The leaders of France and Germany warned of the dangers to democracy within their countries and from hostile foreign powers as they marked 35 years of German unification on Friday, October 3.
French President Emmanuel Macron was invited to take part in a ceremony marking the anniversary in the southwestern German city of Saarbruecken, where he described the threat of "a degeneration of our democracies" in a wide-ranging speech.
At the same event German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that "new alliances of autocracies are forming against us" and that "our liberal way of life is under attack, from both outside and within." He said that European countries "must relearn how to defend ourselves" by "deterring our adversaries from further aggression."
Germany has been the second-biggest supplier of aid to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022 and is on high alert for sabotage and other acts of "hybrid warfare" directed from Moscow.
Merz has made it an aim of his government to build up Europe's "strongest conventional army" in response to the Russian threat as well as concerns about US security commitments to Europe under President Donald Trump.
Macron also stressed the importance of Europe becoming "for the first time, a military power" and avoiding the fate of being "happy or unhappy vassals, depending on the choices of those we rely on." He also took aim at social media giants "controlled either by major American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies." He accused them of allowing "a democratic public space to emerge where people are all masked, anonymous, where the rule is to insult others if one wants to be popular."
The French head of state called on Europeans to mount a "resurgence" to "rebuild a 21st-century democracy." Otherwise Europe would risk becoming "a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury."
France and Germany have both seen a rise in popularity of political parties on the far right and far left in recent years, at the expense of the centrist blocs that had previously predominated.