Angela Merkel is helping Nicolas Sarkozy in his bid to win the French presidential elections. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union, is in campaigning mode as though it was fighting a state election back home in Germany. Should we condemn this as undue interference in the French electoral process? Absolutely not.
I consider the arrival of partisan party politics in Franco-German relations as one of the more welcome developments in the eurozone for a long time. In the past the quality of bilateral relations was largely determined by the chemistry between leaders, who often came from different ends of the political spectrum. Think of Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Or Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.
The eurozone crisis has changed all this: bilateral relations have become more party political. The reason is that important policy decisions have shifted from the national to the eurozone level. Take the fiscal compact, recently signed by European Union leaders, most of whom are from the centre-right. The compact was Ms Merkel’s idea; Mr Sarkozy strongly supports it. But François Hollande, the French Socialist presidential candidate, says that, if elected, he will renegotiate it.