Just as significant, however, is Merz\u2019s second foreign visit, which is set to be with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk \u2014 a meeting that underscores just how much the bloc has changed.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s good reason to believe that the Franco-German \u201cmotor\u201d within the EU will jolt back to life in the Macron-Merz era. The two men agree on many things, from the need to create a \u201csovereign\u201d Europe to the existential obligation to prevent Russia from winning the Ukraine war.<\/p>\n
Moreover, Merz has made it clear that, faced with U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d unilateralism, Germany\u2019s delicate post-war pas de deux with the EU and the U.S. must end, and he has called for \u201cindependence\u201d from Washington.<\/p>\n
All this implies an even closer relationship between Berlin and Brussels \u2014 and, therefore, Paris. All the same, it would be wrong to believe the Macron-Merz partnership can become as powerful and pivotal as the Franco-German partnerships of the past, whether in the Giscard-Schmidt era of the 1970s, or the Mitterrand-Kohl double-act of the 1980s.<\/p>\n
The EU has become larger and more complex. And Merz\u2019s Warsaw visit recognizes the bloc\u2019s multipolarity \u2014 a fact, however belatedly, also accepted by France.<\/p>\n
According to his most senior advisers, one of Merz\u2019s foreign policy aims is to strengthen the so-called triangular \u201cWeimar\u201d relationship between Berlin, Paris and Warsaw \u2014 perhaps through the negotiation of a new treaty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just as significant, however, is Merz\u2019s second foreign visit, which is set to be with Polish Prime Minister…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[1442,6215,7057,32,5898,34,6561,2000,299,805,36,38,1945,11070,1824,28649,1303,7337,7497,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-80810","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-competition","9":"tag-cooperation","10":"tag-defense-budgets","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-donald-tusk","13":"tag-emmanuel-macron","14":"tag-enlargement","15":"tag-eu","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-foreign-policy","18":"tag-france","19":"tag-french-politics","20":"tag-friedrich-merz","21":"tag-german-politics","22":"tag-germany","23":"tag-national-budgets","24":"tag-nuclear-power","25":"tag-olaf-scholz","26":"tag-strategic-autonomy","27":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114464411127818312","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}