at the Elysée Palace for the ceremonial renewal of the marriage vows between France and Germany. Jacques Chirac bounded out to meet la chancelière, greeting her with one of his special hand kisses and then a fatherly arm around her shoulder. Chirac was deeply relieved that Merkel observed the rules and made Paris her first port of call before her date with Tony Blair in London tomorrow. The Chancellor, whose pro-Washington leanings have worried Paris, said all the right things about the undying importance of the Berlin-Paris partnership.

So much for the ritual. Everyone, including Chirac, knows that trying times are in store for the axis that has held together more or less since Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle proclaimed the marriage in the Elysee treaty of 1963.

It has always been a bumpy marriage. Chirac quarrelled bitterly with Gerhard Schroder, Merkel's predecessor, at the Nice summit in 2000, but their common interests convinced them to patch up their differences and they became sort of friends. In the early 1980s, Francois Mitterrand had trouble with Helmut Kohl. As a young reporter, I witnessed their first uneasy ice-breaking session over lunch in the Black Forest. The exquisitely cultivated Mitterrand, who had been a wartime prisoner and resistant as well as servant of the Vichy puppet government, came away with the impression that he had just met an archetypal German bumpkin. It took several years for them to win each other's confidence and turn into accomplices in the Franco-German rapprochement. 

The omens are not great this time. France is in the weaker position. Chirac needs Germany to help him help fend off the British-led "liberal" axis that Paris fears is taking over Europe. This means in the short term continued German backing against Tony Blair and his demands for reform of the Common Agriculture Policy. Merkel has every reason to see France, in its present state of nervous breakdown, as a brake on her efforts to pursue German reform and end the US-diagnosed division of Europe into old and new.
   
Chirac wants an ally in France's rear-guard action against European deregulation and globalisation. The two nations certainly have much in common, as Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president, pointed out today. "France and Germany both have excessively weak growth, an unacceptable level of unemployment and the need for modernisation that is indispensable to face up to the tornado of globalisation," said the old quarrelling partner of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. There is a difference in future plans, though. Merkel wants to speed up Germany's already relatively advanced reform, while Chirac wants to slow things down in order to calm France's explosive mood. Unlike the Germans, the French have not yet accepted the need for a painful rebuild of the welfare state. Making things even harder for Chirac, the Socialist opposition has just lurched leftwards towards antique Marxism, pandering to public fears ahead of elections in 2007.

Chemistry counts and on the face of it, Chirac, as a Gaullist, should get on with a Christian Democrat leader better than her Socialist predecessor.  In practice,  he is more of a leftist than many in the SPD. To Chirac's anguish and the amusement of the Paris political classes, the real chemistry is fizzing away between Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister and Chirac's nemesis as well as leader of his UMP party. The pair get on extremely well, using the intimate tu/du in private and public conversation. (Chirac was on stricly "vous" terms with the Chancellor today.)  Sarkozy, a pro-Atlantic thinker who shares Merkel's reform ideas, badly wants to be President in 2007. Merkel will certainly cultivate her relations with cher Jacques, but she will stick close to Nicolas during the final 18 months of France's lame-duck presidency.