Joseph de Weck

Germany is asking itself whether it can continue to trust France if the far-right Marine Le Pen is elected president next spring. But that is the wrong question.

The nuclear question is the key one for European defense integration. The good news is that the Europeans seem ready to tackle it.

In the new geopolitical situation, German public opinion is changing fast, leaving old military and fiscal taboos behind. Germans could even be convinced of EU debt issuance to finance a European defense build-up, a DGAP-Forsa poll shows.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the German public is fiscally conservative and hostile to easing the constitutional debt brake. However, a new poll suggests that a majority of Germans, including supporters of the center-right CDU/CSU, want the debt brake to be changed to allow for higher levels of investment.

The new Assemblée Nationale’s most important task is to adopt an electoral system based on proportional representation. Only then can France’s transition from a presidential to a parliamentary democracy succeed and the far right be kept in check.