When we look at each other we are sorry, when we compare ourselves we are consoled, says the saying. Viewed from France, Germany has the opposite effect. She remains for us this over-gifted and over-performing neighbor to whom, for lack of being able to console us for looking at ourselves, we are sorry to compare ourselves. It has been going on for twenty years, since the 2000s when the one nicknamed “the sick man of Europe” became the first European economic power and one of the top five in the world.
Faced with the dropout of France compared to Germany in terms of growth, unemployment rate and public debt, the envious that we are have not ceased to highlight its methods of bad comrade: its wages for a long time kept down, its disproportionate trade surplus, its savings greater than its public investments by obsession with budgetary balance – the famous dogma of the schwarze Null, a budget of “zero or more”, engraved in its Constitution. He was accused of making no effort in the area of defense and of leaving France alone to guarantee, together with Great Britain in the past, the protection of the European Union within NATO. And, above all, he is accused of an energy policy centered on gas and dependent on Russia, whose irresponsibility came to light with Putin’s war in Ukraine.
The recent announcement by the Scholz government to release 200 billion euros to help citizens and businesses weighed down by the energy crisis has caused outrage in France, but also in other EU countries. and in Brussels, which is concerned about distortions of competition in the internal market. “If Germany can afford to borrow 200 billion euros on the markets, other EU member countries cannot,” tweeted European Commissioner Thierry Breton. “I think it is essential, in Europe, that we react together in the face of the energy crisis”, declared the Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire, adding: “Without this, we risk the fragmentation of the eurozone.” After the European turn of Angela Merkel accepting a common indebtedness and a sharing of vaccines, Germany goes back on its own. Are we right to worry?
Germany and France back to back
Franziska Brantner, Green elected representative and Parliamentary State Secretary for Economy and Climate in Olaf Scholz’s government, answered me tit for tat: “Should we Germans be worried, because France and Spain have been capping gas prices for months, and Italy is doing it for oil? Our fault, compared to you, is perhaps that we acted too late. French State aid for compensate for the rise in energy prices protects more companies than German aid does. We could have been shocked by such a distortion of competition, and we were not! German companies are are complaints that prices are not capped, and of the economic advantages that Spain or France derived from it.
And Bam. The tariff shield on gas and electricity applied in France for individuals and small businesses with less than ten employees and less than 2 million in turnover, from October 2021 to the end of 2023, is an amount certainly lower: 100 billion euros, according to Bercy. That is half of the Scholz plan, but which is “proportionate to the size of the German economy”, justifies the Minister of Finance Christian Lindner.
Another criticism of the Germans: having started the tour of the Gulf countries, thus contributing to the rise in the price of hydrocarbons. “Prices were already on the rise last fall, before the war, because Putin had cut deliveries by a third,” Ms Brantner retorts. Russian gas. We are criticized now when we look for gas elsewhere. We should know! Looking for a culprit and accusing each other of helping more, or less, is useless. The only question that should occupy us is is how to accelerate renewables, save more and stop, all together, subsidizing European welfare for the benefit of gas exporters.”
Moral of the story: on this strategic priority issue that energy has become, Europeans must urgently decide not to decide alone. On pain of sinking us all together.