One of the worst kept secrets in Brussels is that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel don’t exactly hit it off. The German chancellor is even-tempered, precise, methodical. The French president is passionate, impulsive and "an unguided human missile", to quote one diplomat who has seen him in action amd whose jaw has only just started to return to its normal position.

The areas of disagreement between Merkel and Sarkozy, the EU’s most important pair, start with monetary and exchange rate policy. He is scornful of the European Central Bank’s anti-inflation emphasis, but she dislikes his jabs at the ECB’s independence. They end with Turkey, where Sarkozy flatly opposes Turkish entry into the EU and Merkel, though not personally in favour, believes the EU should honour its pledge to Turkey to continue membership talks.

Still, it would be unwise to assume that Merkel and Sarkozy can’t achieve results together when they really want something. It turns out, for example, that this oddest of couples cooked up the deal whereby Felipe González, the former Spanish prime minister, was chosen last week to lead the "reflection group" that will study the EU’s future up to 2020-2030.

The reflection group is Sarkozy’s pet project, but up until Friday’s EU summit in Brussels it was not entirely clear who was going to chair it. Some EU ambassadors swore as late as Wednesday that no names had been officially proposed to them.

However, according to those in the know, Sarkozy and Merkel made contact at the start of last week. After running through a list of possible candidates, they settled on González, who governed Spain from 1982 to 1996.

There was, alas, one slight problem. In their enthusiasm to show that the French-German motor, the traditional driver of EU integration, was functioning as well as ever, Merkel and Sarkozy forgot to tell José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s current prime minister, in advance about their choice. All things considered, Zapatero took it well. Perhaps, like the rest of us, he knew in his heart that it didn’t matter a bean who got the job.

December 19th, 2007 in French-German relations | Permalink