Our new Chancellor Angela Merkel has already announced that the axis Paris-Berlin-Moscow will be a thing of the past once she formally assumes her new office. If the French continue with their self-destructive course that also is highly damaging for us, things might even go considerably further. ‘Divorce’ might not the be the wrong term for it.
Unfortunately it won’t happen like this:
“We get the kids and and the house, and you, Cherie, can go sleep in your burnt-out car”.
It would be short and sweet, but the chances that it would go like this are nil. A man can dream though, can’t he?
Germany doesn’t have to divorce France, it could take it over instead.
Seriously – who’d want to stop that? (Okay, we might be a bit concerned about Germans with nukes, but give them to the US and everything would be cool.)
Just don’t screw with Disneyland Paris.
I think that’s been tried but various people came along and liberated them
Divorce is one thing, but let’s not have them throwing dishes at each other like last century.
Let’s hope the divorce/separation puts an end to the senseless agriculture subsidies. With budgets under strain in all industrialized world, an end to subsidies would be equivalent to tax cuts to future generations.
Die Zeit has a commentary on the integration of Turkish guest workers in Germany, apropos of the riots in France. In a delicious bit of irony, it is called “Französische Verhältnisse verhindern”–“Avoiding French Conditions”. The irony is that “angelsächsische Verhältnisse”–“Anglo-Saxon conditions” is the code-word in Germany for the evils of capitalism and (relatively) free markets. “Angelsächsische Verhältnisse” are the great bogey-man of the German left. The choice of words is surely not accidental. Die französischen Verhältnisse are of course the alienated immigrants living in the banlieus.
The French/German alliance was somewhat of a throwback to the older ways of Europe. It was not the sort of multi-generational alliance we have become used to in the modern world, it was more of a tentative and temporary association entered into for specific, short-term goals.
It does say something disturbing about France’s politics that France’s center-right party seems a more comfortable fit for Germany’s SPD than Germany’s CDU/SDU.