The German government prior to 24 September 2017 elections. The results of the elections were inconclusive and a new government has yet to be formed as of the publication of this article. Bernd von Jutrczenka/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.After Emmanuel Macron’s election in France, many (including myself) claimed that this signalled a revival of the Franco-German alliance and a renewed impetus for Europe’s process of top-down economic and political integration – a fact that was claimed by most commentators and politicians, beholden as they are to the Europeanist narrative, to be an unambiguously positive development.
Among the allegedly ‘overdue’ reforms that were said to be on the table was the creation of a pseudo-‘fiscal union’ backed by a (meagre) ‘euro budget’, along with the creation of a ‘European finance minister’, the centre-points of Macron’s plans to ‘re-found the EU’ – a proposal that raises a number of very worrying issues from both political and economic standpoints, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.
The integrationists’ (unwarranted) optimism, however, was short-lived. The result of the German elections, which saw the surge of two rabidly anti-integrationist parties, the right-wing FDP and extreme right AfD; the recent collapse of coalition talks between Merkel’s CDU, the FDP and the Greens, which most likely means an interim government for weeks if not months, possibly leading to new elections (which polls show would bring roughly the same result as the September election); and the growing restlessness in Germany towards the 13-year-long rule of Macron’s partner in reform Angela Merkel, means that any plans that Merkel and Macron may have sketched out behind the scenes to further integrate policies at the European level are now, almost certainly, dead in the water. Thus, even the sorry excuse for a fiscal union proposed by Macron is now off the table, according to most commentators.
