The latest crisis in the uneasy French-German relationship was accelerated by Trump's decision to stop Germany's comfortable and decades-old free-riding on trade and security issues, writes Michael Ivanovitch.
That was a restatement of Merkel's earlier view that Europe had to take its fate in its own hands. But her latest rallying cry was part of a campaign for the European parliamentary elections, where the Euro-skeptics are projected to win a third of the popular vote.
That has set the stage for an intractable French-German confrontation because Macron now has to compose with a rising wave of French Euro-skeptics and anti-German forces spanning the far-right and the left political spectrum, with a few nationalist groups in between. Some of them are even calling on Macron to resign because his election campaign platform on European ideas is getting less public support than the Euro-skeptics' strong advocacy of a nation state that can stand up to Germany.
Germany is angry, worried and confused about the course ahead, but its populists still poll at only about 13%. France is very different: From left to far right and the shifting middle ground, Euro-skeptics account for nearly half of the French electorate. In the ongoing six-month social unrest, a low-polling president and his government are in a political minefield.
Macron's desperate attempt to firmly and irrevocably anchor the French volatile body politic into the EU has been denied by German opposition to his proposals of re-founding the European project of economic and political union. Macron is now adrift and forced by populists into an open-ended and dangerous confrontation with Germany.
The old belief that the ill-fated French-German couple would always fix Europe's problems has lived; the entire European project is currently listing in uncharted waters.
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