Berlin watches France's eurosceptic upheaval with despair

The victory of the far-right National Front (FN) in the French elections for the European Parliament is almost as much of a shock in Berlin as it is in Paris.

Even though the result was in line with projections, Germans can scarcely believe what is happening across the Rhine. For decades Paris and Berlin have worked together in running the EU - and for decades they have coped with mutual stresses and strains.

But now the French half of the relationship is in trouble - and the German partner is both sharing the pain and wondering what dangers the populist surge in France poses for the rest of the EU.

Finance minister Wolfgang Schauble was passionate in his condemnation of the FN, which came first in Sunday's poll with 25 per cent of the vote.

For the 71-year-old Francophile, it was personal. Mr Schauble's first foreign language was French and he grew up with the post-1945 reconstruction of Europe and has dedicated his political career to the EU.

Speaking at a conference, he condemned the FN as "fascist". And he warned that its success was a challenge not just for France - but for the rest of Europe, including Germany.

"It is a problem not only for our friends in France. We have to think what mistakes we have made that a quarter of the electorate [in France] voted not for a rightwing party but for a fascist extremist party," he said. "That is a disaster."

In more subdued tones befitting her style, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, repeated her commitment to support Paris, saying Berlin had the "utmost interest in France being successful".

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Mr Hollande has long been ambivalent about German plans for further eurozone integration. The triumph of the FN, with its demands for an end to the eurozone and the return of power to national capitals, will further constrain his room for manoeuvre.

On a personal level, the conservative Ms Merkel is no close political companion to the socialist in the Elysee Palace. For all her frequent arguments with his Gaullist predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, she enjoyed a better working relationship with the UMP leader. Still, she has done her duty by Mr Hollande, inviting him, for example, just before the European polls to visit her rural constituency in Stralsund, north east Germany.

With populist parties also doing well elsewhere, notably in the UK, some Germans are feeling the arrival of an existential threat to the political order that has sustained them through a prosperous postwar period.

"The grand coalition in Berlin stands before its trickiest task . . . to stabilise the faltering EU . . . [and] protect the work of six decades," Torsten Krauel, a German political commentator, wrote in Die Welt newspaper.

Ms Merkel's instinctive reaction was to focus on the economy. "The question is how we win back the voters," she said after the poll results. "I think an approach that focuses on competitiveness, growth and jobs is the best response to the disappointment."

Mr Schauble's remedy, as he spelt out this week, is a combination of Ms Merkel's economic proposals with further integration in the eurozone, and some loosening of EU rules for non-eurozone members.

But all this is difficult. Germany and France increasingly represent opposite European poles in the economic debate. While Berlin continues to prize fiscal discipline and competitiveness as the pathway to prosperity France, wants more public investment (much of it paid for by Germany).

As Ms Merkel said after Tuesday's summit: "We agree on the need for growth but we have different opinions as to how to generate growth."

Ms Merkel can take heart from the pro-EU coalition's success in Germany and that of prime minister Matteo Renzi's Democratic Party in Italy.

But for the EU to work, France and Germany had better find a way to narrow their differences. Marine Le Pen, the FN leader, is gaining strength. And, as she made clear this week, her ambition is to take carry her anti-establishment revolution beyond France's borders.

"If through the incompetence and weakness of our leaders Germany has become the economic heart of the European Union," Ms Le Pen said, "then France has been and will be the political heart of Europe."

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