The French president will not stay in Paris for long. Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his wife Brigitte, will make a state visit from Sunday to Tuesday to Germany in order to mark “the permanence and depth of the Franco-German bond” beyond recurring disputes over Europe, announced Wednesday the Élysée.
This will be the first state visit by a French president to the big neighbor across the Rhine since that of Jacques Chirac in 2000 and the sixth since that of General de Gaulle in 1962.
The trip, initially scheduled for July 2023 but postponed due to riots in France after the death of Nahel, killed by police shooting in Nanterre, is this time “confirmed” despite Emmanuel Macron’s surprise visit to New Caledonia, territory French Pacific in turn hit by violent riots, at the other end of the globe. “The president has planned to take off on Sunday in the middle of the day for Berlin,” underlined a presidential adviser.
A Franco-German Council of Ministers on the program
The head of state will visit Berlin, Dresden in the former GDR and Münster in western Germany at the invitation of President Frank-Walter Steinemeier. The state visit will be followed by a Franco-German Council of Ministers, alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, on Tuesday evening in Meseberg, near Berlin. “We can talk about the vicissitudes of French-German but there is also a permanence”, of “relations between the two peoples, interpersonal, individual” and “this is what this state visit shows”, we summarize at the Élysée.
On Sunday, the president will participate in the democracy festival in Berlin to mark the 75th anniversary of the “Basic Law”, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the same way, Frank-Walter Steinmeier will accompany Emmanuel Macron on June 10 in Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne), the scene of Nazi abuses to the day 80 years ago.
On Monday, the two presidential couples will visit the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, witness to the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. They will be accompanied by French lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld and his German wife Beate, who led a tireless post-war fight for the trial of Nazi criminals and their Vichy accomplices.
Both, who tirelessly tracked down and demarcated the Nazis throughout the world, will also be decorated by Emmanuel Macron in Berlin. They are today controversial for their positions in favor of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, whose commitment they welcome against anti-Semitism, after having long fought the formation of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front , founded by supporters of Vichy.
A speech in front of the Frauenkirche
In Dresden, Emmanuel Macron will deliver a speech on Monday to European youth in front of the Frauenkirche, the city’s emblematic church, reduced to ashes by Allied bombings in 1945 and rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tuesday morning, he will be awarded the Westphalian Peace Prize in Münster, “for his European commitment”, it is emphasized in Paris.
This prize was initially given to him for his dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin in an attempt to prevent and then stop the Russian offensive in Ukraine in 2022. Emmanuel Macron has since broken all contact with the master of the Kremlin, while the military operation continues.