France and Germany are not only drifting apart in energy policy.

When it comes to immigration and Islam, French society has become increasingly alienated from German society.

This can be seen in the heated debates about national identity in the beginning of the presidential election campaign.

Again and again, amazement about Germany flares up in the French media.

Most recently, the decision of the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, was in the headlines to allow mosques to use the loudspeaker to call the mosques on Fridays.

It was irritated to see how little the cathedral city cares about its Christian identity.

"An election campaign without the word Islam" was the headline of the newspaper Le Parisien and was surprised that immigration policy is apparently not an issue for the upcoming coalition negotiations.

In France, the emotions have not subsided.

The reasons are complex.

The threat posed by Islamism is much more present in everyday life than in Germany.

Soldiers are still patrolling public spaces for anti-terrorism protection.

Every day, trial reporters in the Palais de Justice describe the horror of the terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015.

Minute of silence for Samuel Paty

Remembrance days are a reminder of how many victims Islamist terrorism has claimed.

On Friday all schools observed the murdered teacher Samuel Paty with a minute's silence.

It has been a year since the educator was beheaded by a radicalized Islamist for showing Mohammed cartoons in a class on freedom of expression.

The shock has lingered on and has reduced inhibitions to discuss the interrelationship between integration failure and Islamism.

The perpetrator was an 18-year-old man with Chechen roots whose family was granted political asylum in France.

He went to school in Normandy for six years.

The French know similar résumés from the Paris bombers.

The uncertainty is great and has gripped large parts of Emmanuel Macron's electorate.

The president recently passed a far-reaching law aimed at preventing the emergence of Muslim “parallel societies”.

The focus is on neighborhoods with a high proportion of immigrants that have crept away from the French canon of values.

France, however, fails to prove that the fight against a degrading image of women, against anti-Semitism and contempt for homosexuals in these districts can be won with a law.

"Civilization War Against Islam"

The thesis that immigration, religiously based “separatism” and radicalization are interdependent is hardly ever questioned in France.

This unspoken consensus explains why a political career changer like the right-wing extremist journalist Éric Zemmour can generate such an echo.

Zemmour has been convicted of racial hatred and defamation repeatedly.

But his success in the polls is based precisely on the breaking of taboos, which his theses of the "population change" and the "civilization war against Islam" represent.

He gets approval on a terrain that the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen left fallow with her claim to salon ability.

Now she is trying to win back lost sympathies with the promise of an immigration referendum.

In its sharpness, the immigration discourse in France has long been reminiscent of tones from Hungary or Poland. The dramatization doesn't stop at Macron either. There is nothing to suggest that he claims a moderating role as he did five years ago. His hymns of praise for the German welcoming culture have fallen silent. When the Taliban seized power in Kabul, he immediately focused on “the unregulated immigration flows” from which Europe must protect itself. Compared to Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, he has taken a tougher pace and reduced visa permits. At the national borders with Spain and Italy, he doubled the number of border guards.

Not only Macron is playing with the suspicion that the EU could not be the solution, but the problem in immigration policy.

Former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier is openly looking for conflict with the EU and has recommended himself to the French as a candidate for president with a general immigration ban.

He justified the frontal attack on the European asylum and immigration policy with the fact that the EU borders are like a sieve for terrorists and criminals.

The impatience with the EU, which is standing still on the issue of asylum and immigration, has reached the political center in France.

Macron would not be Macron if he were to remain silent during the French EU Council Presidency, which will take place next year in the shadow of the presidential election campaign.