Why the Franco-German engine that powered the EU is now almost kaput

As they confront a marauding Trump, trade tensions with China and their own upheavals, the bloc’s two biggest countries are at a crossroads

“When France and Germany advance, all Europe advances. When they don’t, it grinds to a halt” was how former French president Jacques Chirac put it almost a quarter of a century ago at one of the periodic love-ins between the EU’s two biggest member states.

So what would Chirac, who died in 2019, make of the current condition of the famed Franco-German engine which, since the bloc’s inception, has powered so much of the postwar European project? It looks not so much faltering as comprehensively bust.