Olaf Scholz did not speak about the subject for a long time after Emmanuel Macron dissolved France's Assemblée Nationale on the evening of the June 9 European elections. Now, he has. "I'm concerned about the elections that are going to take place in France, and I'll say it clearly: I hope that parties other than [Marine] Le Pen's will win," said the German Social Democrat chancellor on the ARD television channel, on Sunday, June 23.
In Berlin, the hypothesis of a French government led by the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party has been causing immense concern. "The RN is deeply Germanophobic. Its coming to power would be a catastrophe for cooperation between France and Germany," said Nils Schmid, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Social Democratic (SPD) party's group in the Bundestag and co-chairman of the French-German Parliamentary Assembly (AFPA/DFPV).
"In Germany, many people fear that a far-right victory in France would plunge relations between our two countries into their most serious crisis since the Second World War," agreed Tobias Bütow, secretary general of the French-German Youth Office (OFAJ). In the Bundestag, where she has been a member since 2021 after 15 years in the European Parliament, Christian Democrat Inge Grässle (CDU) is one of the lawmakers who knows France best. Now, she is in total disarray. "The two parties that will carry the most weight in the next Assemblée Nationale will undoubtedly be the Rassemblement National, on the far right, and La France Insoumise [LFI, radical left], on the far left. Both hate Germany, both are enemies of Europe, and both have extremely worrying economic programs. Whether one or the other has the most elected representatives, the French-German engine, which is already not running very well, will enter into an extremely serious crisis," she asserted, referring to the bilateral relationship that is seen as driving Europe.
Whatever the outcome of France's snap legislative elections, one thing is certain: Macron's image in Germany has been severely tarnished, even among those who have long admired him. Such was the case for Free Democratic Party (FDP) MP Sandra Weeser: "Macron has done a lot for Europe, he has put forward many ideas and expressed a real long-term vision. But by announcing this dissolution on the evening of the European elections, he gave the impression of behaving like a child acting on a whim, when for such a weighty decision we would have expected him to remember the old saying that sleeping on it helps."
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