Chancellor Angela Merkel paid tribute, Thursday, December 3, to Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, this "friend" of Germany, who died the day before at the age of 94 as a result of Covid-19.
Chancellor #Merkel: “With the death of Valéry Giscard d´Estaing, France loses a statesman, Germany a friend and all of us a great European.
I am grateful for the good talks we have had and my thoughts are with his family.
»Pic.twitter.com/nduTRt6INA
- Steffen Seibert (@RegSprecher) December 3, 2020
Germany will have immediately occupied a special place in the heart of the former French president, since he was born there on February 2, 1926, in the city of Koblenz, in the southwest of the country.
His father then held the position of financial director of the French army in the Rhineland, an area occupied since the end of the First World War.
The Second World War would then help forge the relationship, "close and complex" in the words of the daily Die Welt, of VGE with Germany.
Anyone who continued his studies in occupied Paris, before participating in his Liberation in August 1944, will repeatedly tell of having seen a German for the first time "in the sight of a tank", the weekly recalls Thursday. Der Spiegel, who portrayed him as an "aristocrat and modernizer".
In 1994, he could not hold back his tears when he spoke of the common parade that French and German soldiers were going to accomplish together for the first time to celebrate July 14, fifty years after the Liberation.
A special relationship with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt
But it is above all his relations with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, his counterpart at the Ministry of Finance in the mid-1970s, then at the head of the country, which will contribute to the Franco-German rapprochement.
"We mourn Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. He rendered enormous services to Franco-German friendship and had a decisive influence on it, also thanks to his special friendship with Helmut Schmidt", chancellor from 1974 to 1982 , recalled the head of German diplomacy, Heiko Maas.
We are saddened by the death of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
He rendered enormous service to Franco-German friendship and left his mark on it, also through his great friendship with Helmut Schmidt.
We will miss a great Frenchman and a great European.
- Heiko Maas 🇪🇺 (@HeikoMaas) December 3, 2020
Everything seemed to separate the French liberal and his "friend" Helmut Schmidt, Social Democrat from Hamburg.
"I saw a huge cloud of smoke at the end of the corridor. And under this cloud of smoke appeared Helmut Schmidt", recalled in 2013 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing about his first meeting with the former German leader, smoker unrepentant, died in 2015.
"An exemplary Franco-German duo"
Despite their differences, the two men formed an "exemplary Franco-German duo", underlines Der Spiegel.
Together, they "co-founded the European Council and invented the economic summits" of the G5, which later became G7, recalls the daily Die Welt.
They will also have laid the foundations of the European monetary system and launched the European Council, the decision-making body of heads of state and government.
This tandem established a "remarkable Franco-German tradition: the friendship between a conservative and a social democrat", notes the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, hand in hand in Verdun, before Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, opposed to Western intervention in Iraq, will then cultivate this paradox.
This constant report to Germany had a darker end with a sexual harassment complaint filed in May 2020 by a German journalist who accused her of repeatedly touching her buttocks after an interview.
Charges refuted by the former president.
With AFP
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